Anyone who knows me knows I am in general antipathetic toward sports. I don’t watch it, I don’t follow it, and I could not care less who is winning or losing. The sun does not rise and set on finals, March Madness, seasons, MVPs, or any of that. I missed being infected with this particular virus as a child and have never regretted it, as I find the whole thing baffling.
Mind you, I don’t have anything at all against playing sports. I think more kids should (if they’re allowed in by the jocks, that is). But watching?
Regardless my feelings about sports as such, my biggest complaint is with the fetishizing of it and the profound cost of such obsession on just about everything. So much else of considerably more value often goes begging just so a city can have a brand new stadium. Sports, frankly, generates enough income just by being, it does not need tax payer support, and that we grant it any, never mind as much as we do, should be the subject of government hearings.
But what really gets me hot is how much education is distorted by this obsession.
Did you know that, in all likelihood, your state’s highest paid public employee is a coach?
Here’s a delightful article with a colorful chart showing this fact state by state.
Mostly football coaches.
I’m sorry, but—what the fuck is wrong with everybody? With all that we have slipped behind so many other countries in so many academic areas, exactly how does paying the football coach the highest compensation of any other public employee in a state serve to correct the profound epidemic of DUMB that seems the chief problem facing us today?
The article reiterates the well-established fact that major athletics programs make universities no money. They cost.
We’re seeing tenure under assault, staffs being cut, tuition rising across the board, and money being spent on something that does nothing to advance the state of learning. And football? A moment aside for a personal note of invective. Traumatic brain injuries, not to mention life-long injuries in general, should place this sport in the same category with boxing. The group-think, team-spirit lunacy embraced—not by the players but by the fans—would not be a problem if it did not come at the expense of so much else.
(It doesn’t help my attitude that I was once threatened by several members of my high school’s varsity team with being thrown bodily from a third floor window because I expressed the opinion in the school paper that just maybe some other things were perhaps more important than football.)
With all the complaining about wasteful spending we have to listen to from people hell bent on curtailing just about anything useful in education (not to mention the country in general) why do we not hear congress up in arms about this?
Let me be emphatic—when a coach makes more money than a dean of an entire university, something if very, very wrong. Spin it any way you like, I surely do not want to pay for this kind of crap.
Well, boy howdy, the highest paid public employee in the Great State of Oregon here is … wow, a football coach. I don’t even have to look it up to figure it’s whoever’s currently at the head of the University of Oregon Ducks, who storm the standings every season with nothing more than a well-funded, over-pampered and mollycoddled (by NIKE, fagoshsakes!) football program.
But the U of O program is just a mound of recruiting violations just waiting to detonate. It almost did this last year, but it looks as though they’ll dodge *that* bullet. But that luck runs out eventually. The shrapnel from that hive of scum and villainy flying apart should level about half of Eugene.
I hope they have emergency plans in place for that.