The Other Professional Football League

Today marks the start of the NCAA college football playoffs. NCAA football or, if we're honest about it, the other professional football league. 

It's true, you know, at least at the higher levels. With literally billions of dollars at, ahem, play, and athletes themselves getting NIL, Name, Image, and Likeness, money, we are far beyond amateurs playing for school bragging rights or poor kids getting an education through sports which they wouldn't otherwise get. It's all about the money. Again, at least at the highest levels anyway.

It's not about getting an education. Most of these players are in sports management or some such nonsense. It's not about the school or school pride, it's about the personal brand. You can now leave for a better deal. Hell, it's not even about selfless sportsmanship. When you treat the other guy like an enemy when all you're doing is playing a game, if you have to 'fire up' to participate, you've gone a step too far. Several, in fact, but that may be for another day.

The intellectually honest thing to do would be to disassociate the games from the schools. Cut them off and let them go their own way. It's not like the money isn't there. Yet intellectual honesty is something college sports, like politics, can't, or won't, see. 

Hey, enjoy it, if that's your entertainment. But say what it is. And it's professional football.

Random Tuesday Writings

The Lions won convincingly Sunday. It's kinda making it hard not to believe in them.

College football is now a type of professional football, with all the NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) money going around. Ohio State for example paid around $20 million to its players. I'm not saying that's wrong. But it is causing athletes to jump around from team to team (Marshall couldn't play its bowl game because so many players had left the team for greener pastures) and ripping the game from its roots. So can we be spared the myth of the scholar athlete, the hype about how important 'the game' is to 'the kids playing' at least where the big revenue sports are involved? It's all about the money now, folks. Again, not bad. Yet decidedly different. I, for one, don't know that I like it.

I mean, it really just adds to the hype, the artificiality, of the whole thing. It's turning me even more off of a game which I've been slowly losing interest in for years now. Maybe I do know how I feel after all.

Glad we missed that big winter storm a few days ago. Winters haven't been bad in Detroit recently. Am I tempting fate bringing up the issue?

Well, there's a machine with an oil leak, another 'not saying nothing' as the customer related to me (I had no idea drain snakes might be sentient or self aware), and a third which needs a new motor table adjustment. I suppose I should get to them. 

Emotional Investment

I am an advertiser's nightmare, a destroyer of the hype machine, anathema to television networks. The older I get, the more I ignore both adverts and hyperbole.

I'm not trying to hit on anyone's favorites or foes, but only using Michigan football as an example. I watched most of last Saturday's game against Ohio State and did not enjoy a minute. I was more relieved than happy when the Wolverines won. I simply didn't have any fun despite, for me, a positive outcome.

Last night U of M won the Big Ten title game over Iowa. I did not watch a second. Indeed, I crawled into bed and was asleep before 7. I woke up around 1 to find they had won, and I was happy. I didn't stress the outcome at all in ignoring the game and felt better afterwards.

Perhaps, to be fair, it's only me, yet I increasingly find that high powered sports just aren't worth the emotional investment. I'm inclined to exempt baseball, for various reasons I won't get into here. I can't imagine myself not watching and listening to baseball. But football, well, too much hype, too much hyperbole, and a certain unsportsmanlike arrogance. It's not good for the soul.

The Hatred that is Football

I want to show him the hatred that is football.

-Hank Hill, explaining the reason for taking his son Bobby to his first college football game.

Apparently there was a bit of post game dust up between Michigan and Michigan State players after last Saturday's Big Game in Ann Arbor. As of this writing, it is said that nine State players allegedly attacked two Michigan players after Michigan's 29-7 win. This comes after there were issues between Penn State and U of M in the same general area a week earlier. As both teams playing at the Big House (the nickname for Michigan's football stadium) have to exit the same tunnel to reach their locker rooms, there are calls for the school to change the way teams leave the field.

How about a few calls to train these young men, who by playing football are supposed to be changing into mature older men, to keep themselves in check? I know that's easier said than done, given that football seems hell bent on firing up emotions to the boiling point before and during games. And maybe that's the real problem. We stoke the coals of these guys to think of the other team as some kind of enemy invading their territory yet expect them to immediately chill after the final whistle.

Football isn't alone in this, although it does seem to me the main perpetrator. Overwrought celebrations after nearly ever damn play is bound to teach players egotism, an I'm better than you attitude, rather than sportsmanship.

Those are human beings on the other side of the line, guys. Show some respect. A pat on the helmet or back is enough congratulations as a rule. Running towards the sideline or the end zone looking for cameras to self comment on your awesomeness to the world is simply gauche, even mean spirited. You're being, at best, a jerk when you do that. Displays of your superiority are bound to make the other side seethe; the whole thing feeds on itself. What do we get, then?

Fights on the way to the locker room.

Yes, King of the Hill is comedy, and Hank Hill is a comic character. Yet the best humor often reflects certain truths in life. I believe Hank is onto one of them. His remark does not reflect well on reality.

The Toilet Bowls

It began yesterday with two. They were the first of forty-two. There were only forty-one, but they, the NCAA, had to, they simply had to, mind you, add another so that all eligible teams could play in one. 

Eligible teams are defined as those with 6-6 records. Current rules also allow 6-7 Hawaii to play another game.

I'm sorry, mediocrity shouldn't pay, and a .500 record is most certainly mediocre. At least half of these bowl games are simply participation trophies. They aren't merited.

It's really that simple.

College sports really ought to be banned

I read in the Detroit Free Press this morning that most collegiate football programs, indeed most college athletics, are effectively underwritten by the schools through their general funds. That means tuition and fees pay for them. That means that too, at least for many, our taxes through our state governments pay for college sports. All this is fuel to a fire which has burning in my gut for years now. I think we ought to get rid of college athletics, or at least those which are not self supporting.

Be honest: athletics by and large are peripheral at best to the academic mission anyway. Why should our taxes pay for them? And please don't bother me about how they help kids get college education who otherwise might not, because that presumes two things both of which by and large are wrong. First, with all the money available for education these days those who really want to go to college will make it. Second, it assumes higher education has a value in any and all areas of life. It is not.

Granted, to that last point we need to destroy the mentality that you must have college to be successful. As with many other things, college can be good in some areas yet not in others. The to the question of sports: why must taxes however indirectly pay for someone's playtime? Indeed, why should taxes offer a springboard for someone else to command millions of dollars to play games?

Yes, yes, yes, some will argue that sports bring prestige to schools. Perhaps they do, to some degree. But I can't see that a serious researcher would believe that important. Someone looking for a cure for cancer surely isn't about to argue that a football program, especially when (as is true the bulk of the time) the game drains the school of funds, is really worthwhile compared to fighting disease. And I simply cannot imagine The University of Michigan or Michigan State losing image without sports. It doesn't seem to have affected Harvard or Yale, two universities not exactly well known for sports, but well known just the same.

I know this will never happen if for no other reason that too much money for too many folks is at stake; that's the same reason the tax codes will never be simplified. But we really ought to ban college athletics. They take money from the schools, taxpayers, and college loan students which they simply should not.

Let American Football Die as a Sport

Football features two of the worst aspects of American life, violence and committee meetings.
George F. Will


Pity all the poor owners and players in the National Football League. Why, they just can't seem to come together on an agreement to divvy up all those hundreds of millions of dollars in a way satisfactory for them all. It, it, simply brings a tear to the eye.

Not. Most emphatically not.

So the NFL players association has decertified itself. Big whoop. The owners have instituted a lockout. Double big whoop. So now the players can sue the NFL as individuals against a monopoly. Really big whoop. You mean it wasn't effectively a monopoly anyway? Just like the players union itself was not a monopoly? By all that's right in the world, there ought to have been a Detroit Lions union (okay, so that does invite all kinds of jokes, buy let that be as it may) or a Green Bay Packers union rather than one big union anyway if monopolies weren't involved.

The best thing that can happen now is for the entire 2011 season to be lost; indeed, for modern professional football as a sport to be knocked down a few pegs. The league, the players, and the very game have become far too arrogant and self aggrandizing. Celebrating savage hits as something to marvel upon? Life threatening injuries are interpreted as 'part of the game'? Incessant trash talk and unsportsmanlike conduct on the field (too many actions on the field are nothing more than in your face insults which no true sport ought to tolerate). Why not let's go back to the Roman Colosseum for our blood for sport?

Why, football is such a great game that it can only be played once a week. That's a testament to how big and tough football players are, to be sure. Yessir, we're big and tough, not like you baseball and hockey and basketball weaklings who play several times a week. Real men, we NFLers are.

Let the NFL die, and let its fans watch it decompose. They may find that there are better things in life. Such as getting one.

There is no real National Champion

They played a football game last night, but as to who won, who cares? Or, more correctly, who should care? Simply that a group of people trying to make money got together and declared one game a championship match does not make it so. Indeed, it reeks of that corporatism which is slowly destroying America as much as the increasingly slack morals we, as a nation, continue to tolerate.

Why must their be a national champion anyway? Especially in a sport such as college football, where leagues abound and local rivalries are what made the game popular in the first place. Why do we require the false unity of a single champion?

It isn't as though the best team actually wins all the time every time. Even in a true playoff scenario, the victor is often the team which gets on a hot streak. There is no reason to be impressed that one team won one game, particularly a game crowned as the end all be all on fairly arbitrary grounds.

The Ivy League has the right idea: play among ourselves and don't fret over what anyone else is doing. As it is, the average fan is simply being played by corporate greed. That's not sportsmanship. That's selfishness.