A Peek Under the Rock of Football

10/13/2014

American Higher Education in All Its Glory

It all comes back to me now – the disconnect I felt whenever I wandered into big-time college football during my years as sports columnist.

I could deal with the machinations of professional sports. They were who they were -- steroid frolics, owner collusion, ignorance of brain damage. But big-time basketball and football gave me the creeps even worse because they existed under the title of “higher education.”

It comes back to me when I read terrific articles like the one in the Times on Sunday about how the entire power structure of Florida State University and the tolerant community fell into line to produce a football power every weekend, to the point of overlooking complaints about prominent players.

I visited Florida State when I was a columnist. I once talked to a player who lived in a football dormitory and seemed a trifle flustered when asked about classes and contact with students. He knew where the weight room was, though.

Now I learn that the authoritative people parking cars around the huge stadium complex were off-duty police officers, all part of the program.

There was always the temptation to get caught up in the folksy ways of coach Bobby Bowden. He would meet the press early Sunday morning for a review of the latest wide-right kicking fiasco, which he met with decency and humor. He would invite us to attend church with him. Y’all come. It was easy to fall into the familiar world of team ratings that would determine bowl placements.

I wrote about scandals at these schools. I once found some tutors at another powerhouse who admitted they had handed in papers for players. Other schools had legal issues, admission scandals, coaches who jumped ship, programs that hired comely hostesses tI wrote about it all. In the new blogosphere, apologists would generate hundreds of hostile e-mails to me, which was fun.

Football is the worst because it involves huge numbers of players and physical brutality, a Lord of the Flies bullying atmosphere. I read Harvey Araton’s terrific piece in the Sunday Times about Sayreville, N.J. and wonder how many other “programs” have fun traditions like that. How similar are the allegations at Sayreville to the ugly stuff that went on at Penn State?

Even for events I liked, like the good old Big East basketball tournament in the Garden, I always felt that coaches, advisors, tutors, presidents, boosters, recruiters, alums, knew the dirty secrets of getting these athletes into school.

I don’t watch college sports anymore. Don’t have to. I do read -- serious reporting about how the systems work. It all comes back to me.

8 Comments

Thor A. Larsen

10/13/2014 04:33:43 am

Hello George, you triggered one of my 'hot-buttons'. I seriously believe that college sports should be like it was with my alma mater, Queens College and other City Colleges, in th elate 1950's, essentlally pure amateur, low key, and focus is always on the education of the students. The football and basketball programs at the major colleges and universities today should be fully separated from the colleges and run as 'minor leagues' in their repsective disciplines. The focus of colleges should be pure education. Sports should only be for the purpose of skill development, teamwork, etc with no money involved.

10/13/2014 07:23:35 am

Thor, I totally agree. I was a student aide in the athletic department at Hofstra -- we had good football and basketball, with real students., Many of my athlete friends have done very well....(I write about them on occasion). They all knew they had to pass or drop off the team. The president was a Shakespearean scholar. I really admired the way it worked then....don't respect the way big-time sports dominate 100 schools or more.
Almost went to Queens....
see you soon, George

Ed Martin

10/14/2014 09:46:48 am

Division III, no athletic scholarships, gets an A minus in my book. The minus is because I believe that some athletes get a bit of an edge when regular scholarships are awarded. This is a belief, based on faculty chit-chat, not solid evidence.

Meanwhile as one who played Soccer at a Division III school, I can attest that I would have paid a bit more to play. In fact, we had to convince the school not to drop soccer entirely. In later years the Muhlenberg College became a Centennial Conference champ and played in several NCAA III tournaments. Even though it is far from simon-pure I still I am pretty hooked on NCAA basketball tourney.

Well, nothings "prefect."

Brian Savin

10/15/2014 01:01:25 am

This is the finest yet simplest study of big time college sports that I have read. It is fitting to share the writings of others, but this commentary stands alone. To me, you ask: Why is this worth it?

George Vecsey

10/15/2014 11:51:17 am

Brian, thanks. My thoughts distilled into one sentence. I do not thing big-time college football is worth. Presidents and other apologists are debasing themselves by being associated with it.
GV

John McDermott

10/16/2014 08:05:12 am

I could not agree more. I am not interested in watching college sports and, to be honest, never have been. There's something so artificial about it, at least in the "big" sports like football and basketball. I would also add-and you know I had to find a soccer angle-that college soccer and the NCAA's governance of it are holding back the development of the sport in the US. Good players who opt for "college soccer" are essentially signaling that they are not really serious about playing the sport. That in itself is fine if that's what the athlete wants to do. But then MLS carries on with a college draft and the myth that that's where the best American players are going to come from and it is, frankly, a joke. Any young man who wants to play in the NFL or NBA must go to college-the de facto farm system for those leagues. But any good young soccer player with professional aspirations should skip college soccer, which with its very limited "season" and generally low level of play will only retard his development as a player.

George Vecsey

10/16/2014 10:06:00 am

The soccer system is more honest than college and football, in which academics with otherwise good reputations connive to get world-level athletes enrolled in university. As John knows, people overseas shake their heads at the duplicity.
But college soccer is enjoyable -- and provides scholarships for Americans and foreigners who want education and competition. Soccer players have decent grades. A decade ago, I wrote about a Division I defender at LIU who was class valedictorian.
GV

Richard

1/6/2015 03:00:51 am

hi geroge i'm a 7th grade student at broad meadows middle school in MA. every year we do a project to find a breaker, and i choose wat misaka, i know you wrote a story about him, so have some questions to ask you
-why is he a ground breaker?
what obstacles or dangers he faced to open up basketball to more people, can you give me some examples?
-also if you can choose a metaphor that describes what he did.

Leave a Reply.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

A Peek Under the Rock of Football

Leave a Reply.

Categories

Buy the Book