This of course is the deepest nightmare of every jock-school trustee and president. It’s much deeper than current worries about tanking ticket sales. You can still maybe bell-and-whistle tanking ticket sales; you can imagine ways of turning a stadium into, I don’t know, something that in significant ways resembles a really plush, high-tech, Las Vegas gambling hall/hotel/restaurant. But you can’t change the system of recruitment and cheating; you can’t stop the fact that Florida State University’s revenue-athlete graduation rate is a sick joke, or that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, qua academic institution, is a sick joke. Lying and cheating your way around this problem is starting not to work. That’s the nightmare. Because the guy making the comment in my headline is saying that he can’t identify with the people playing on the gridiron anymore; that he feels like a jerk trying to pretend they are part of the college world.
Eventually the remnant true believers will trickle down, as it were, to the south, where the few locations that have always been honest about being football stadiums and nothing else (Auburn, Clemson, Alabama) will continue to stage games. Eventually most of the audience for the games will be like the tourists who go to “Old West” towns to watch pretend shoot-outs.
January 21st, 2014 at 7:34PM
Ironically, in 2013 Florida State University made news of a different kind, relative to graduation rates for African America students. I suspect that the Black students who are not athletes came to college very well prepared for academic success. It’s obvious the same can’t be said for the athletes in certain sports, however!
http://diverseeducation.com/article/53530/
30 BEST U.S. Non-HBCU Schools for Minorities
27. Florida State University,
Tallahassee: The six year graduation rate is 72.7 and 74.1 for Black and White students, respectively. As a state school, tuition is affordable for residents ($212 per credit hour for full time) and Florida students can also take advantage of tuition breaks through the Bright Futures program that tracks academic progress and community involvement during high school.