It’s getting positively elegiac out there, as football scribes in empty stadia find themselves reduced to the elaboration of despair. At most of our universities, the whole lucrative rah-rah project has come crashing down, leaving intellectual institutions bereft of money as well as dignity as they desperately try, with cheap booze and trinkets, to get people to sit down and watch, in its full sordid duration, an unwatchable game.

It’s not just the disgusting injuries (concussions; “gruesome” fractures; coach-bullied players’ deaths from overexertion); the rampant violence against women and other students among players; the university-budget-destroying coaches’ salaries, buyouts, and lawsuits (“Schools end up not only paying millions to their former coach, and millions to their new coach; they have to pay millions more to their new coach’s previous school, so he can leave to come to their school.”); the institution-destroying bad publicity arising from corrupt merchandise and recruitment deals; the filth all over campus from drunk tailgaters the day after; student riots when they win; student riots when they lose; the school- and city-destroying insistence on building vast new indebted stadia to accommodate the two thousand people who want to attend games; university presidents pretending that borderline-psychotic players (Aaron Hernandez, Richie Incognito, Lawrence Phillips, Johnny Manziel) are just feisty charming lads; presidents honoring coaches who hang out in school showers raping children; assistant coaches who set up houses of prostitution in players’ dorms, for players and their fathers; the institution-wide academic scandals arising from the sickening compromise of faculty integrity as students admitted only for their football skills are handed bogus … not degrees, since few graduate, but bogus courses; it’s also the sheer boredom and insult of the stadium experience (“The issue for me is games lasting nearly four hours. TV commercials are killing the game … I just can’t sit in the hot weather that long in back breaking seats.”).

What a shocker that few outside of fraternity members (the functional equivalent of football players) and hopeless drunks (who aren’t even financially viable, since they typically stay just for the tailgate) want anything to do with the shit-show.

Where did the university go in all this?

Buried, under mounds of Bud bottles.