Could not agree more. Thank you for this. I was always a big college basketball fan but have mostly given up on it. The legalization of sports betting was a terrible mistake. And it is very sad that we have abandoned the traditional view that high-level college athletes are compensated by receiving a free education and now think they ought to be paid as well. As you say, then they should just have their own pro league and skip the pretense of college. Keep on sayin' it!
I do have to put a plug in for “St Johns” of Annapolis/Santa Fe. They strongly encourage ALL students to be involved in intramural competition. They play only The Naval Academy yearly in , drum roll please, lawn croquet. Which they generally vanquish the Navy at this. Excellent school that teaches you to read discerningly, respectfully explain your views, and listen carefully.
Reading this right after watching the skirmish at the end of the Michigan/Ohio St. football game. It’s hard to put the blame on college kids when they’ve been — as detailed in this article — shown by adults to not value anything other than winning and money. It’s also a rapidly changing landscape with NIL deals and college athletes finally being compensated for the revenue they bring schools. I’m glad athletes are getting paid, and it’s an opportunity for these athletes to have generational wealth, but it’s tough to see values being eroded, too. Not sure there’s a clear solution, but I hope some balance is reached where fair compensation and the integrity of higher education/virtues of sports can coexist.
I had just watched that melee after the game on youtube. Like you, this was fresh in the back of my mind while reading Ted's "I Say Forbidden Things About Sports."
You know, off-campus rioting isn't uncommon after at least one Big Ten team loses. It's happened off and on for years now. It just isn't televised. (By "years," i mean 5 decades.) The team is, btw, Penn State.
An amazing article. Coming from someone who played sports and loved watching sports, I agree with it. But you're 100% right. I've mentioned this time and time again that the NILs and transfer portals have ruined college footballs as no one stays in one place long enough to grow the rivalries.
Again, you're so right in the fact that college sports are no longer about the 6 lessons mentioned, but to win and bring in revenue.
Now, when you mention gambling, you're so so right. I've also noticed that in the last two years gambling has taken off -- grabbing a lot of people into its grasp. It's at this time I want to remind everyone of George Orwell's words on gambling in 1984: "films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds." When I saw this, I now knew why gambling came into the mix.
Great post once again and here's an article I wrote on sports:
I live in the town where the highest paid football coach in Iowa also lives and works and let me tell you, it's a freaking religion here. It makes me sick to be honest. The rest of us, the non-sportsketball worshiping public, have to plan our lives around football weekends because you can't travel, you can't expect to find an open hotel room, you can't expect to find a table in a restaurant on those weekends. It is truly enormously inconveniencing. Interestingly, the merchants in the city don't see nearly as much money flowing in as the University does. In fact game days are dreaded more than enjoyed pretty much universally by a lot of the merchants in town. Restaurants and hotels are about the only businesses really seeing any benefit from this. It is an absolute racket. Thank you for your clarity and insight. I really appreciate you.
Alma... yeah. I live near Penn State. Alumni money sustains large parts of the university, and if the school should ever decide to scale back the football program, the dropoff in donations and bequests... well, you know all too well how this works. I will say that PSU's marching band is *really* good, but the stupid broadcasters never allow the halftime shows onscreen anymore. So.
There was a “This American Life” episode about Penn State a few years back that made it sound like, from a local business perspective, football was good for local businesses.
The ep debuted a few months before the Sandusky scandal broke. The scandal highlighted the many downsides of football at Penn State that the This American Life reporting covered. TAL went back and there was a lot of superficial soul-searching in that follow-up episode. Of course, nothing changed.
Hotels/motels, restaurants and bars are the only businesses that make money on home game weekends. Traffic is gridlocked before and after games, including Friday night, since there are so many out-of-towners heading to the games.
As always, I am grateful for your thoughtful work here, Ted.
As both a former college athlete and now a business professor/assistant vice provost at a university system (WashU in St. Louis), I share a similar worry about the profit maximization motives being too closely linked to the university model. Given that WashU is DIII, we are slightly less directly impacted here, but still, it is something to keep top of mind as we think about how to design the schools of the future.
The moment someone decided to run higher education as a business was the beginning of the long slide to where we are now, in academics and college sports. I was an educator at the college level for 26+ years and despite all efforts by my peers & colleagues across several institutions, here we are. Keep on fighting the good fight, everyone. Thanks for your insight Peter.
That is why the US illiteracy rate is 20%, and growing. Even college freshmen fall into this category reading at below a 5th-grade level. The US should be ashamed. I am a US citizen with a 14-year-old son living in Portugal and will never consider moving back to the US. The illiteracy rate here is less than 5% and incredible because, before the revolution in 1975, it was 50%! Why do you think Trump got elected?
The 'aliteracy' rate (those who can read but chose not to) is even more frightening and alarming, and the reason why 'nobody reads books anymore,' especially in the US. The latest debacle is Costco removing their book sections in stores, because 'it's too much trouble.' (US citizen living in Norway with two kids who read books)
PS. My father was a college professor of Romance languages for 16 years. He finally gave up, took a welding course, and worked for GE welding locomotive engines for another 16 years until he retired. He was happier welding!
My wife and I got into horses a few years ago, started taking riding lessons at a local stable. The guy we took lessons with was a trainer/rider of horses in a sport called ‘Reining’ which has its roots in cowboy skills but has developed into its own thing. The activities include spinning your horse like a top, galloping and then sliding to a stop like Bugs Bunny, and other things no horse would think of doing on its own. The sport is hard on horses, and they start the animals at around 2 years of age, although many experts agree that a horse’s bones aren’t mature enough to carry a rider until they’re 6. The purses and prestige for champions are large. The use of steroids and other drugs is commonplace. Horses are extremely social animals, but because they sort things out in a herd with their teeth and hooves, competition horses are not allowed to mix for fear of damage(their disputes leave bite marks on their hides, which, although they heal completely, are unsightly when fresh, and the hind feet are shod with special large shoes to help them slide, which could inflict serious wounds). The result is hypernervous, depressed animals, living in small stalls except when training or competing. My wife and I actually bought a couple of horses slated for competition and considered them rescue animals. The horses, unlike college athletes, don’t get wooed with Lamborghinis or lucrative endorsement deals, they just get used up and tossed aside. As in your article, the motivation for this ‘sport’ seems to be power, money and prestige, and the needs of the animals are of little to no importance- there will always be more horses.
Equestrian "sports" in this country are just... some people will do *anything* to "win." The horse is always the loser. (I'm talking about competition, not all of the decent people who care for their horses properly.)
My partner was once an adjunct professor at a public university routinely mentioned in the usual Top Ten lists. It's also usually in the top ten of sports. One semester she found herself working in an adjacent department due to someone being out on maternity leave. On being given the syllabus she discovered it was hardly at high school level. And then she discovered that all of her students were athletes who were being steered into this class. Then she discovered that at least one of the students was reading at perhaps the third grade level. She complained to the chairman who told her to just give them all a Pass (it was a pass/fail system) and never mind the consequences. Being somewhat stubborn, she did fail one student's mid-term paper because she recognized some of the paragraphs had been lifted verbatim from a paper she had published a few years before. Uncredited of course. The student demanded a conference and showed up with his father, who berated her for 30 minutes for threatening his sports future. After that semester she quit academe for a private research job. That was 20 years ago and she still gets upset when she's reminded of this incident. And from what we hear, things have only gotten worse.
And the trickle down to high school is appalling. Public schools used to be places where all kids could have a chance to play something. Now only those who can afford expensive club programs and travel programs even make the school team.
And the parents are unbelievably awful. There’s a referee shortage where I live because they get treated so poorly. Parents think that their mediocre athletes are tickets to the high life.
The travel system needs to be dismantled. It serves as a pay-to-play shakedown that only allows certain kids of a certain class, whose parents are willing to give up every weekend at a hotel just to see their kid be the best, when in reality, they are far from it.
You won't be getting any flak from me. Even though I grew up playing every sport from football to ping pong and watching others play them on TV (to learn), I have steadily abandoned attending organized sporting events at stadiums and watching them on TV. I'd rather watch pick-up soccer in a public park than the NFL.
Completely agree. I gave up watching college sports years ago because I couldn't stand the hypocrisy and corruption inherent in these massive programs. I'll even take it a step further - why in the world do we ask high schools to run sports programs? Why can't local communities come together and sponsor teams if they want to, as they do in Little League? A final point - the real question is why we so desperately need to entertain ourselves that we lavish so much money and attention on what is demonstrably an exploitative system that has nothing whatsoever to do with higher ed?
Everyone else was making money on them; paying the players themselves was overdue. The associations of college football and basketball with academia have been nominal for decades. Sever them.
Great article. All this needs saying and more. I'd like to add on by aiming the spotlight at those who will by far always constitute the largest population in the sports world, and that is the spectators. You could have written another six or so intrinsic benefits of sports for all of us. It would have been a different list, but no less inspiring, and no less related to money. And this is where a whole 'nother level of outrage strikes me.
College sports has been turned into just yet another thing we have to pay money to enjoy at all. When my formerly beloved Washington Huskies moved to the Big 10 last year, not only did I find myself no longer caring very much (how is it I'm supposed to care if they win against friggin' Rutgers, for crying out loud?), but it has been made extremely difficult, nearly impossible, to even listen to the game without subscribing to something or other. The perennial autumn pleasure of raking leaves while listening to the Washington-Oregon State game is no more. One merely has to pay attention to the laughably hyperbolic hype surrounding college games now to know instinctively that we are now being SOLD something more than anything else. It's disgusting.
Atvleast the the NFL makes no bones about being professional sports. And my pro team is still on the radio and television for free. So long college football. Go Hawks.
Excellent piece. I am not sure where to go from here. The vast sums of money are corrosive. The virtues you espouse are the only redeeming feature. Thank you.
This has been going on for more than 50 years. When I started college in 1967 I took a Debate class. The official debate topic that year was whether colleges should maintain the myth of amateurism, or acknowledge reality and pay football players a salary.
Could not agree more. Thank you for this. I was always a big college basketball fan but have mostly given up on it. The legalization of sports betting was a terrible mistake. And it is very sad that we have abandoned the traditional view that high-level college athletes are compensated by receiving a free education and now think they ought to be paid as well. As you say, then they should just have their own pro league and skip the pretense of college. Keep on sayin' it!
I do have to put a plug in for “St Johns” of Annapolis/Santa Fe. They strongly encourage ALL students to be involved in intramural competition. They play only The Naval Academy yearly in , drum roll please, lawn croquet. Which they generally vanquish the Navy at this. Excellent school that teaches you to read discerningly, respectfully explain your views, and listen carefully.
Just moved to Annapolis and looking forward to seeing this. I’ve heard it’s epic!
Definitely go watch the croquet match, and dress like the 1920’s!! Such fun!!
I have just the dress for it.
Reading this right after watching the skirmish at the end of the Michigan/Ohio St. football game. It’s hard to put the blame on college kids when they’ve been — as detailed in this article — shown by adults to not value anything other than winning and money. It’s also a rapidly changing landscape with NIL deals and college athletes finally being compensated for the revenue they bring schools. I’m glad athletes are getting paid, and it’s an opportunity for these athletes to have generational wealth, but it’s tough to see values being eroded, too. Not sure there’s a clear solution, but I hope some balance is reached where fair compensation and the integrity of higher education/virtues of sports can coexist.
I had just watched that melee after the game on youtube. Like you, this was fresh in the back of my mind while reading Ted's "I Say Forbidden Things About Sports."
People wearing helmets, face guards and pads all over, gently pushing each other...wake me when the hockey game breaks out.
You know, off-campus rioting isn't uncommon after at least one Big Ten team loses. It's happened off and on for years now. It just isn't televised. (By "years," i mean 5 decades.) The team is, btw, Penn State.
And not just big 10.
Of course. I didn't mention the name of the school, then revised later.
An amazing article. Coming from someone who played sports and loved watching sports, I agree with it. But you're 100% right. I've mentioned this time and time again that the NILs and transfer portals have ruined college footballs as no one stays in one place long enough to grow the rivalries.
Again, you're so right in the fact that college sports are no longer about the 6 lessons mentioned, but to win and bring in revenue.
Now, when you mention gambling, you're so so right. I've also noticed that in the last two years gambling has taken off -- grabbing a lot of people into its grasp. It's at this time I want to remind everyone of George Orwell's words on gambling in 1984: "films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds." When I saw this, I now knew why gambling came into the mix.
Great post once again and here's an article I wrote on sports:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/7-reasons-you-should-stop-watching
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-brave-new-world-of-1984-part
I’m about to delve into your Substack channel. We need more voices like yours.
Thank you Cathleen! Please let me know your thoughts!
To what degree do sports now exist just to provide something to wager on?
Great question. It makes me sad.
I live in the town where the highest paid football coach in Iowa also lives and works and let me tell you, it's a freaking religion here. It makes me sick to be honest. The rest of us, the non-sportsketball worshiping public, have to plan our lives around football weekends because you can't travel, you can't expect to find an open hotel room, you can't expect to find a table in a restaurant on those weekends. It is truly enormously inconveniencing. Interestingly, the merchants in the city don't see nearly as much money flowing in as the University does. In fact game days are dreaded more than enjoyed pretty much universally by a lot of the merchants in town. Restaurants and hotels are about the only businesses really seeing any benefit from this. It is an absolute racket. Thank you for your clarity and insight. I really appreciate you.
Alma... yeah. I live near Penn State. Alumni money sustains large parts of the university, and if the school should ever decide to scale back the football program, the dropoff in donations and bequests... well, you know all too well how this works. I will say that PSU's marching band is *really* good, but the stupid broadcasters never allow the halftime shows onscreen anymore. So.
There was a “This American Life” episode about Penn State a few years back that made it sound like, from a local business perspective, football was good for local businesses.
The ep debuted a few months before the Sandusky scandal broke. The scandal highlighted the many downsides of football at Penn State that the This American Life reporting covered. TAL went back and there was a lot of superficial soul-searching in that follow-up episode. Of course, nothing changed.
You may know all
this but your comment struck me.
Hotels/motels, restaurants and bars are the only businesses that make money on home game weekends. Traffic is gridlocked before and after games, including Friday night, since there are so many out-of-towners heading to the games.
As always, I am grateful for your thoughtful work here, Ted.
As both a former college athlete and now a business professor/assistant vice provost at a university system (WashU in St. Louis), I share a similar worry about the profit maximization motives being too closely linked to the university model. Given that WashU is DIII, we are slightly less directly impacted here, but still, it is something to keep top of mind as we think about how to design the schools of the future.
The moment someone decided to run higher education as a business was the beginning of the long slide to where we are now, in academics and college sports. I was an educator at the college level for 26+ years and despite all efforts by my peers & colleagues across several institutions, here we are. Keep on fighting the good fight, everyone. Thanks for your insight Peter.
That is why the US illiteracy rate is 20%, and growing. Even college freshmen fall into this category reading at below a 5th-grade level. The US should be ashamed. I am a US citizen with a 14-year-old son living in Portugal and will never consider moving back to the US. The illiteracy rate here is less than 5% and incredible because, before the revolution in 1975, it was 50%! Why do you think Trump got elected?
The 'aliteracy' rate (those who can read but chose not to) is even more frightening and alarming, and the reason why 'nobody reads books anymore,' especially in the US. The latest debacle is Costco removing their book sections in stores, because 'it's too much trouble.' (US citizen living in Norway with two kids who read books)
No way the illiteracy rate is only 20%. Maybe 20% of American humans are literate?
PS. My father was a college professor of Romance languages for 16 years. He finally gave up, took a welding course, and worked for GE welding locomotive engines for another 16 years until he retired. He was happier welding!
A friend of mine was a professor of German language and literature.
He now drives a truck.
Tradies get the ladies, say the good people of Australia.
Nice article, Ted. Here’s a parallel perspective:
My wife and I got into horses a few years ago, started taking riding lessons at a local stable. The guy we took lessons with was a trainer/rider of horses in a sport called ‘Reining’ which has its roots in cowboy skills but has developed into its own thing. The activities include spinning your horse like a top, galloping and then sliding to a stop like Bugs Bunny, and other things no horse would think of doing on its own. The sport is hard on horses, and they start the animals at around 2 years of age, although many experts agree that a horse’s bones aren’t mature enough to carry a rider until they’re 6. The purses and prestige for champions are large. The use of steroids and other drugs is commonplace. Horses are extremely social animals, but because they sort things out in a herd with their teeth and hooves, competition horses are not allowed to mix for fear of damage(their disputes leave bite marks on their hides, which, although they heal completely, are unsightly when fresh, and the hind feet are shod with special large shoes to help them slide, which could inflict serious wounds). The result is hypernervous, depressed animals, living in small stalls except when training or competing. My wife and I actually bought a couple of horses slated for competition and considered them rescue animals. The horses, unlike college athletes, don’t get wooed with Lamborghinis or lucrative endorsement deals, they just get used up and tossed aside. As in your article, the motivation for this ‘sport’ seems to be power, money and prestige, and the needs of the animals are of little to no importance- there will always be more horses.
Equestrian "sports" in this country are just... some people will do *anything* to "win." The horse is always the loser. (I'm talking about competition, not all of the decent people who care for their horses properly.)
Ya, real "Exciting" , the Taylor Sheridan version of Horsemanship ... What a Laugh - Horse Spinning & Skidding to a Stop. Wooo - Thrilling. What MEN !
My partner was once an adjunct professor at a public university routinely mentioned in the usual Top Ten lists. It's also usually in the top ten of sports. One semester she found herself working in an adjacent department due to someone being out on maternity leave. On being given the syllabus she discovered it was hardly at high school level. And then she discovered that all of her students were athletes who were being steered into this class. Then she discovered that at least one of the students was reading at perhaps the third grade level. She complained to the chairman who told her to just give them all a Pass (it was a pass/fail system) and never mind the consequences. Being somewhat stubborn, she did fail one student's mid-term paper because she recognized some of the paragraphs had been lifted verbatim from a paper she had published a few years before. Uncredited of course. The student demanded a conference and showed up with his father, who berated her for 30 minutes for threatening his sports future. After that semester she quit academe for a private research job. That was 20 years ago and she still gets upset when she's reminded of this incident. And from what we hear, things have only gotten worse.
And the trickle down to high school is appalling. Public schools used to be places where all kids could have a chance to play something. Now only those who can afford expensive club programs and travel programs even make the school team.
And the parents are unbelievably awful. There’s a referee shortage where I live because they get treated so poorly. Parents think that their mediocre athletes are tickets to the high life.
The travel system needs to be dismantled. It serves as a pay-to-play shakedown that only allows certain kids of a certain class, whose parents are willing to give up every weekend at a hotel just to see their kid be the best, when in reality, they are far from it.
Cindy, I'd like to hear more about these club programs and travel programs. I don't know a thing about either.
You won't be getting any flak from me. Even though I grew up playing every sport from football to ping pong and watching others play them on TV (to learn), I have steadily abandoned attending organized sporting events at stadiums and watching them on TV. I'd rather watch pick-up soccer in a public park than the NFL.
Completely agree. I gave up watching college sports years ago because I couldn't stand the hypocrisy and corruption inherent in these massive programs. I'll even take it a step further - why in the world do we ask high schools to run sports programs? Why can't local communities come together and sponsor teams if they want to, as they do in Little League? A final point - the real question is why we so desperately need to entertain ourselves that we lavish so much money and attention on what is demonstrably an exploitative system that has nothing whatsoever to do with higher ed?
Everyone else was making money on them; paying the players themselves was overdue. The associations of college football and basketball with academia have been nominal for decades. Sever them.
Great article. All this needs saying and more. I'd like to add on by aiming the spotlight at those who will by far always constitute the largest population in the sports world, and that is the spectators. You could have written another six or so intrinsic benefits of sports for all of us. It would have been a different list, but no less inspiring, and no less related to money. And this is where a whole 'nother level of outrage strikes me.
College sports has been turned into just yet another thing we have to pay money to enjoy at all. When my formerly beloved Washington Huskies moved to the Big 10 last year, not only did I find myself no longer caring very much (how is it I'm supposed to care if they win against friggin' Rutgers, for crying out loud?), but it has been made extremely difficult, nearly impossible, to even listen to the game without subscribing to something or other. The perennial autumn pleasure of raking leaves while listening to the Washington-Oregon State game is no more. One merely has to pay attention to the laughably hyperbolic hype surrounding college games now to know instinctively that we are now being SOLD something more than anything else. It's disgusting.
Atvleast the the NFL makes no bones about being professional sports. And my pro team is still on the radio and television for free. So long college football. Go Hawks.
Yes, the same is true (playing against schools like Rutgers) for all of the Big "Ten" teams. Am not a football fan, but i live near Penn State.
Excellent piece. I am not sure where to go from here. The vast sums of money are corrosive. The virtues you espouse are the only redeeming feature. Thank you.
This has been going on for more than 50 years. When I started college in 1967 I took a Debate class. The official debate topic that year was whether colleges should maintain the myth of amateurism, or acknowledge reality and pay football players a salary.