That scene from An Officer and a Gentleman captures what happens when a sports factory loses its assembly line — when all the investments and efficiencies fail and the place begins to shut down.
The University of Kentucky’s football team – the only game in town except for its basketball team, coached by the amazingly corrupt Calipari – is faltering, and customers are fleeing.
Recently, the University of Kentucky Athletics Department announced that season ticket sales for the 2012 UK Football team was down nearly 30% from last year’s totals. And, on top of that, roughly 2,000 unsold tickets were returned to the University of Louisville for the September 2 matchup. Needless to say, the apathy amongst the Big Blue faithful toward this year’s team is high. The question in most fans’ minds: How do we fix UK Football?
The writer is a fan. He proposes spending much more money on the team. The school just bought an incredibly expensive upgraded Adzillatron for the stadium, and there’s no doubt that UK will continue to spend every penny it has on sports. But what if all the money in the world can’t make the football team win? Meanwhile Calipari will probably play fewer and fewer games on the UK campus…
You see where this is going. Soon there will be no reason for the University of Kentucky to exist at all.
August 11th, 2012 at 2:03PM
Maybe they could all, I dunno, go out and volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, or pick up trash, or found a sports league/tutoring service for underprivileged kids or something instead? Or just go home and mow the lawn, clean out the gutters, do the laundry, swab the toilet, and make a meal or two? Almost anything would be more of a contribution to the common good than cheering while a bunch of people who probably won’t graduate from college (and who are making money for pretty much everybody but themselves) run around a field.
August 11th, 2012 at 2:29PM
Contingent Cassandra: Don’t know if you saw the wonderful quotation from the brainy French gold-medal swimmer: “It’s just swimming up and down a large pool.”
December 12th, 2012 at 12:23PM
[…] that “we haven’t completely mobilized the alumni yet.” His last job was at the University of Kentucky, so he knows university […]
December 13th, 2012 at 6:57AM
[…] to university sports, it doesn’t get any more pathological than the University of Kentucky, a perennially corrupt player constantly featured on this […]