David, a UD reader, sends UD this opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. It’s strong-minded and well-written, but it’s up against the same problem everyone writing about Penn State is up against.
The entire complicated, powerful, wildly popular, and unimaginably lucrative system of university football is corrupt — morally degenerate, criminally sordid. Forget academic fraud and university-specific stuff like that. Academic fraud is endemic, of course, but that’s a trifle here. When people like the WSJ guy talk about “shining a harsh light, and building the whole thing over, the right way,” they’re talking about revolutionizing a culture – a culture of massive university-sponsored alcohol sales to students, routine post-game riots and campus-trashing after tailgates, Mondo Cane-style coach-deification (after Penn State pulls down Uncle Joe’s statue, you can worship at Saint Saban’s), total subordination to television stations and naming-rights banks…
En effet, mes petites, it can’t be changed. That’s why the harshest critics of it resort to comedy, as in the hilarious yearly Fulmer Awards for the team with the most arrests among its players. A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling, said Nietzsche, and all the smartest critics of college football and basketball are jokesters. They’re way past feeling anything about it. Do you think Italians at this point do anything other than tell each other jokes about the mafia? University football and basketball have settled in, and if you don’t believe me, look at the guy running the biggest joke of them all – the NCAA. Scroll down for the skinny on Mark Emmert, aka “top stooge.”
No, look. J’adore Barack Obama, but he’s a mad jock. Say we get Romney next — Mr Olympics. Ahnold’s trying to repair his marriage to Maria so he can run. (I know – citizenship problems there.) Look at the Senate, for chrissake. We can’t even remove the tax exemptions these educational activities enjoy. Luxury boxes are exempt.
From the little freshman fan in the cheap seats to the President of these United States, everyone’s slobbering and panting for grander Godzillatrons and stronger steroids. Everybody’s hyped up. School spirit. When you feel it, you give money to the sports program so the school can be even more of a jock joke.
The WSJ guy is right – it’s a culture. It has many, many moving parts, and they mesh wonderfully. It’s way past anybody fucking with it in any serious way.