As I understand it — and I do not pretend to understand football as a sport — the suits in charge of College Football just committed some major ‘realignment’. The stories I’ve seen about this have not been positive. Will Leitch, at NYMag, said that “College Football Is About to Change Drastically — and Not for the Better”.
The Washington Post‘s Sally Jenkins was even less impressed:
The current state of college football is this: Across the nation, paunchy, over-exalted ticket managers who title themselves athletic directors are racing in ungainly circles trying to find a padded, covering seat for their butts in a game of musical chairs. For years they cried that name, image and likeness payments to players would be a threat to the game’s tradition and uniqueness. It’s nothing compared with the destruction wrought by these administrative gluttons, with their combination of treachery and ineptitude, who would give away a century to grab a television minute.
The 100-year-old Rose Bowl is in danger of collapsing into one of those tumbled-down structures you see on the slopes of old Rome while the supposed business geniuses turn college football into something sickish that looks like three different tumors stuck together. They have arrived at a situation in which Stanford, TCU, Cincinnati and Central Florida could wind up clapped into the same distended conference, in which players must take red-eye flights home from games, just so said administrators can claim to be media honchos while covering years of overdrafts…
Because my brain works by bricolage, I immediately flashed back to the most recent SC(R)OTUS sports decision. A recap:
WATCH: The U.S. Supreme Court held that a former public high school football coach’s action of leading prayers with players were protected by his own rights under the First Amendment and said that the Washington state public school district violated the rights of the coach pic.twitter.com/ucrzCADdWP
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 4, 2022
I've never seen this in a SCOTUS ruling before. SCOTUS said that the coach was merely exercising his personal right to pray on the field. Sotomayor literally included a photo in her dissent, to prove that the right-wing justices were lying. pic.twitter.com/5MojGVzf6J
— Barney ???? (@barney1776) June 27, 2022
… It’s an unsurprising development from this staunchly conservative (and often overtly religious) court. But it’s one that is worth considering in the context of broader societal trends. The Supreme Court is empowering Christianity as the United States becomes less religious. It’s blurring the line between church and state as Republican officials like Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) advocate for religion to play more of a role in politics.
That demand has a cause. White Christians are a fundamental part of the Republican base of power — and White Christians make up a declining portion of the country and the electorate.…
White Christians are still a majority, as are Christians in general. But this decline undoubtedly contributes to a sense among Republicans that Christians are embattled in the United States. In polling conducted by YouGov in June 2021, 63 percent of Republicans said that Christians faced “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of discrimination — a significantly higher percentage than said Hispanics, gay Americans or Black Americans faced that amount of discrimination.
None of this is to say that the Supreme Court is explicitly trying to backstop the power of Christian or White Christian Americans. It is, instead, to again point out that the imbalance in the allocation of power to more rural parts of the country — and therefore more White and often more Christian parts of the country — helped Donald Trump become president and Republicans to secure a majority of the Senate. That, in turn, helped build a robust conservative majority on the court that reflected a sympathy for allowing overlap between government power and religion. And Christianity…
English expat now living in DC:
UK school sports –
– nobody cares
– coached by divorced dad or indifferent PE coach
– literally nobody can name who's on the teamUS school sports –
– literally only thing to do in Texas
– coach paid 1 million dollars
– players buried in ceremonial tomb at 18 by town— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) June 27, 2022
Call me a glass-half-full pessimist, but I don’t think this ‘victory’ is gonna do much to save American football as we know it. There’s also been a recent spate of news stories on the dangers of CTE. I suspect that parents who aren’t completely desperate will be increasingly unwilling to let their kids get involved with the kind of full-contact practices, starting in primary school, that has been regarded as “essential social/developmental training” (… If kids are to progress through the local ‘Friday Night Lights’ school-sports grind, into the college feeder system, which provides the NFL with trained novices without the costly indignities involved with running its own AA / AAA leagues.)
“Nothing against your extremely sincere religious faith, Coach, but I can’t let my kid take the risk of head trauma. Even if he *might* be your winning card against Springfield High, I want him to stay healthy enough to recognize his grandbabies thirty years from now. “
(Of course, the lottery-ticket hopes of those parents desperately dreaming that their physically-gifted child just might be able to rescue the whole family when he turns pro… it’s gonna make the whole system look even more like gladiatorial combat for the entertainment of spoiled couch potatoes…)
J R in WV
Frist?
ETA: Maybe my first Frist post evah!! I like the sport of football, don’t particularly have many fan favorites, my school is minor league, Marshall U, and everyone else I’m related to went to WVU, which is always the underdog. But the actual execution of plays can be so beautiful when it all works. Of course, CTE is a problem.
Maybe no pads flag football would be safer? Am glad players will finally get some of the vast sums of money slopping around NCAA TV sports.
sab
@J R in WV: Congratulations.
sab
I wouldn’t trust my kid’s safety to that coach.
Shalimar
The 2 major Los Angeles teams moving to the Midwest is the latest sign that amateur football is over. College football is nothing more now than feeder leagues for the NFL, like minor league and college baseball were 2 generations ago when both were popular. We will see if it suffers a similar decline over the next 40 years.
J R in WV
I see that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), famous restauranteur in Colorado, has had her lease cancelled, and will either be moving or closing. Good.
SiubhanDuinne
I see what Zeddy did there.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@J R in WV:
No pads, leather helmets, add 10 yards to length and width, eliminate the field goal and limit squads to 20 players so people play both sides of the ball the whole time. Also, fewer clock stops.
That way, you won’t have players exploding off the line, fresh as daisies – they have to marshal their energy for the long haul.
SiubhanDuinne
@J R in WV:
I tried to mention that a couple of times yesterday, but my internet’s been very sluggish and I don’t think my comments ever got through.
But, yeah. Good.
HumboldtBlue
On the college football angle, the bomb dropped last week that USC and UCLA were leaving the PAC-12 for the Big 10, and it really was a bomb. The SEC is currently the premier league in the land with the Big 10 second followed by the rest of the alphabet soup of leagues (ACC, MWC, AAC, Big East etc.)
The Big 10 just added the LA market to its Midwest, Chicago, Cleveland, New York (Rutgers), Philly (Penn St.), DC (Maryland) markets in an effort to keep pace. The ruling that finally allowed players to profit from their labor has absolutely blown up the former college football operating models and now the race is on between conferences to secure the most popular — read revenue generating — programs. They have ostensibly established a minor league of football, and it’s my guess these powerful conferences will leave the NCAA altogether and form their own league.
Another angle to keep an eye on is what Deion Sanders is doing at Jackson State, an HBCU with a long, proud football tradition. HBCUs have never been able to attract the top football players because of the pull of traditional schools, but Sanders is using his influence to change that. He is now pulling in top recruits much to the dismay of the old guard, (Nick Saban at Alabama complained about how well Sanders was doing, so you know he was doing well) and again, the new NIL (name, image, likeness) regs mean players don’t have to go to a traditional powerhouse to gain exposure — whether from pro scouts or from generating ad revenue through NILs. The digital age has changed all that and now that players are free to move and play wherever they want (that’s what REALLY pissed off the old white money men, allowing these kids to be actual free agents) college football will not look remotely like it does now in five years, at least at the top level. Division 1-AA and Division II/III will most likely remain as they are.
There is a lot more change to come.
zhena gogolia
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Like in Horse Feathers!
SiubhanDuinne
@J R in WV:
Apparently her campaign HQ is in an adjoining space. Landlord cancelled that lease, too.
Double good.
Scout211
I enjoyed Big Ten football when I was in college many years ago but the game is not the same as it was back then.
I can’t imagine any other reason to form super-leagues of teams scattered all across the whole country other than for more money. It’s certainly not for the players, the fans, the students or for the love of the game.
LeftCoastYankee
My favorite college football story is that for years they (NCAA) considered the big bowl (New Year’s) games were a sacred tradition. Then Yahoo Sports ran a series of stories on Bowl games, mostly to do with the kickbacks and corruption, but also one which outlined how many millions of dollars the NCAA was losing by not having college football playoffs.
Sacred tradition somehow lost out after that.
David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch
I always pray they cover the point spread
Scout211
@HumboldtBlue:
It’s now the Big Ten©️ Not the Big 10 anymore.
Or the symbol B1G©️
Nope, nothing is the same anymore.
Martin
So, CA spearheaded this collapse in collegiate sport through the radical declaration that students had the right to be paid for the use of their likeness.
The upheaval then is a matter of who gets to participate in the taxation of that revenue, what the NCAA will allow, what individual states will enforce, and what divisions will do in the mix. Gonna be a hellscape until it becomes intolerable and sensibility returns.
Before I retired we had established a pretty solid non-NCAA club sports ecosystem with the hope it would rob the NCAA of talent.
Cameron
For those who savor the exploits of the iconic Floriduh Man, Cigar City Brewing makes a Florida Man double IPA.
HumboldtBlue
@Scout211:
That’s right!
prostratedragon
@Martin: I think the compensation is the second stage, and what @LeftCoastYankee remarked was the first. But yes, it does seem like tptb want to make as much money as possible off the young people if they’re going to have to pay them.
Scout211
I know nothing about lawyers arguing cases at the Supreme Court but how does an attorney get away with lying about the facts in the case of the coach who forced his players to pray with him? Was there not another side (school district I presume) to refute the lies? Or was this a case of the Super 6 not wanting the facts?
Almost Retired
@Scout211: Exactly. The UCLA/USC students can’t be all that hyped up about this. You could drive for the weekend to Phoenix or the Bay Area for Pac 10 games. I don’t think a weekend in either of the Bloomingtons is on any local student’s bucket list. I can’t imagine a huge rally on the USC campus before the Rutgers game (“Huh, what’s a Rutger?”). They better pray this works out (which they can do publicly during the games, by the way).
dr. bloor
You buried the lede. This is precisely why football isn’t going anyplace anytime soon. The folks who make money off it certainly don’t care, nor do the couch potatoes.
Phylllis
The small, rural district where I work has always been football mad, and something of a small school football powerhouse in the state. Routinely in the playoffs, and making the state championship game in their class five of the last seven years. Back in the day, there’d be at least fifty young men on the sidelines. COVID pushed those numbers down, and the kids haven’t come back. I feel like the time will come in just a few more years that they won’t be able to get enough kids to actually field a team. Suits me fine, football can’t go away soon enough as far as I’m concerned.
I said a long time ago that if the NFL, MLB, NHL et al want a feeder system, then they damn well ought to pay school districts and colleges for it.
RobertB
@J R in WV: Go Herd!
(Class of ’87)
Splitting Image
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
One of the guys at LGM (Scott Lemieux, I think) wrote an article some years back about how baseball and football would change if baseball had a 16-game schedule and football had a 162-game schedule. His conclusion was that football would have to evolve into something like hockey, with two or three units taking shifts and no one playing the entire game. The bruising play would have to be reined in completely since players wouldn’t have a whole week to recover from each game.
His basic point, I think, was that a lot of what we take for granted in gridiron football is an artifact of the shorter schedules it has traditionally had. With only 12-16 games per year, teams can play far more physically than with a longer schedule, and the risk of a crippling injury is worth winning that one extra game per season, especially if it’s a guy on the other team who gets injured.
HumboldtBlue
@Phylllis:
That’s happening all over the country in rural areas. It’s happened to three schools up here. They can field soccer, basketball, baseball/softball, track and field teams, but not football.
raven
If you don’t like it don’t watch it and don’t play it. GO DAWGS!
dr. bloor
@HumboldtBlue: I’d guess Sanders is going to find his way to one of the bigger programs before he’s able to introduce any meaningful, sustainable change in the status quo.
Quite possibly looking at two Super Conferences unaffiliated with the NCAA growing out of the SEC and Big 10, playing national schedules, with the remnants of the Power 5 and FCS teams relegated to playing regional schedules. It’s also likely to happen faster than these things typically do, because the high profile programs in the ACC, Big 12, Pac 10 etc don’t want to be left out in the cold.
Anne Laurie
@raven: I almost added an apology to you in the body of the post!
(But: Still news, one way & another… )
RobertB
@HumboldtBlue: I’d bet that football isn’t going to go away, but will shrink quite a bit. Horse racing and boxing are still out there. More than one set of parents I know told me they would never let their kids play football.
raven
@Anne Laurie: Well there’s nothing else going on so dredging this up again is probably necessary. I was reading a tweet by a West Virginia fan explains how all this tumult has caused him to have lost interest because of the lack of regional opponents that made it all so interesting to some many. It may explain why Cole suddenly saw the light, the EERS suck!
raven
@RobertB: Yea, and Tampa Bay Bucs coaches kid juts signed with my Dawgs!
HumboldtBlue
@RobertB:
Oh, football is going nowhere, except in small and rural communities where the need for almost every kid to come out to field a team is a real burden. Combine that with the health concerns and increasingly aware parents, and you’ll see youth and high school football participation continue to dwindle.
raven
I gotta go, ya’ll have fun.
TheOtherHank
When my sons were young I was willing to let them play any little league sport they asked to play, but I drew the line at football. This was before I was aware of CTE, I just thought they should not have to go to high school with blown-out knees. They both played AYSO soccer for several years, but settled on our local club swim team (which got them good enough to be varsity all four years of high school). But the real advantage of swimming in my opinion (besides the fitness aspect), is that boys and girls practice together and swim at the same meets. It’s a lot harder to be a toxic shit-head sports boy when there are multiple girls on your team that are faster than you are.
J R in WV
@SiubhanDuinne:
Sweet! Thanks for the update!
HumboldtBlue
@dr. bloor:
I’m not so sure about that, I think Deion is in it to make a point. He’s already brand-famous, he’s Deion Sanders, he’s got all the money and accolades he needs, I think he wants to turn HBCUs into competitive programs and I think we’re gonna see more former college and pro black athletes join him in building the HBCU brand. It’s already happening in college basketball, and I think we are gonna see a lot more 4 and 5-star recruits start to choose HBCUs instead of the traditional blue bloods.
And yes, things are going to move very fast as realignment continues to reshape the college football landscape.
Ken
I’ll accept James Palmer’s evaluation of UK school sports, but it kind of ignores the internationally-famous (because often drunkenly violent) fans of the city teams.
(Or teams of the boroughs, districts, counties, and other historically-meaningful administrative divisions of the UK, as the “Map Men” explained.)
BC in Illinois
As a semi-retired Lutheran minister, let me add a comment aimed at those people who are zealous for bringing institutionalized prayer to their local public institution:
One should not over-estimate the value, or try to predict the results, of coerced religious performances. It does not have the effect that people [including parents] may imagine it will have.
(I will let others provide examples.)
On the other hand, the effect of coercing a religious performance among people who have not intentionally gathered together for that purpose, and do not even necessarily share the religious convictions of those who have the power to enforce the coercion, is almost universally bad.
When I, in the performance of my office, invited a group or a family or an individual to join me in prayer, that was what they had come together to do. That is what they had called me and asked me to do. The decision for me to have a prayer was, in part, theirs. But when a teacher, politician, employer, or military officer takes it upon themselves to impose a time of prayer — even if the only coercion is the pressure of the group — then they have put the person who doesn’t believe in the words being said, who didn’t come to the event for that purpose, and doesn’t, at heart, want to be a part of that public religious performance . . . they have put that person in the position of pretending to believe words that they do not, in fact, believe. This does nobody any good.
Coerced make-believe has no spiritual benefit.
[ When I was still living in Illinois, there were people going from county to county in southern Illinois, trying to get school boards to put the Ten Commandments on display. They never made it to my locality, but I had a file folder ready. I was going to ask the school board WHICH Ten Commandments they wanted to display:
I was sure that I would be able to de-rail any proposal. And my closing statement would have been, “People have been trying to say that putting up the Ten Commandments is not a religious message, it’s a civic message. I have actually been teaching the Ten Commandments to young people for 30 years. It’s there in Luther’s Small Catechism. And, yes, it is a religious message, which message I do not want the school teachers of _________ County to teach to my children.” ]
RobertB
@raven: Yeah, some parents still let their kids play. Heck, I probably would have let my kid play, if my kid wanted to (my daughter wasn’t particularly interested).
As for WVU, yeah, joining the Big 12 was a mistake, from a fandom standpoint.
Ken
I was surprised recently to find that roller derby is still out there.
(It was from Molly White’s “Web3 is going just great” blog, reporting that some of the roller derby stars tried to launch a line of NFTs. Because when I hear “roller derby” my first thought is “ooh, I want an encrypted electronic token saying I own some nebulous digital right to… something vaguely associated with my favorite roller derby athletes.”)
Ken
Samaritan or get out.
J R in WV
@RobertB:
I’m class 0f 1984, my third swing at college… worked out because I made friends who actually knew how to study. I was smart enough to do well in high school without cracking a book, but college level math, computer science, not so much.
One thing I learned, it isn’t the college that matters, it’s the student that counts, the work that you do. MU is a good school, but I worked my ass off, and that’s what counts.
Go Herd !!
SpaceUnit
Football isn’t going anywhere. If this country can force girls to give birth then we can damn well force boys to play extremely dangerous but entertaining sports.
At gunpoint if necessary.
gene108
@Scout211:
It’s only about money now.
It’s always kind of been about money, but ever since ESPN started throwing money into college football coverage, the amount of money available just skyrocketed.
League directors became entrepreneurial, rather than just administrators.
The SEC’s exclusive football deal with CBS gave them the money to make them the best football conference. The Big Ten Network was a stroke of genius to capture an additional revenue stream that forced the rest of college football to catch up.
The moves conferences make to add teams are purely business decisions.
I think the lure of money will be so great that in a decade or so, when the top football schools form their own league the players won’t actually have to be students. The teams will just have some licensing or branding agreement with a university, while players have an option to be students.
Then there’s going to be a bunch of also rans stuck with being too big to just go back to the scale the game was at decades ago, but without the money or resources to match whatever monstrosity of a pro-league passing itself off as college football emerges among the top schools.
DrDaveChemist
@TheOtherHank:
For many years, I coached in a cross country program where the co-ed dynamic applied. Occasionally we would have a particularly strong girl runner who was in with the top tier of boys, and often some of the boys who just needed “fitness credit” were in with the average girls. I think it was good for everyone to see that there’s a broad range within each gender, and having boys and girls together helped forge a team identity that transcended genetic differences.
JaneE
My friends are grandparents or great-grandparents, and I hear a few say they would have let their kids play sports if they knew what they know now. Granddaughter has indicated that she will discourage her son from contact sports and try to direct his interest in other directions. He starts kindergarten this year.
Geminid
@dr. bloor: Deion Sanders could snag a higher level head coach job now if he wanted. I think he’ll stick with his current job. Sanders excelled as a player at the highest level, he doesn’t need the big coaching bucks, and he’s trying to prove something.
What I’m wondering is whether former BYU and U.Va. coach “Bronco” Mendenhall will return to coaching. Mendenhall quit his job at Virginia last November when ambitious boosters wanted to fire his defensive coaching staff. He has a very good reputation and would be in high demand if he was looking for another job. But he’s let one hiring season go by now. Maybe next year.
HumboldtBlue
@gene108:
I read that it was the failure of the PAC 12 to develop an adequate streaming service that was a prime catalyst in the move by USC and UCLA. The idea that the conference most closely aligned with Silicon Valley was behind on any development of digital platforms is gobsmacking. I don’t know how much it played a role in the move, but it had an impact.
Martin
@prostratedragon: Well, we’re describing opposite phenomena. LeftCoastYankee is describing the accumulation of power within the NCAA. I was describing the diffusal of power back to the students, which the organized NCAA will be able to exploit in the near term, but probably not in the long term.
The college admissions scandal from a few years ago had sports as its entry point. Every major university will admit behind closed doors that collegiate sports are destroying academic institutions as a class, but at the same time they are unable to give it up without destroying their individual institution faster.
It’s a lot like climate change – we know its going to kill us all, but making my quarterly numbers matters more.
kindness
I’m not sure the Republic is going to survive the Gilead Supreme Court.
trollhattan
@Shalimar:
Pretty much this.
My kid’s conference is losing the biggest school–BYU–to the Big “12” after the upcoming season. The difference? They’re the only school in the conference with a football team. Opinions differ on the rea$on.
If you’re feeling stout, listen to the BBC Hardtalk interview with rugby star Steven Thompson, suffering with early-onset dementia. It’s a brave and frank discussion I’m glad I listened to but it still haunts. Thompson won the 2003 World Cup with England and does not remember doing so. His description of training drills is…instructive. Was reminded of the Bear Bryant book I once read.
Martin
Pretty sure Cal and Stanford would take that as a compliment that they were unwilling to sell out academia even more than they’ve already done.
LeftCoastYankee
There is more than a little irony that coach Lincoln Riley left Oklahoma when they declared they were moving to the SEC where they will be a doormat. He hasn’t coached a game at USC when they declared they were moving to the Big10/13/15… where they will be a doormat.
I’m actually more bummed about the impact to other sports in the Pac-12, particularly women’s hoops and softball.
gene108
@HumboldtBlue:
When the big state university programs were segregated, some HBCU’s could blow the pants off those top teams.
The HBCU’s were the only option for where many black football players could go.
trollhattan
@HumboldtBlue: IDK, I have the Pac12 Network and don’t know what its shortcomings may be.
What I’ve read is the Pac 12 doesn’t “pay coaches enough.” I don’t believe in negotiating with terrorists.
Martin
@kindness: I would argue that it’s necessary to survive, but in a forcing the end sort of way. The cult of white Christian nationalism was always going to burn it down to win. It was mostly down to which generation would be forced to suffer through the end state, and which generations could we spare by running them through the watered down version of it while we kick the can further down the road.
If we didn’t fight it out now, we’d have to fight it out later. Let’s get this shit over with.
LeftCoastYankee
@HumboldtBlue:
All the other leagues (and Texas) partnered with ESPN and let them develop and market their networks, which is why they are available in TV packages that have ESPN.
The PAC-10/12 decided to build their own network, which is why it’s not widely available.
IIRC the “Longhorns Network” was what started the grumbling between Texas and the Big12. Also, may have been a stumbling block with an earlier PAC14 (w/ UT and Oklahoma).
persistentillusion
@SiubhanDuinne: I’ve been to Rifle. Those two closures will spiff the place up a bit.
jonas
@HumboldtBlue:
Pop Warner leagues are struggling in a lot of states as well. That’s the youth football league that feeds players into high school programs. Turns out moms aren’t as enthusiastic as they used to be about signing their 8 year-olds up to get traumatic brain injury. I’m sure Herschel Walker’s run in GA isn’t doing football any favors, either.
trollhattan
@SpaceUnit:
Pretty much. “Don’t you dare mess with my Saturdays” requires an endless stream of 8YO boys to feed the machine. “Informed consent” my ass.
trollhattan
@jonas: Has Herschel spawned enough boys to fill one complete side? They still counting?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Scout211: I grew up in Michigan and went to Michigan State for grad school (small liberal arts college for undergrad). The only way this conference expansion could possibly work for me is if they add enough teams to form one division made up of all the long time Big Ten members and another for the newbies. Then they could call the conference championship game The Rose Bowl. But there are East Coast and West Coast teams so I’m not sure that makes any sense WRT travel even if all the teams have private jets.
gene108
@HumboldtBlue:
The problem the PAC-12 has with regards to viewership is the time zone their in. Being three hours behind the east coast means to get a noon Eastern time kickoff slot, they’d have to have games scheduled for 9:00 am. A prime time West Coast game starts at 10:00 pm East Coast time. Most people east of the Mississippi aren’t going to stay awake to watch the entire game.
I think they’ve recently experimented with different time slots to start games that are friendlier to East Coast and Midwest viewership, but it seems to be too little to late.
*Back in 2000, I attended a conference in the Silicon Valley area. When I woke up Saturday morning and turned on the TV, a college football game was on. Being on the East Coast most of my life, I never imagined waking up and having breakfast with a football game on.
J R in WV
@raven:
Comparing WVU football with Georgia is like comparing Marshall U with the K C Chiefs. Pros vs amateurs. And the WVU team isn’t the bottom of the Big 12 either. Tiny state doing its best to compete with the big dogs and sometimes they win against the odds.
trollhattan
@gene108: Remember when Notre Dame contracted directly with NBC to broadcast their games? Seemed like an outlier at the time, now it just seems prosaic.
Scout211
@gene108: The time zone for television broadcasts was one the reasons that USC and UCLA joined the Big Ten©️ (supposedly). They will get the better game times for mostly away games but they would still raking in the big bucks for the best slots and the Big Ten©️ television contracts.
Jeffro
OT but went to see that ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ movie with the fam this afternoon and it is…not good.
I don’t want to ruin anything with spoilers, so I’ll just say that the plot is a real mess, the characters are not very in-character from previous movies, and while the GN’R songs sound good and cute in the trailer, they really don’t work well in the movie.
Another Scott
@Martin: Do it.
ChicagoTribune:
The first Heisman Trophy winner was a Maroon (Berwanger).
It’s not good for kids and it’s not good for universities for sports to be such huge enterprises.
Cheers,
Scott.
surfk9
I hoping that my alma mater SDSU will get into the Pac whatever. Better competition and better recruiting.
Amir Khalid
@Ken:
As opposed to American basketball fans who riot to celebrate their city team winning the NBA playoffs?
JanieM
@Amir Khalid: It’s not just basketball.
trollhattan
Weird if you live here, too.
OTOH had a bidnez trip to the East Coast and was up after midnight watching frickin’ MNF go into overtime. That was a rough Tuesday.
Martin
Many years ago I hired a wonderful person away from UMich and during a little walking tour of our campus on our first day she asked in all seriousness ‘where do your students riot?’. I chuckled and asked her what the fuck she was talking about. She said after the team wins or loses a game, where do they go to burn sofas and overturn cars. “Uh, we don’t do that here. After our team wins or loses a big game, students go back to studying. Maybe stop off at Starbucks on the way.”
Grumpy Old Railroader
@BC in Illinois:
Right on. I have been preparing a slightly different argument. My argument is that to go along with the 10 Commandments, there should be a marker for the 5 main beliefs of Buddhism
HumboldtBlue
@gene108:
That’s why when you look at the rosters of NFL teams in the 60s and 70s you see them stocked with talent from schools like Jackson St., Savannah St., North Carolina A&T, Grambling etc. HBCUs still turn out an NFL player these days, and that will increase, I believe, as the landscape shifts.
Amir Khalid
@JanieM:
I’m aware of that; but I needed to keep the sentence tight, so I only had room to cite one example.
persistentillusion
@Another Scott: My Dad played with Berwanger. He always said that he (B) was a hell of an athlete. Dad was recruited from a little Iowa town because he was big (6’3″ and probably 220 as a young man), not because he was a particularly gifted athlete. UC 1946. Also worked on the nuclear pile Oppenheimer was working on, as the muscle needed to shift things as they were building it came from UC football players. Thanks for the autoimmune problems, Oppenheimer!
lowtechcyclist
This white Christian asks: how can you feel ’embattled’ when you have the presence of the Lord of the universe living in your heart?
Oh wait, they don’t. They’re just using Jesus as their team mascot. Fuck ’em.
eddie blake
@Jeffro: i couldn’t disagree more. it’s not a great movie, but it’s pretty darn good. the characters behave differently because a) different people are writing and directing them, but more importantly, b) because this movie is about their growth.
transitions, bitter experience and repeated, excessive trauma haunt the odinson, king val and dr. foster (not to mention the what’s left of the asgardians) and the movie shows them trying to work through the wreckage of their pasts.
christian bale’s gorr is there and doing what he’s doing for impossibly understandable motivations, and the film takes pains to show us that with notable exceptions notwithstanding, gorr was right.
anyway, i really liked it. had flaws, was pretty dark in a “bambi’s mom just got whacked” sort of way, but that’s apparently a disney signature, and i enjoyed the character’s maturing.
obviously there’s a lot more i’d like to get into, but i wouldn’t wanna spoil the film.
yeah. no, i thought it was a fun flick with a tight finish.
Shalimar
@gene108: I went to law school in San Diego. I really enjoyed all the games beginning 3 hours earlier. Made watching all day without having to stay up extremely late a lot easier.
Geminid
@HumboldtBlue: Grambling grad Doug Williams won Superbowl XXII for Washington on January 31,1988. The first Black quarterback to start an NFL championship game, Williams completed 19 of 28 passes for four touchdowns and was named the game’s MVP. His 340 yards passing set a Superbowl record.
lowtechcyclist
@Grumpy Old Railroader:
Clearly I’m not cut out to be a Buddhist.
prostratedragon
@Martin: Opposite? More like call-and-response as the student players became more aware Zof the money being made off them by adding games, among other marketing plays.
HumboldtBlue
@Geminid:
Yes he did.
And Walter Payton of Jackson State retired as the greatest running back in NFL history.
Super Dave
I went to school in Texas from 6th grade through my freshman year in high school. I was a scrawny kid that all my classmates outgrew by my 7th-grade year. In spite of being a pretty good football player, I just didn’t have the size to compete against the bigger boys. So I played tennis instead and did pretty well in that sport. We had a saying that “there are only two sports in Texas… football and spring football.” It was pretty much axiomatic that if you didn’t play football in Texas, you weren’t (rhymes with) spit. We moved to Nebraska for my sophomore year, where I competed well enough in tennis to play a couple of years for the University of Nebraska on scholarship. Of course, the entire tennis team budget was less than the shoe budget for the football team (Nebraska football teams were national champions my last two years there). I can honestly say I’m glad my size didn’t allow me to play football. I’m in much better physical condition in my old age because of that.
Ken
@Amir Khalid: I didn’t intend to excuse American sportsball teams.
Geminid
@jonas: NFL Safety Irv Cross had so many concussions his rookie year his teammates nicknamed him “Paperhead.” The next season a doctor told him another concussion could disable, maybe kill him. Cross put extra padding inside his helmet and taught himself to tackle with his head clear. He went on to play eight more seasons.
Cross started doing sports reporting for a Pittsburgh TV station in the offseason. After he retired from football, a network recruited Cross to appear regularly on a national pregame show, a first for a Black man. Later, Cross told a reporter that the producer wanted him to wear a leisure suit and a gold chain! Cross showed up in a coat and tie as he did throughout his broadcasting career.
Miss Bianca
@BC in Illinois: thank you for saying this. I have been disturbed for quite some time about creeping Christian religiosity into public life, something I see a lot of in my small county. Particularly disturbing to me is the oath of office that apparently all public officials now swear here, which starts out “I swear by the ever-loving God etc etc”.
If I really wanted to make more trouble for myself locally, I would raise the issue that compelling people to take that oath amounts to the sort of religious test that the First Amendment expressly forbids.
pluky
@Almost Retired:
These games aren’t for the students. The TV ratings are all that matters.
Michael Cain
Some of this is the NCAA (behind the scenes) trying desperately to ensure that at least one team from the Mountain/Pacific time zones is relevant in the football national title hunt. Much of the discussion about expanding the playoff field from four to eight or twelve has been, in reality, trying to ensure a Pac-12 team will get in. I hold out some hope that the (now) Pac-10 presidents are brave enough to tell the NCAA no.
divF
@HumboldtBlue: And Jerry Rice from Mississippi Valley State University, arguably the best wide receiver in NFL history.
Wapiti
@RobertB: In the mid 1970s I had to get a doctor’s check-up before I could participate in Jr. High athletics. Because it was track, he was fine with it; but he said he wouldn’t sign off on football; too many injuries.
Jeffro
@eddie blake: Ok, it’s great that you disagree, that’s fantastic, whatever. It was still a jumbled mess, full of plot holes, confusing & inconsistent character motivations, and irritating, ill-fitting musical choices.
and whew, the ending? Each part of the ending (including both of the post-credits scenes) was especially terrible too, for the same reasons.
Fans (of which I thought I was one? I’ve been a life-long Marvel fan and have seen every one of the movies except Eternals) seem to like it, but it really left me wishing I hadn’t wasted my time or money.
HumboldtBlue
@divF:
The list is long.
John Stallworth, Mel Blount, Willie Lanier Michael Strahan, Art Shell, Steve McNair, John Taylor, Too Tall Jones, Greg Lloyd, Robert Brazile, Harry Carson, Shannon Sharpe, etc. etc. etc.
dnfree
@TheOtherHank: the cross-country boys and girls practice together too, and go to meets together, and cheer each other on. We found that out when our daughter ran cross-country,
At least in Illinois, the high school boys and girls have different swim seasons.
eddie blake
@Jeffro: yeah, again, no. what plot-holes? the movie is very good about showing the audience just about everything it needs to (except maybe korg meeting his boyfriend).
what is inconsistent about the character(s) is how the russo brothers portrayed them in the two avengers films, ignoring everything in the thor movies that led up to that point, especially ragnarok. the beginning of the film is waititi discarding all the baggage he doesn’t want.
the ending fit too. thor deciding that love is more important to him and turning his back on battle wins the battle.
i don’t know what you thought was confusing about it, it’s one of the more youth-oriented marvel movies and was fairly straightforward. “dude needs mcguffin, dude finds lever to get mcguffin, holder of mcguffin tries a workaround and ultimately decides to play an entirely different game.”
post one sets up the following film and a soon-to-be major player in the MCU. post two shows the audience that gorr’s god lied and opens up tremendous possibilities.
anyway, yeah, i thought it worked.
prostratedragon
@Wapiti: Way back in the 40s my mother’s brother wanted to play h.s. football. Their grandparent/guardians reluctantly allowed him to get his equipment. I think he lasted one practice before deciding to emphasize baseball.
pajaro
I apologize in advance if someone has made this point, but creating a conference that goes from sea to shining sea is incredibly awful for the student-athletes (and I use that term without irony) in non-revenue sports. It’s insane that volleyball or soccer players are going to be jetting across the country, with three hour time changes, for games, some of which, in the current mix, are scheduled for mid-week.
Honus
@raven: hows that national championship trophy case working out for your hokies?
BC in Illinois
@Miss Bianca:
It seems to me that the discussion of the Constitution’s prohibition of “religious tests” would be helped, if people would talk about what it means (and what it has meant to them) of taking and passing — or failing! –a real religious test.
I have (voluntarily) taken a number of religious tests and made specific declarations of my faith, from my instruction in Luther’s Small Catechism to my assent to the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, the (unaltered!) Augsburg Confession, the 1580 Book of Concord — including the question of whether I agree with them “because” [quia] they are in accord with the Scriptures or only “insofar as” [quatenus] they agree with Scripture. It is entirely right, or at least defensible, that a church body committed to these doctrines test the people they put into office. I can devise tests that no one but a Lutheran would pass. Other people can devise tests that no Lutheran could honestly pass.
These kind of tests have no place in deciding who will be the starting offensive tackle, or the head coach, or a history teacher, or county commissioner, or Chief Petty Officer, or Health Commissioner, or any other officer executing the laws under the United States Constitution.
With two additional declarations, not controversial here perhaps, but contentious elsewhere:
Honus
@J R in WV: also, WVU beat UGA the last time they played in a BCS bowl.
11WVU
11-1
38
Final
35
8UGA
10-3
waspuppet
There’s nothing about teamwork or hard work or self-sacrifice or unity that you can learn from football that you can’t learn from baseball or basketball or track and field or chess.
dnfree
@BC in Illinois: the addition of “under God” to the pledge is divisive, hence interfering with the claim of being indivisible. Ironic, or just sad?
Geminid
@pajaro: James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia had a very successful second level football program for years. Now they are jumping to Division I. Their former league was mostly Mid-Atlantic schools with a couple north of the Hudson. Now they’ll be in the Sunbelt Conference and playing more distant schools. I don’t think it was the alumni who drove this decision, and certainly not the students. A small number of wealthy boosters call the shots at JMU and other schools like U.Va. I think they are setting themselves and their larger university communities up for disappointment.
HumboldtBlue
@waspuppet:
Nothing like being an All-State Rook on the chess team!
dr. bloor
@pajaro:
IANACSM*, but this seems like where football gets off the NCAA train. Sending the USC Tennis team for an early spring match in Happy Valley makes zero sense for all involved.
*I Am Not A College Sports Maven
HumboldtBlue
@dr. bloor:
Agreed. And Basketball may be on that train while every other sport remains as is.
raven
@Honus: I’m an Illini by birth, a Hokie by marriage and a DAWG all day long!
raven
@Honus: You’re fucking delirious. 2 thousand fucking six.
I hope JT works out, great arm and a great kid.
Ksmiami
@kindness: hmm. I’m hoping the Gilead Supreme Court won’t survive the republic. They are, after all just human flesh in robes.
KSinMA
@BC in Illinois: Come sit by me.
different-church-lady
The sham that is [anything in our society you care to name here] continues unabated.
The Pale Scot
BS, Christians belong to a church that has been established by apostolic succession,
The US Protestant churches aren’t close. They were created in the most part by shysters captivating their bored, extremely rural audiences. Here and now they have created “Christian colleges” where they can say they studied “theology” and have a degree. They are christianists, not Christians.
I don’t believe this stuff, I had friends who were intending to be theology students….