Nice ambiguity there, huh? To what does “they,” in Joe Nocera’s sentence refer? The teams or the universities?
I guess he means it to refer to the teams; but, if so, should he not at least have reversed the order – between the universities and the teams, and stop pretending they have any ‘educational’ value (and why put educational in quotation marks?)? Nocera presumably believes some universities have either educational or ‘educational’ value…
Consider too the content of his claim. Nocera’s one of many writers who, faced with the superscummy world big-time athletics has brought to America’s universities, urges that we “create some real separation” between athletics and universities.
Easy to say, Joe. What the fuck, pray tell, might you mean? When two people who can’t stand each other but find themselves married decide to really deal with that, they separate. Real separation means you live in different places and have little to nothing to do with one another. But I doubt Joe has in mind this clean a break.
I mean, plenty of people are calling for universities whose campuses are routinely trashed — literally and figuratively — by their sports programs to spin them off, to have a merely symbolic association with a local professional team that continues to carry the name of the university. That’s one way to go. But there are many more people, like Nocera, who seem to think that universities and big-time sports can be separated and yet reconciled, can have broken up and still live together under the same roof.
There are many reasons why this is impossible, prominent among them the simple dynamism of the phenomenon itself: Every year, unstoppably, scandals get more lurid, more expensive, more absolutely disgusting. Every year, coaches and players get more out of control, gain more power. Every year, the shreds of academic integrity these schools have managed to maintain shred yet more. Every year, more and more classes are cancelled to make way for games and for the dictates of the media conglomerates that now run the university show. Etc. Nocera’s column happens to be about university presidents destroyed by their athletic programs, but that’s only one of countless corruptions intrinsic to the decision to import professional sports — whose even more repulsive scandals (the latest being baseball boys and their steroids) Americans really seem to get off on — to universities. So you can put the smell over there, as it were, but it’s always going to work its way deep into your nostrils.
And I’m afraid absolute separation won’t fly either. I mean the idea of spinning off the teams, professionalizing them, but keeping University of Georgia in their name. Let me explain why.
Think of alum fandom as a delicate and nuanced perfume. It has a note of nostalgia, a bouquet of beer, a hint of hazing… studded about with the scent of sorority and the fragrance of frat. Alum fans are connected to their team through memories of sadistic initiation rituals, drunken stumbles into lakes, and other cherished keepsakes. Pack up the team and send it across town and you rip those memories from their moorings. Won’t work.
June 6th, 2013 at 7:09PM
You’re right; and that’s why paying the players (more) doesn’t make sense (and why paying the coaches so much sort of does). The money is there because of the university and the program, not because of the individual players. There is zero interest in minor league pro football.
June 24th, 2013 at 11:51AM
When I think of how dysfunctional the French higher education system is, I recall your blog and heave a sigh of comfort that, at least, we don’t have sports (that is, we do have good-humored amateur sport, but nothing of the semi-professional or professional sport found in US universities).
June 25th, 2013 at 1:16AM
In other words, athletic programs are needed in order to get alumni dicks big, because, after all, all those cute cheerleaders aren’t on the sidelines to make their mommies proud.
Say it for what it is, college sports is the outdoor equivalent of strip club VIP rooms, bachelor parties, and drunken twenty something men fighting over ovulating women. College was never intended for the working class, but a place where the elite sent their children, mostly males, to learn to be gentlemen. The Morrill Act sparked the energy change to alter college mandates, that the people could pay to create a institution which returned their research to the population that paid for the thing in the first place. For the past 30-40 years, its been under attack. And the people who pay for it, have been given trinkets and beads of athletics to distract them from the swindle. It all makes sense now…