They Make Too Much Damn Money

Tags

money, NCAA, Sports

For reasons that I don’t truly get myself, I’ve been intrigued to the point of passion with this seasons college football season. On the whole I rather like college sports over professional, and I’ve watched not only my beloved Spartans, but the entirety of the national race for #1 team of the year.

I confess that I enjoy all the games, albeit, I am intellectually against what I see as an over-emphasis on the unholy dollar bill.

I admit up front, that I don’t know a single “fact” regarding Jameis Winston’s rape allegation. I have read generally that many who have looked into the allegations believe that the University of Alabama and local authorities either deliberately ignored evidence or worse, or at minimum failed miserably to conduct anything like a reasonable investigation. Winston may well be innocent. I have no clue. There are rape charges that are untrue, and as a lawyer, I had one or two that I felt were bogus.

That’s really not the point here. The point is, that if there was not a full-fledged investigation, then justice was in no way served, and it can only be for one reason. That reason is that Mr. Winston was deemed too important to the football program at Alabama to be lost. So he was not to be benched “pending investigation” even. Rather it was, it seems all made to go away, with him never missing a snap.

Again, this case is not important, but indicative of a greater problem, one we saw even more clearly at Penn State regarding the Sandusky affair. People look the other way, push evidence under the perennial rug, and otherwise not upset the financial apple cart. What apple cart is that?

It is said that among the major players in the NCAA football world, schools bring in millions of dollars per year. In fact at Penn, one year’s profits covered the $60 million dollar fine imposed upon them.

In nearly every single state in the union, the highest paid person is a football or basketball coach.

The revenues of the athletic departments of these schools are separate from the university budget and are TAX-FREE.

I am no fan of Jim Harbaugh. In fact I dislike him rather a good deal, but I surely get why he decided to downsize from the pros to college, when Michigan offered him a 7-year contract worth $40 million bucks. Imagine, 40 MILLION BUCKS to instruct young men to play a game!

One could, at one time I guess at least argue that these young men were at least getting an education. No more of course, with the big talents opting out for early drafts, leaving school without their diplomas. And of course the atmosphere now may be anti-learning anyhow.

Cardale Jones, the third-string quarterback that will play for the national championship in a couple of weeks, tweeted on Friday the following:

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS,”

Yes, I guess they are Cardale. Here we have a child in a man-body prepared to stake his entire life on the millions he dreams of making in the NFL. What will he do if that is cut short by some catastrophic event before he steps off the plane to sign that contract? An uneducated, nobody looking for work just like everyone else, all because education is like “pointless” dude.

Yes, they do entertain us, and they do an excellent job at that, but I’d be willing to bet that that is not what is at issue here anymore. It’s all business and no doubt it starts now at the high school level.

On New Years, MSU came back from a huge deficit, a game that was surely lost, and scored and scored again and again, until they were within a touchdown of winning. And then they did it. They scored, and Baylor road home stunned and unable to fathom what had happened.  Houston did the same thing yesterday to Pittsburg, scoring like three times in 15 minutes and winning two on-side kicks in a row.

These sorts of games make fans jump for joy. Yet in a state like Texas, the Baylor players may well want to transfer to another state to play next year. Football is life there.

Still, when all is said and done, colleges and universities are supposed to stand for something. It is supposed to be about building character in youngsters through athletics, team and individual efforts, winning and losing and doing your best and accepting being bested. When the FSU players walked off the field after being bested by Oregon, were they showing character or simply the behavior of brats who have been coddled into believing that they were God’s gift to humanity and deserved to win?

Are we teaching our youth anything that will sustain them in the future when we play to this sort of thing? When we pay their coach millions for a game? When we “wink, wink, nod, nod” them why supplying them with “extras” under the table? Surely you must know they do.

Can we expect a Cardale Jones to believe anything else when his coach makes ten times more than the university president?

I recall many years ago a young man who stood before a judge about to be sentenced for some criminal act. He wore a jacket with the name Georgetown emblazoned across the back. The Judge, an alumnus of that university, asked, “do you know what Georgetown is, sir?” The youth replied, “yes sir, it’s a basketball team, sir.”

Such is the state of athletics in America.

It should not be so.

No. It should not.

* factual allegations regarding the football programs and their profits is drawn largely from this article at the Washington Post, “Why Jim Harbaugh is worth $40 million  to the University of Michigan’s Football Team.”

 

 

Has It Come to This Again?

Tags

basketball, economy, Election 2012, health, liberalism, NCAA, packing, pornography, racism, Rick Santorum, women's rights

Friday.

I meant Friday.

My sweet brain cells are under extreme tension and stress.

I have lots of teams in the NCAA that I have to root for.

Sometimes, well that brings me into conflict.

I used to live in Connecticut. You know. Connecticut. Where basketball is akin to the Mayflower and that great experiment? It’s like the MOST important thing.

So, I’m a Huskies fan.

But I live in Iowa. So it would be ungracious of me not to support Iowa teams.

And when Connecticut plays Iowa. . . sigh. . . well you see my dilemma.

And then of course I support MSU, because that is my alma mater. So I get all twisted when MSU plays either Connecticut or either of the Iowa teams.

And NOW there is my about to be state: New Mexico. So there are two teams there. And I want to be a good New Mexican.

So. . .the potential for conflict is growing, well, exponentially.

¶

What kind of packer are you?

No, not football. Geesh. You and my husband!

No, I mean packing as in boxing up all your crap to move it to another location, packing.

I like to think I’m a pristine packer. Nice sleek boxes, nice tape. Packing carefully, lots of bubble wrap and peanuts, and very clean items, carefully chosen as necessary to my new about-to-be life.

At least throw out the crap you haven’t seen since the last time you unpacked, thirteen years ago.

S I G H

Instead, I’m dumping it in, and sealing it up, and thinkin’, “I’ll sort through that when we unpack.” or “I wash all that when I have a dishwasher again.”  I suck. I know it, and I keep on suckin’ at packing.

Speaking of which. Guess who has not placed one single item in one single box so far?

Guess.

You women know of what I speak.

¶

The noodle heads of course claim that racism exited stage left when MLK was declared the new human shield used by racists to declare their lack of racism. Ain’t no racism no mo’, I only judge by the content of the character!

Bully-crap.

As Juanita Jean so perfectly points out. There is nothing left to the imagination with this little bumper sticker coming to a car near you.

The new hate.

Is there anything but hate and “otherness” to these people?

At long last, have they no shame?

When they are not wrapping themselves in the American flag and proclaiming their way is  “the way” they are slipping on the white robe of morality and telling everyone else how to live righteously.

All the while they are doing the nasty and lookin’ at the porn quicker than anyone else.

Speaking of which, Squatlo Rant has a link to the story of a woman and what it means to be subject to the Texas sonograms law from a real life example.

¶

Meanwhile Ragin’ Rick is busy telling Puerto Ricans that they gotta learn to speak English and promising the rest of us, or them too, that he will spare no expense in having the Justice Department devote it’s time to eradicate pornography. He said he would personally look at it all, cuz he sure does know it when he sees it. Look out BARBIE, no more chest bumps for YOU.

This comes as great news to Americans who are looking for work. Perhaps they can be English teachers or porn identifiers in the new Santorum regime. Probably only a minimum wage job. . .oh I think Santorum is probably against minimum wage. . .makes ya dependent ya know.

¶

Constant Weader points us to this older Vanity Fair article to understand the awful state that Republican policies have put this economy in. It’s a valuable read. Joseph Stiglitz is the author.

Did you know that “performance bonuses” were changed to “retention bonuses” to reflect that there was little performance but they sure wanted to pay themselves that money anyway.

It’s about greed. I bet that comes as a surprise.

¶

This one just gave me a giggle. Written by a “purported” liberal turned conservative, it suggests all sorts of things that are patently untrue on the surface and beneath. This guy is about my age, maybe a bit younger. I did not grow up thinking capitalism was somehow bad. And duh, you might want to look at the numbers. Americans are far from the happiest people on the planet. They regularly fall far below most Europeans in life satisfaction. That darned anecdotal evidence thing again. An anecdote does not make a generalization dude.

 

The Day the Earth Stood Still. . . Really!

Tags

basketball, Humor, Iowa, JayHawks, Kansas, March Madness, NCAA, UNI

People all over America ran out and stood on their porches. They listened, and faintly at first, then reaching a bellowing crescendo, a hue and cry of agony was heard emanating from the Midwest, Kansas to be specific. The death knell of a Jay Hawk rendering it’s last lamentable screech, as it plummeted to earth with a thud.

Meanwhile, mathematicians across the world threw aside all interest in string theories and unified universes and multiple ones, to concentrate on the singularly most important question the world needed to know: How did they do it?

Formulae was expounded, tested, as slide rules slid, and computers byted, and super minds twirled out the numbers. It was declared an impossibility. No, this could not be. In fact, so great was the unlikelihood of such a thing happening, that all manner of other phenomenon was reported across the globe.

Reports from Damascus declared that clocks ran backwards, while astronomers at Palomar noted an axial shift, where North became South. Coffee cups fell off counters as the earth’s rotation came to a halt and began the laborious effort to move in reverse. There were selected reports of hell freezing over, mostly at luaus in Hawaii.  Movie rentals phoned in that there were astronomically enlarged sales of Charlton Heston movies, especially Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes.

We cannot report the news from the super secret doomsday computer model shifts, buried deep in the belly of Cheyenne Mountain. But rumors suggest that projections have caused workers there to scurry home to drink lots of Bosco and put on their footed jammies.

The unthinkable happened, and I’m still reeling, and wondering of course if it all wasn’t just a big hoax. Reports are circulating throughout Hollywood, which is poised to make a movie, due out Tuesday, about the occurrence that may not actually have happened. Jay Hawk fans still hold out the hope that it was just a massive hypnotic delusion from which we all will awaken on Monday.

But, still, one cannot deny the rumors. Was this all a massive hoax? I mean really really massive. Like in the entire NCAA? It is claimed that a number of the bracket makers (all now in hiding) were heard grumping that they had never actually every pulled off a great April Fools Day prank. So there is some evidence that, yes, we have all been taken for a ride.

It would seem that the NCAA agreed to have the teams change places in the game. Thus the Jay Hawks were actually the UNI Panthers and vice versa. This has been played out in all the tournament games so far. It worked to a limited degree, however, the very rarefied air of pretending to be the better team seems to have enlivened some teams to play out of their collective behinds and actually win as “expected.”

Still, there has been what the Foolers planned–a ginormous number of “Cinderella” wins. For years, the brackets have been done so professionally that there was seldom even one. In fact, there was often no legitimate Cinderella  contender at all. At best, we got Harriet, her sister, who is more akin to Ugly Betty than a beautiful princess.  This year, there are so many that it’s getting embarrassing. So many man-boys all sweaty and big footed, struggling to squeeze size 11 feet into glassine pumps of a size 4.

Indeed, we  the loyal college B-Ball contingent, would admit, the Cinderella phenomenon is essential to a “good” tournament. We love the upset about as much as the NASCAR beer swilling trailer home crowd enjoys wrecks at the oval. I mean what other point is there?

In Beckian logic, this probably can be interpreted as proof that there is a massive gay agenda being played out in the March Madness arenas. And doesn’t this stand to reason, since there is something pretty darn gay about March Madness when you think about it. I’ll be interested to get Glenn’s take on Monday, assuming he’s not still in his bunker.

I’ve heard that there were huge gigantic “tournaments” on line where people registered their bracket choices. I’m told there were more than half a million at one site. I’m told that all but twelve have now lost. Wall Street stands poised for a run on the banks, as they sweat out the opening of overseas markets tomorrow.

Oh, the inhumanity! Forget the health care vote, forget global warming, the chitty job market, and the slow slogging of the economy–this is Armageddon folks. If I should stop typing suddenly, you will know that the Raptu……………………………………………………….