… that Les UDs watched the other night, UD set about looking for ways to visualize American university football. She set about looking for visual equivalents of a situation that everyone realizes is totally, totally nuts.

The BBC thing got her thinking, because it represented a clever solution to an obvious problem: How do you make visually compelling a massive and impossible to grasp abstraction (infinity)? How do you make visually compelling a bunch of unkempt mathematicians and physicists droning about a massive abstraction?

The producers solved the problem by doing things like putting one of the mathematicians on a trampoline and filming him bouncing up and down while his voice-over droned.

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True, bouncing on a trampoline has nothing to do with infinity, but it was something to watch while the mathematician droned.

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Everyone talks about the sickening farce of university football, and there are always new books coming out chock-full of shocking language about the farce… And there are routine visuals of players’ and coaches’ mugshots and their long days in court… routine visuals of the brand-new cost-overrun stadium on game day with 10,000 rather than 60,000 fans in it (two or three thousand at the very end of the shut-out)… routine viral YouTubes of the interview with the coach who earns five million dollars a year by telling the national press to fuck itself. Yes, there are these, and many things like these.

Yet all are small separate clips that don’t capture in a meaningful, artful, way the full reality of university football — neither the way it impoverishes and degrades intellectual institutions, nor the way campus officials from the president on down smilingly and excitedly assure us that things are great, or they will be great in a minute.

So UD looked for an extended, precise, visual evocation of the situation of university football in America.

As she thought about it, she remembered a favorite film of her mother’s – Bread and Chocolate – which featured a scene of Italian guest workers in Switzerland living in a chicken coop.

What my mother loved about the scene was the smiling, proud, and excited way the covered-with-feathers proprietor of this shelter welcomed the film’s hero to it.

You don’t need to understand Italian to understand 1:17:00 to 1:25:00 in this film. These few minutes from this film capture the proud coach welcoming you to his excellent university, where football is, as everyone says, the “front porch” of the institution. Are things less than totally ideal? Less than perfect according to some impossible standard? But of course!

But look at the beautiful campus big-time football has given us! What better proof of the way football unites us all in school pride! How lucky we are to live in this sports paradise.

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The analogy falls short in this way: The guest worker paid for his dwelling by working on the chicken farm. All of us, one way or another, pay real money, through the nose, to maintain America’s system of university football.