So now with all this talk of vanishingly few people going to football games (we’ve been talking about it on this blog for a long time), UD is here to tell you the truth about why it’s happening.
Recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dictum – Existence precedes essence. With football, it’s equally existential, though with a twist.
Existence precedes putrescence.
Did you know NASCAR attendance/viewership is also tanking, at an even faster rate than university football? NFL attendance/viewership is down too.
The core problem is one of – incremental, to be sure, but real enough – civilizational progress. We are failing to replicate yahoos.
With each passing year, our young men look at stands rich with drunks either screaming at fields rich with assholes, or enduring fifteen minutes of ads screamed at them from stadiums rich with Adzillatrons, and they ask themselves: Is it just me, or is this disgusting? Am I alone in feeling kind of dirtied up by what I’m being put through here? By the sort of people I’m supposed to be cheering for? By the whole cheesy exploitative atmosphere? Does anyone else notice the hypocrisy of all this clean-cut Americanism as the world’s thinnest overlay for greedy coaches, concussed players, and the total domination of tv revenue?
In short:
I have a life (that’s the “existence” part) and I don’t have to spend one moment of it with this rottenness (putrescence).
The problem is particularly acute on college campuses, where a real-time war is being waged between the pressure from the institution to civilize, and the pressure from the game to barbarize. At least NASCAR isn’t being staged on the fields of Harvard! The great disadvantage under which college football labors is its proximity to sources of human development.
As universities respond by retrofitting stadiums with less and less seating, it’s going to occur to them that things like football and NASCAR are assuming the subcultural status of professional wrestling and motorcycle gangs. Schools will begin the titanic task of dismantling the vast smoky hollow that was their football stadium.
Watch the demolition, and you will be reminded of people all over Europe pulling down statues of Lenin.
All-male, all-football Ohio State University gets the full New York Times treatment as it generates the sort of outrageous scandals (see, most recently, all-male, all-football Baylor) all-male, all-football settings (see Penn State) tend to generate.
At the end of its article about local reactions to the most high-profile of its many current scandals (the wife beaters and the male buddies who ignore the wife beating scandal), the NYT reporters quote a guy saying “[we] don’t want Ohio State just viewed as a football factory.”
But look up at the opening paragraphs of the story: its culture of sports above all.
Sorry, babe. That’s the definition of a football factory.
Own it. And pay for it.
Lawsuits stemming from abuse cases have led to multimillion-dollar settlements at other universities. Earlier this year, Michigan State set aside $500 million to settle with hundreds of victims of Lawrence G. Nassar, a university physician who sexually abused hundreds of young women, including prominent gymnasts. A few years ago, Penn State agreed to settlements totaling nearly $100 million with more than 30 victims of the former football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of sexually assaulting boys.
Get out your wallet. And keep it out.
In one of many similar pathetic appeals across the nation, Minnesota’s Star Tribune editorial board begs its readers to go to its state university’s football games. The prospect of what looks to be 13,000 empty seats at UM’s opening game (“cold weather will not be a legitimate excuse for staying away”) seems to have generated panic and depression at the newspaper, which no doubt realizes that widespread and growing indifference to the game will have a serious impact on its circulation and ad revenue and all.
But look how they make the case, petites.
The university has made a large investment in coaching salaries and facilities. Gophers fans can be part of the solution by buying tickets, getting the maroon and gold out of the closet and coming back to campus on game days.
Parsing the logic here is a challenge. I guess the crux of the thing lies in the word “solution.” Uh… because UM, over intense local opposition, insisted on building a stadium it can’t afford, and because it hires incredibly expensive jerks throughout its athletics programs, the citizens of the state must bail it out of all the financial and legal and reputational problems it has predictably brought on itself.
UM, in other words, has done its part in steadily bankrupting itself, demanding more and more sports money from its students, and making the school a laughingstock when its AD turns out to be a drunken idiot who reels around town “asking if he [can] perform oral sex” on random women; now the good people of Minnesota must do their part by spending huge money to attend games in which they have no interest.
*****************
The Wall Street Journal just published a piece – COLLEGE FOOTBALL’S GROWING PROBLEM: EMPTY SEATS – which features in its first paragraphs (the only ones you can read without subscribing) the self-same University of Minnesota. It explains why the local editorialists pleaded with their readers not merely to buy tickets but to actually show up in the stadium on game day. WSJ:
When Minnesota hosted Nebraska at TCF Bank Stadium last year, the game featured charismatic new Golden Gophers coach P.J. Fleck, a home team fighting for a bowl berth and a big-name opponent. The announced attendance was 39,933—an OK crowd for a crisp November day in Minneapolis — but it didn’t tell the whole story.
Only 25,493 ticketed fans were counted at the gates, 36% lower than the announced attendance and about half of the stadium’s capacity. More than 14,000 people who bought tickets or got them for free didn’t show up.
At no point in a long article about an insane drop in participation does the reporter even vaguely, even tentatively, allude to some of the likeliest reasons UM’s incredibly expensive newish (2009) stadium stands more and more empty.
Of course the stadium almost never filled up for football (it can seat 80,000! but they count 50,000+ as a sell-out), never made the money its boosters said it would. Goes without saying. Boys will have their big toys, and students will pay for them.
But now it’s really getting bad. Embarrassing, in fact, as cameras pan vast viewing deserts, and as the university hemorrhages money.
The reporter duly writes down what the athletics people tell her about all the shit they’re doing to make it ever so much more fun to sit in a hellhole full of troublesome drunks (UM has already desperately made booze freely available) than watch on your phone, or, best of all, not watch at all. She says nothing about a raft of player and coach sex scandals, enormous buyouts of said coaches…
Somebody needs to tell her that spending a lot of time and money cheering on really gross people and programs isn’t an attractive prospect for a lot of students and locals. You can throw all the incentives you want at people, but if your program keeps pumping out scandals (and what program doesn’t?), you’re going to keep losing your audience.
Yes, that’s what we always think of first when we think of Berkeley, isn’t it? Sports.
As with the dying Goethe, so with the dying college football game, the famous final words will be:
Mehr licht … bier!
Throw more beer at the little shits! Still more!!
Whether it’s the real game, at a high school, or the virtual game, at an entertainment complex, football and Florida go together like Smith and Wesson.
Put America’s most violent game together with virtually universal gun ownership, throw in an open public venue, and POOOOOF! Mass shooting.
The shots and shrieks are recorded by all the dying people, so the soundtrack of America writes itself: Concussive hits from the game; RATATATATATATATATA; fuck they’re shooting run; bodies running; grunts; bodies falling.
****************
And Parkland’s only four hours away! The Sunshine State’s full of opportunities – at many of the same locations! – to get killed in a large-scale event.
****************
Their flagship university.
****************
[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.
****************
SEVENTEEN TRILLION
“How many mass shootings in your state will it take for you to do something?” David Hogg tweeted to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
And that’s why the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is naming their basketball stadium after the coach.
No one knows how to play the game like ol’ Roy.
Happy to oblige, Andrew; happy to oblige.
Last Sunday night, UL’s tight ends coach
swerved on Interstate 64, nearly struck a barrier wall multiple times and drove through a construction zone where workers were present.
… Sheriff’s deputies had to pull [him] out of his car after he refused to comply with their orders to exit, according to the citation. Deputies then attempted to run field sobriety tests, but [he] walked into the interstate, “almost being struck by a truck pulling a horse trailer,” before deputies pulled him to safety. [He] had multiple open containers in his vehicle as well as multiple empty beer cans in the passenger seat.
He’s been hitting the bottle ever since they closed the on-campus whorehouse.
Though you’d think he’d find some consolation in his $600,000-plus salary AND a monthly $500 car allowance.
**************
Hey! They’re paying this guy to drive his car into construction workers! What a deal.
Words from a University of Maryland student to emblazon on all of their advertising, yes? Come study at our university. Why? Just listen to wide receiver DeAndre Lane: I felt like I was the only one who cared about my brain.
Meanwhile, amid the heat deaths and concussions, it looks likely that the disgusting state of the football program at Maryland will take down a whole bunch of people, including the president.
It would appear the Board also believes the AD and President either knew about what was happening with the football program and failed to report it, learned of it and didn’t react accordingly, or simply didn’t do enough to prevent it from happening in the first place.
Of course, you’ve also got the Board of Trustees… Trustees, you know… AKA Regents… They’ll feed us some horseshit about having been kept out of the loop (this narrative plays out so often, there’s a game plan they all use) and, satisfied by the humiliation and possible criminal culpability of the big guys, we’ll let it go.
But mes petites. You and I know that the rah-rah trustees bear just as much responsibility for the abattoir. If any of them have any decency, they will quit the Board.
*****************
UPDATE: The larger picture.
UD is grateful to a reader for linking her to this Guardian article about university football player deaths. Excerpts:
The sport is needlessly and heedlessly killing athletes…
Athletes are asked to do too much, too fast, for too long, performing workouts that are untethered from both the sport’s demands and basic principles of exercise science. Too many college coaches use offseason workouts as a tool for developing mental and emotional toughness – as a way to inflict physical pain and suffering, the better to push the limits of what their players are willing and able to endure.
… “Pick a stakeholder or constituency group [in college football],” [one observer] says. “I’ve had conversations over and over with them about conditioning and preventing deaths. And it’s not just me. Others have been involved as well. It just hasn’t resonated as a point of priority within the culture, period … Because it happens so often, there gets to be a little bit of acceptance of things…‘Well, football players die of heatstroke. That’s just a risk.’ I’m kind of wondering what body count we’re waiting for before we take some action.”
****************
And back to Maryland:
[University of Maryland football player] Jordan McNair died because his humanity was secondary to the egos of the members of the Maryland coaching staff. He died because he was physically abused in the course of what was supposed to be training for the upcoming season. He was a victim of both workplace violence and of domestic abuse.
… The death of Jordan McNair opened up a chamber of horrors for all to see. ESPN’s subsequent reporting has produced tales of almost inhuman abuse under the guise of coaching, and a reckless disregard for the health of the athletes in the name of “coaching.” Players forced to eat until they vomited because coaches thought they were fat. Verbal abuse more suited to the SERE training given to Navy Seals than to young football players in a college weight room. The Maryland football family was an abusive family, like so many others around the country. The essential dynamic is there for all to see. Jordan McNair is the kid who gets beaten to death in the third-floor walk-up after which everybody stands back and wonders how it all happened. They seemed like such a nice family.
**********
UPDATE: Details, kill rate.
You know how many kids NCAA football coaches have killed with conditioning drills in [the last seventeen years]? Twenty-seven. I say “kill,” because that’s what it is, when tyrants force captive young men to run themselves to death, out of their own outdated fears of weakness. Why is the NCAA tolerating this kill rate, which is unmatched at any other level of football?
… Only the NCAA tolerates – and refuses to regulate – unhinged dictators who think football has to be conditioned with sadistic extremes.
“They get to dictate these things, and we get to keep burying athletes until we make definitive changes to the culture,” said Dr. Douglas Casa, a kinesiologist who serves as CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut.
In a 2015 article with the amusing title Is the Era of Abusive College Coaches Finally Coming to an End? a Sports Illustrated writer totes up the butcher’s bill, to which we have most recently added University of Maryland football player Jordan McNair. “Our [false] conviction that hostility works is encouraged by a culture that makes legendary figures of [Bob] Knight and Steve Jobs,” says the writer, who goes to great lengths to argue that you catch more flies with honey. Maybe he should have held tight until the results of the last presidential election.
Meanwhile, they’re beating the shit out of high school football players too.
[P]ractices [at Grayson High School in Georgia] featured “full-force hitting in shorts.” Although no players were injured this year before the [team walkout over sadistic coaching], they were “concerned for their health heading into the season.”
One parent explained … that concerns have been raised about [the coach] since he took over the program in 2017 because of “multiple ambulance trips for heat-related issues” as well as broken bones and body cramps suffered during practices.
Once the coach is done with you, there’s avoiding anal rape by your teammates. (I’ve linked you to only the latest anal rape story. Google anal rape football and go to town.)
If you survive all that, it’s off to a homicidal fraternity in that big state school that recruited you. And get ready for your new best friend, Richie Incognito!
Concussions? Ha. Concussions are nothing.
***************
Oh. The whole does it work or doesn’t it controversy? Way off-point. Look closely, please. Some coaches love violence for itself, the way most human beings do. Look at the game to which coaches devote their lives.
Most human beings won’t kick or kill other people the way some coaches do; they’ll go to violent movies and football games and watch violent porn, etc. Life won’t afford them the opportunity to physically (and psychologically) brutalize actual human beings. Coaches get that opportunity.
Both – to their despair – find themselves headline news this week. And why? Because no matter how much divides us, sexual strangeness, and a kind of desperate emotional lostness/loneliness, unites us.
We all have access to these things – I mean, being sexually strange; and feeling, in a restless, panicky way, lost and alone – though if we’re lucky in life and love we may seldom experience them.
Smith – until recently a powerful, highly paid coach at Ohio State; and Ronell – a powerful, highly paid professor at NYU, seem to have experienced these things more acutely than most other people; more importantly, their sense of their invulnerability to punishment seems to have allowed them to behave with total abandon. Ronell is tenured; Smith and the famed OSU head coach, Urban Meyer, have a very close personal relationship. Ronell was found guilty of sexually harassing one of her graduate students; she had, with unaccountable stupidity, written down everything culpable she had done in emails. Smith took dick pics of himself in the White House and on the OSU campus and sent them to friends; he ordered large numbers of sex toys to be delivered to his university office, and openly boasted of sexual encounters in the same office with various subordinates.
In both cases as well, powerful friends of these powerful people protected and defended them, which is another whole scandal. In a just-filed lawsuit, Ronell’s graduate student has credibly claimed that Ronell’s associates
launched a widespread disinformation campaign against [Nimrod] Reitman, falsely accused him of, among other things, having waged a ‘malicious campaign’ against Ronell and having a ‘malicious intent,’ thereby further ruining his hopes for any future career in academia.
******************
Of course there are differences between these two. Zach Smith appears to be a complete mess: Along with what I have already described, he has been arrested for drunk driving; and his ex-wife accuses him of extensive and extreme domestic violence. Ronell is far from a mess; what she is, rather, despite her revolutionary self-presentation, is that saddest of traditional figures: An older woman whose self-regard convinces her she remains attractive to men. Ronell was helped along by countercultural ideology; Smith was helped along by a hypermasculine, alcoholic, risk-taking sports culture.
But under these two current tragicomic figures from the American university lies the same old same old: self-destruction.