I Shouldn't Be Ashamed....

Football season for my college alma mater is mercifully over. They finished with two wins and ten losses, including a defeat by a then 0 and 8 team. It is one of the worst performances in school history. They fired the head coach mid season. The fact that this happened, and that I am distraught by it, is a product of my own disproportionate emotional investment in what amounts to athletic entertainment, and the greater collective problems with universities, the media, and the money involved in all of it.

During my time at university, I had nothing to do with the athletic department, aside from attending football and basketball games as a student, back in the early 1980s. Since then, college sports has grown exponentially into an entertainment empire that is increasingly coveted by media conglomerates that continue to cannibalize each other, concentrating vast sums of money. It is now ESPN/ABC/Disney, FOX, CBS/Paramount, and, to a lesser degree, NBC, the CW, and other smaller networks, that are determining "winners" and "losers."

The media quest to cash in on college football began decades ago with the migration of games from free broadcast television to cable channels, namely ESPN. Ultimately, nearly all bowl games, BOWL games(!) became unavailable to any fans unwilling, or unable, to pay for ESPN. This model has continued with the recent playoff format and national championship.

As if that was not enough for the hungry media corporations, those companies drove conference realignment to create "superconferences" that make zero geographic sense, terminated some traditional rivalries, and completely abandoned at least two colleges. One of those universities left for dead was my own. The argument was that we respresent too small a "market" to attract viewers. I have been in a state of perpetual rage ever since. The schools that fled our once vibrant conference also attempted to abscond with all the money, forcing lawsuits by the two remaining schools to protect themselves financially. This is what I mean by the media choosing winners and losers.

Today, the media is obsessed with only two of the "power four" conferences: The Southeast Conference (SEC) and the Big Ten. The Big Twelve and the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) are only begrudgingly accorded recognition, persumably to avoid outright mutiny from those fanbases. The entire structure now guarantees that the Alabamas, Georgias, Ohio States, Notre Dames, Michigans, Oregons, and Oklahomas will always be at the top, or at least ranked, with little revenue left for any other programs to improve unless they have millionaire booster benefactors.

It gets better, or worse, depending on how robust the athletic budget of your school. Student athlete stars are now rightly demanding Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) compensation. Are the media giants stepping up to meet that new burden? Hell, no. It is left to each university's booster clubs to pay their own athletes. Once again, the schools with rich and powerful alumni and other benefactors, profit by being able to elevate the visibility of their athletes, and gain an enormous recruiting advantage, while every other university is left behind.

Now to even more important questions. How have we, as a society, let it come to this? Why do we allow our universities to be branded "winners" and "losers" based solety on the performance of their football and/or men's basketball teams? Why is the public face of higher learning one dimensional, equated with the school's mascot? Did I not receive a quality education? I would say so, especially given that I did not graduate from my state school, yet my current publisher is an Ivy League press. My alma mater did something right in my case. That is all that truly matters: how your education at the university level translates to advancement in your chosen career, even if that is not in professional team sports.

If we, as a society, were truly committed to fairness in college athletics, we might demand the following to help level the playing field:

• Institute a cap on booster/alumni contributions to athletic departments. Academic quality should be the overriding concern of universities, and capping donations for athletics would allow other departments to prosper.
• Require all universities, public and private, to join a conference. No more independents like Notre Dame, so that they cannot enter into their own individual contracts with broadcast media outlets, with the resulting unshared revenue.
• Put the burden of NIL on media outlets, and the agents of individual athletes, instead of picking winners according to the wealthiest universities with boosters that can afford the cost.
• Require any athlete entering the transfer portal from a ranked school, to sign with a lower-ranked, or unranked university. Spread the talent more equitably. Make it more difficult for talent to defect. Everyone should be making sacrifices in the name of increased parity.

The remaining two universities in my school's conference have entered into an agreement to rebuild the conference, poaching the better teams from the Mountain West Conference; but for at least the next two years there will still be only eight teams, guaranteeing that no conference champion will be granted an automatic playoff berth consideration. Terrible.

Why am I personally so dejected? This year, at least, I think I am so depressed by the state of humanity, and the planet, that I am looking for *any* example of justice, fairness, redemption, and reason for joy. I want the underdog to triumph, and to do so emphatically. I want the elites and bullies to be punished, demoralized, metaphorically eviscerated. I guess I look to sports for signs that an actual revolution of importance can happen. Who am I kidding?

Team World

My wife likes to watch the Olympics. Generally, I could not care less. It seems to be too much pomp and circumstance, too nationalistic, and not much fun for the athletes. I do think we can improve, both as the Olympiads themselves and, more importantly, as spectators.

In my Fantasy Olympics, every participating country would leave with ten medals of varying colors. The field would be that level, that competitive. The overriding priority of the Olympic Committee would be to welcome more new countries every Olympiad, and recruit more diversity for each event. The commentators would shut up and let the performances speak for themselves. Enough nit-picking critiques, please. Explain the rules of rugby, though. How do you stop the other team again? Also, how has no one been killed by the hammer throw?

Those of us television viewers and in-person audiences, should we ever have those again, can up our own game. We can stop taking the games so seriously. We can be “traitors” for a moment and cheer for another country’s representatives. Where is the crime in that? Heck, if belugas were in the swimming events, you can bet your bottom dollar I would be rooting for them.

We need to trust our athletes to do what is best for them, and therefore their comrades. The backlash over Simone Biles’ decision to withdraw says a lot more about our character than it does hers. We have unrealistic expectations and, unfortunately, they are often couched in racism, too. Our white privileged society “values” other ethnicities primarily as servants and entertainers (and I lump athletes in the latter category). Those are the only professions we “allow” them any material affluence, and even then, only if they meet or exceed our grotesquely inflated demands for record-breaking efforts. Disgusting, but we don’t give it a second thought until one of those athletes is brave enough to stand up for themselves.

The Olympics tends to be a missed opportunity to get a glimpse into other cultures, and here in the United States we will never be encouraged to learn the continuing impacts of colonialism and economic expectations on other nations. We want Latin America to keep giving us baseball pitchers and bananas. What do we care about them otherwise? Yes, I am exaggerating (barely) to make the point of our sense of entitlement.

The fact that we demand the Olympics be held at all in the middle of an ongoing global pandemic says enough, does it not? The “world stage,” I keep hearing, but what we need is world parity, not simply in athletics, but in global health and economics. Dominance disgusts me, in any form. It is a reminder of oppression and inequality that comes from privilege and colonialism.

If you want to unfollow this blog because it makes you uncomfortable, because you view the author as a “race traitor,” or a conspiracy theorist, that is your right. However, I suggest instead that you ask why you have the sentiments you do, and whether they are serving you any longer. Stop letting Olympic athletes be proxies for you. Step up your own game and join Team World.

The Olympics

© Olympic.org

After careful deliberation, I deem the Rio version of the thirty-first Olympiad worthy of a score of roughly 4.2. This is much less of a reflection on the host city and the competing athletes than it is on the presentation of the games by NBC, which was simply dreadful.

First, as with all networks these days, NBC assumed that every television spectator has a cable or satellite service and could therefore tailor their Olympics-watching to their own personal tastes. This left those of us without such providers to endure basically only "race" events and women's gymnastics, interspersed with diving and beach volleyball. Seriously, that was about the sum of network coverage on free, commercial television.

The network also missed many an opportunity to profile non-U.S. athletes, though there were some stories here and there. Showing how athletes from what we might consider Third World countries can succeed against athletes from nations where they train almost full-time, and have many of their expenses covered, would be a real source of inspiration and hope to a jaded American audience. As it is, I find myself rooting for the "underdog," especially in the Olympics, because we already have it so good here in the U.S.A.

At least one friend commented on Facebook that it was nice to be free of political advertising and, ostensibly, other matters of more lasting importance economically and socially, during the two week span of televised competition. Still, the irony of someone firing a gun that sends a group of (mostly) Black people running is not lost on me, but no one else will say that because it "isn't the right time," and all of that kind of rhetoric. How doubly ironic that a privileged Caucasian male was the one that committed a crime after his own athletic events had concluded. I am still willing to help pay to extradite his ass back to Brazil, by the way.

The opening and closing ceremonies were the real treat, of course. It never ceases to amaze that the host nation raises art and pageantry to a new level. We need this kind of celebration at more frequent intervals than every four years. Why wait for an excuse? Let's do a world art olympics every two. Also, the commentary on the ceremonies was limited, much like it is for parades, and that is how every event should have been handled.

Among the worst aspects of Olympic coverage were the commentators and analysts. Every event should have been handled with a lot less verbiage, let alone criticism. If ever there were athletic competitions that could do without voice overs entirely, it would be the Olympics. Why not simply explain each event beforehand, then sit back silently and watch the athletes execute? Instead, we get negative comments on all but the most perfect dives and gymnastics performances. I really don't care that you know it all because you are retired from the sport you are analyzing. Shut up and let the rest of us enjoy.

What made NBC think a late night party with Ryan Seacrest was a good idea? His "interview" skills are non-existent, and the rest of the broadcasts were so exploitative of the locals as to make me want to vomit. Even Bob Costas seemed off of his game, relegated to presenting the latest medal count and trying to play along with female gymnasts half his age or younger. You are not "hip" anymore, Bob, get over it.

All of this said, spectator athletics are exactly that: entertainment. Few athletes recognize that they are entertainers, but it is those who do that we adore the most, and who are usually the most successful. It also makes some of those athletes the most hated, misunderstood, and mistreated of all.

Muhammad Ali was perhaps the first athlete in the modern era to recognize his stature as an entertainer, and he played it to the hilt. He was so masterful, in fact, that many people mistook his on-stage (in the ring) persona for his actual character as a human being. Later, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Jr. and Shaquille O'Neal took to the basketball court all smiles and we loved, as we do, watching someone who loves what they do for a living. Simone Biles actually smiled during her floor exercise routine. How can you not love that?

Well, another Olympiad is in the books, for better or worse. We can only hope that coverage for the next one in Tokyo is going out for bid. Maybe PBS will get it, though I wonder how many people would fall asleep during its broadcast. Personally, I am hoping that it goes to Comedy Central.