… has some great comments about university football in this News Hour interview:
… [I]f people begin to say that football is the new cigarettes, and you’re starting to hear that, if people begin to think that football isn’t just tax subsidies — the governor of Minnesota says he’s embarrassed by the Vikings’ treatment of Adrian Peterson…
What you should really be embarrassed about [is the] half-a-billion dollars of taxpayers’ money that the governor of Minnesota gave to the Wilf brothers to build the stadium in which they will keep all of the profits. If people become more aware of those issues, if football becomes perceived as a woman’s issue — nobody saw that coming — and especially if football — people turn their attention to the fact that the vast majority of football is played at the youth and high school level by people who legally are children, that’s where the health harm of football is done.
If public high schools begin to drop out of playing football — and there is some indication they will — that over a period of years could change the NFL’s economics very radically.
… I call [football] the king of sports because it expresses what we are as a nation. It’s too loud, it’s too crazy, it’s too violent…
But when you add the sociological impact, the distorting effect that it has on high school education, mainly for boys, for a few girls, but mainly for boys, the distorting effect that it has, … that NCAA football has at big public universities, and then add in that the public subsidizes the production of NFL profit — roughly a billion dollars a year goes to subsidize the construction and operation of NFL stadiums — where almost all the revenue generated is kept by the super rich, you have these sociological impacts…
America’s public universities: Violence, sleaze, and greed, or non-violence, class, and restraint?
No contest.
September 18th, 2014 at 11:34AM
As a property owner in CA, I and other taxpayers have been approached numerous times for stadium bond measures. The boilerplate is that pro sports brings in public revenue, creates jobs, all the usual. Just ain’t true, the jobs don’t pay well, are seasonal, the costs associated with increased police patrols, infrastructure maintenance overwhelm whatever increased sales tax revenues the stadium generates. Besides, fewer people are attending games, therefore, far less money than what was used to sell these white elephants.
So excuse my cynicism if the NFL’s response to domestic violence is nothing but a facade used to placate and maintain a tax payer subsidy base. The same PR/marketing scheme used to sell college athletic buildouts is the same used by the NFL. Seems to keep working, as long as they control the message….