I'm Going to Offend a Bunch of NFL Fans (Maybe all of them...)
Last edited Thu May 24, 2018, 12:44 AM - Edit history (1)
Also to be offended: Players, players' families, team owners (but who the hell cares about them), team employees like coaches, front office people, etc.
Oh, and probably a good many NCAA Football fans, and the coaches, employees, and alumni of those schools.
But here goes, anyway:
Kill it.
It has morphed into a terrible "sport."
Mind you, my stepfather had season Vikings tickets when I was a kid, and I thought it was fun to go to the games back at the old Met Stadium, tailgating in the snow, bringing along our "stadium bags" to snuggle into, and thermoses full of hot cocoa (coffee laced with booze for the grups), and watch Tark and Alan Page and Foreman and Marinaro and Carl Eller run rings around some poor schmucks whose idea of "bad weather" was a little rain.
Back in those days, though, linemen generally averaged in the 250-260 lb. range (yep, there were some bigger- and a good many smaller, too-) and around 6'3" - 6'4". They were big guys, sure. But nothing like today's behemoths.
Also back in those days, the college athletes were more about getting an education as well as playing their way through. Alan Page graduated Notre Dame, went to law school while he was playing for the Vikings and is now an Associate Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. And while head coaches at major college programs have always been well-compensated, in 1981 Michigan's Bo Schembechler (at the time the highest-paid college head coach) took home the equivalent (in 2014 dollars) of $285,771.
In 2017, Alabama's Nick Saban banked $11.1 million in compensation.
People got hurt playing football back then- there were some nasty ones, indeed. But we didn't know about CTE. And mortality studies of players from the 50s, 60s, and 70s show longer post-career lifespans with fewer health complications related to their football careers.
Back then, it was still a sport, more or less. Sure, the league and the owners made a lot of money and the network broadcast contract pretty much kept ABC in business. But in the days before the casino gambling boom, before Fantasy Football and high-stakes betting, the stakes were a lot lower.
Football was a path for young black men who had both intellectual and athletic abilities to break through the walls. They knew damn' well they were being exploited, to an extent (I recall Carl Eller telling a roomful of fans about hearing a (white, of course) UCLA alum tell a (also white, of course) Minnesota alum at the Rose Bowl "You're gonna have to watch our >n-word<s beat the tar right out of your >n-word<s." But the ratio of risk to return was a little better.
What is football now?
It's a high-stakes, big-money form of gladiatorial combat, stoked by media oligarchs, and dependent on the desperation of young athletes willing to risk their health and sanity in a game that's become far more brutal, far more physically debilitating to play. We're seeing signs of CTE in High School football players, now.
Young men willing to put their bodies and brains into a crushing mill, from an early age, to be winnowed through High School and College competition, to make a chance at one of a couple of hundred draftees, to get yet another chance to not be cut and hopefully stay on a roster, get some playing time, get a marginally better contract and a chance at one of those million-dollar salaries.
And while they're doing that- pounding hell out of their bodies and brains, ensuring themselves a future of pain and confusion and an early death, they get the "privilege" of being part of a milieu that enables and encourages brutality, domestic violence, and extreme behaviors of many other damaging kinds.
While the owners and media barons get wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
And when the players stand up for themselves, when they make a push to be something more than the docile human tanks they're expected to be, they're vilified, fined, and punished.
This is not a game.
This is the bread-and-circuses of a post-democratic authoritarian oligarchy.
Its time is over. Its real value to everyone but the media oligarchs and league owners is gone.
And it should die.
sadly,
Bright
= new reply since forum marked as read
"Also back in those days, the college athletes were more about getting an education as well as playing their way through."
Yep, bunch of damn Slackers these days.
http://www.arkansasrazorbacks.com/academic-records-fall/
FAYETEVILLE, Ark. – On the strength of its 15th consecutive semester with a department GPA over 3.0, University of Arkansas student-athletes now hold a record-breaking cumulative GPA of 3.25. The cumulative GPA of 3.25 is the highest in athletics history.
For the second straight year, football led the conference with 39 student-athletes on the SEC Fall Academic Honor Roll. The two-year total now stands at 79 honorees.
September 1st can't get here soon enough . WOOPIG!!!
