It is – and always has been – curious to UD, as an observer of universities, that the most violent and mindless game out there totally dominates America’s universities. Universities, where the main thing, you figure, is the mind, get positively orgasmic about, and spend themselves into bankruptcy over, a game which we now know pummels the mind to mush.
Forget the body. Of course we know – quoting John Kass again here –
The game is not just a contact sport — it’s a high-impact collision sport. It is about exploding into your opponent, refusing to break, while breaking others to your will and knocking them senseless.
But Kass also notes that “football scrambles the human brain.” He notes the massive and growing numbers of lawsuits coming from high school, college, and professional teams, as players literally lose their minds. Kass predicts football itself will die in the next few decades.
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UD, however, doubts it. Why? Here’s Kass again:
Make no mistake. I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…
Universities, at least according to this guy, can’t survive without a foundation of violent tribal ritual:
It is irrational and tribal love. It is intense emotion, not a vague sense of obligation or philanthropy. [Students and alumni] want to beat State.
Read his heavy-breathing about “shirtless boys” and ask yourself whether passions like these can ever be tamed. Whether the American university can survive without them. Already – in coach buyouts alone – university football is destroying the financial foundation of many schools. Those same schools will not hesitate to pay out hundreds of millions more in personal injury claims.
The model here will be big pharma. As a corporate endeavor, pharma cheats and injures, but as long as it can afford to pay out billions every year in legal settlements and still make a big profit, it will continue to do so. Universities will hit up students for higher and higher athletic fees, and students – even more subject to these passions than alumni, it seems – will willingly give.
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UD thanks mwm.
April 27th, 2013 at 9:10AM
“the most violent and mindless game”
Violent? Yes, of course. Most mindless? No, absolutely not.
I would have more sympathy for your point if you had some understanding of what it was that you were talking about. Your stereotypes take away from the quite proper thrust of your argument, that football, whatever else it is, and a good faith look at the complexity of the sport will show you that it’s anything but mindless, is bad for the universities that sponsor it and the players that participate in it.
April 27th, 2013 at 9:13AM
Well, Fritz, since you make no counterargument but offer only mindless insult, I’ll look for another tackle.
April 27th, 2013 at 9:52AM
Insult? What? Look at the complexity of the sport. That is, gather evidence. You do that, don’t you?
April 27th, 2013 at 10:00AM
so I did some research for you fritz:
mind·less
/ˈmīndlis/
Adjective
(of a person) Acting without concern for the consequences
April 27th, 2013 at 10:10AM
Fritz: Insult: “If you had some understanding of what it is you were talking about.”
I’ve been studying, talking about, reading about, and writing about football for ten years. If you read this blog (go to the category SPORT) you would know that. I’ve gone into plenty of depth both about the intrinsic complexity of the activity on the field, and about the institutional, health-related, and larger cultural complexity of the sport.
Many things are complex. The way cancer kills people is very complex, for instance. This does not make them valuable. You are going to have to make an argument based on something other than the fact that football – like virtually all fun and challenging games – is complex.
April 27th, 2013 at 10:50AM
See, as you surely already noted, I agreed with your substantive point, but you expressed it so poorly that I had to point it out. You are not going to convince people to reassess the place of American football in college athletics by disparaging those who participate or spectate as engaging in a “mindless” activity. Football, like almost all athletic endeavors, fulfills several necessary aspects of human flourishing (at great and perhaps unacceptable cost, as has been noted), and while we can all laugh at the stereotype of the “steak-head”, it’s an extraordinarily poor rhetorical strategy to say otherwise.
April 27th, 2013 at 11:01AM
What are the necessary aspects of human flourishing that football fulfills?
April 27th, 2013 at 11:56AM
George Will, the conservative columnist, wrote an extraordinary piece on football a while back that mentioned average player weight and speed now and decades ago. I did some rudimentary kinetic energy calculations. Suggestive stuff only, and I made no account for improvements in protective gear. There’s more energy going on in a tackle these days, that’s for sure.
April 27th, 2013 at 3:42PM
Margaret, I gotta say I see Fritz’s point. Football may be folly beyond measure (and one can understand that very well by reading this blog) but it does not follow that an endeavor that is on the whole stupid is in part or wholly mindless. Football can be complicated. Socially corrosive but complicated. Fritz is just saying that your very good points about the many evils of sport and football in particular would be better maid if they were not accompanied by your weaker arguments.
April 27th, 2013 at 3:48PM
Margaret –
What are the necessary aspects of human flourishing that poetry fulfills?
I’m with Fritz. You undermine yourself here.
Dcat
April 27th, 2013 at 4:18PM
I think it is remarkable that the two widely played sports that most depend on freakish physical characteristics, football and basketball, are the ones nurtured in American universities.
April 27th, 2013 at 5:01PM
Mindless? No. Tedious? Oh by God, yes. George Will had it bang to rights.
April 27th, 2013 at 5:22PM
Of course football is not mindless. (And I am in virtual total agreement with UD on the substantive merits and in fact research and write on the NFL’s abominable behavior WRT its players’ health).
We can go back to Geertz. The games we play, if they are important enough to the participants and the culture to which it belongs, reveal a huge number of deep and important facets of that society. As I have argued, football is deep play, and it is dangerous to presume otherwise, IMO.
(Mr. Punch’s observation supports the point: one need only go back and glance at the rise of physical exercise in schools and universities in late 19th-early 20th c. America to have some sense of why we value most highly the very athletic endeavors that require such “freakish physical characteristics.” And of course late Victorian ideas about masculinity, weakness, and — of special relevance to universities — the enervation of the spirit and body that flows from overexertion of the mental faculties is of great significance as well).
April 29th, 2013 at 4:42AM
Perhaps a story that supports both Margaret’s point and Daniel’s: some years ago, the Seattle Seahawks were about to cut their backup quarterback, a young man from California named Seneca Wallace. He simply could not master the complexities of an NFL playbook. Somehow or other, one of the coaches thought to ascertain whether Wallace could actually understand what he was being asked to read. It emerged that he could not, and was functionally illiterate. After remedial reading tuition, he made rapid improvements and is still in the NFL, albeit as a backup. And this after spending two years at a community college and two years at Iowa State University.
April 29th, 2013 at 12:47PM
Colin, er, uh, you mean folks who are graduating college with nominal credentials but do not have some basic quantum of literacy? I’m okay with the idea there are a whole lot of “intelligences” besides book-learning. Passion, commitment, character—hard to credential. Ditto athletic ability. How ’bout we get off this student-athlete paradigm when we know to a certainty the Big Money is calling the shots, eh? Spin off “collegiate” sports into a separate corporation that pays a licensing or franchising fee to the university whose name it uses for promotional purposes.
May 2nd, 2013 at 9:26AM
Jack/OH. I had two points: first, that there is actually quite a lot to read and understand in football, especially at the position of quarterback. The game is violent, but also requires abstract thought, pattern recognition, and conceptual sophistication to go along with brute athleticism. There is a reason why NFL quarterbacks tend to be very well-spoken, even thoughtful indivduals whom Margaret would be happy to invite to dinner. The second was the obvious one, that collegiate sports are not even slightly interested in educating their captives, not even to a basic standard of literacy.
October 29th, 2015 at 3:48PM
[…] later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of […]