← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

How much more of a freak show can America’s game become?

Put aside the question whether the academic joke, financial catastrophe (UD thanks John for the link), and criminal bacchanalia university football represents makes it a terrific fit with American higher education. Put aside the fact that multiple high schools are unable to field a team because so few guys (thanks for the link, Charlie) are stupid enough to take part. Put aside the ritual militarization of high school games, with fights and gunshots becoming a structural part of the fun. (As Ravi, one of my readers, puts it, we’re heading toward “open carry on the gridiron.”)

Look merely at one professional team, the Raiders, which recently boasted the Three Violent and Insane Stooges (all were rapidly suspended or dumped or whatever).

UD doesn’t get it. If you really want to watch an insane obese male lumber about destroying everything in his path, you’ve already got the President.

Margaret Soltan, October 4, 2019 8:59AM
Posted in: Sport

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=62306

4 Responses to “How much more of a freak show can America’s game become?”

  1. charlie Says:

    Romanowski was in the NFL for 16 years. Incognito is in his twelfth season. Burfict, despite his suspension, has played at least seven years. The average NFL career is 3.3 years. This suggests an elevated use of PEDs, or Performance Enhancing Drugs. One of the benefits of that stuff is quicker recovery from injury. These players have remarkably long careers, which adds to the suspicion they’re all on the gear.

    Keep in mind, however, that these drugs are primarily synthetic chemicals being injected into the endocrine system, which regulates hormone creation and response. For god’s sake, that’s messing with the body’s building material. It’s going to impact emotional and mental reactions, how could that not happen? Given that all three of these guys decided early on that football would be a career, it’s entirely possible they’ve been using since teenage years.

    Big Boy football doesn’t care if you destroy your hormonal balance, nor does it care if you’re driven mad by the game and end up in a wheelchair. When billions of advertising dollars are at stake, when P5 unis are desperate for increased out of state enrollment, and use a high profiled football team as a marketing ploy, they’ll ignore whatever the consequences of PED use. The aftermath will be mentally and physically crippled humans beings…

  2. Ravi Narasimhan Says:

    Clarence Boddicker as metaphor for the sports University? I think there’s a term paper in that.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5-1nVswz0I

  3. theprofessor Says:

    Still lots o’ high school football around here, UD. So awash in money are our allegedly starving public high schools that the taxpayers coughed up the cash for two brand-new football stadiums and huge renovations to two others. High school football is one of the few topics the remnant of the local newspaper still covers. Along with detailed critiques of game plans, substitutions, injury reports, and hot tips on the upcoming grade school prospects, we usually are treated to several weekly interviews with star players, all of which sound approximately like, “Coach keeps reminding us that there is no ‘I’ in “team,” and we need to step up and follow our game plan.” At least several times per season, we get a feel-good story about how Jim-Bob or DeShonte overcame that minor scrape with the law, is hitting the books hard for a solid 30 minutes per week, and will no doubt qualify for that full ride at Northwestern Southeastern Western East Central State U.

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    tp: LOL.
    But yes – I don’t expect to see the end of high school football any time soon…

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories