… and as UD now always says, I beg to dinner. I beg to dinner with the following Cam Newton commentary by Jake Simpson. My begging to dinner appears in brackets, and in blue.

Like any multibillion-dollar enterprise (or political machine), college athletics doesn’t just rely on its core constituency. It needs the support of its undecided voters — casual sports fans who follow their alma mater religiously and tune in to games when they’re bored on Saturday afternoons. Diehard college football fans are almost necessarily jaded (hello, BCS) and will probably accept Newton’s crimes (if proven true) the same way they accepted the news that Bush had accepted $290,000 in gifts from sports marketers while at the University of Southern California. But if an athlete is accused of flouting the rules of college football by multiple sources, doesn’t address the allegations, wins the Heisman and the national championship while the NCAA investigation plods along, and then escapes to the NFL a couple months ahead of news that yes, he did demand “pay-to-play” deals from prospective colleges, well… let’s just say a lot of casual fans may care whether the game has even a veneer of integrity.  [No they won’t.  I mean, they’ll care a little, but they won’t change their behavior.  Know why?  Because mayhem and rule-breaking are part of the charisma of sports, college and professional.  Men who worship sports are, among other things, worshipping the shits they themselves can no longer be.  These men used to be bad.  Now they’re in the grip of domesticity and corporate employment.  Aggression and loutishness aren’t in the picture for them anymore.  But they remain guys, and they miss those things.  They are not anxiously eyeing the game for veneers of integrity; they’re leaning back in their easy chair and reassuring themselves that even a very advanced culture reserves its highest rewards for the most basic male behavior…. Read Civilization and Its Discontents, for goodness sake.]  [And what does this mean?  It means Simpson’s not only wrong.  He’s exactly wrong.  What he argues is the opposite of the true deal.]

And like any corrupt political machine, the NCAA needs to avoid the wrath of big government. Congress may have infinitely better ways to spend its time, but if California Congressman Darrell Issa really follows through on his pledge to have seven House investigations a week, 40 weeks a year, don’t you think a look at the inherent corruption in college athletics could be among the 280? The NCAA is already facing a potential legal challenge from Utah’s attorney general over the BCS, and it cannot afford to get in any more Congressional hot water.  [Even wronger.  Congress is almost all men.  The new Congress has more yahoos than ever.   Representatives represent the guys I just told you about.   Congress has never gotten anywhere near sanctioning the NCAA on anything, including the notorious absurdity of its tax exemptions…. Same principle here as in my first point:  The idea is to maintain a cultural preserve within which bad guys get away with things.  Until people realize that the moron who stood up during that speech the President gave to Congress and shrieked YOU LIE is a hero to millions of people, they will never understand university football and basketball.]

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UPDATE: These views may be a tad controversial. Let me add a couple of things to clarify.

1. The philosophy of gender underlying these remarks is perhaps best exemplified by the work of Dina Martina, here. Note the expression first of female, and then male (starting at 2:11), behavior.

2. I do not call for an end to football and basketball and other aggressive sports. Not at all. I just don’t think they belong, in their present incarnation, in self-respecting universities.