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?

The Olympics Are Over!

© Eric Eaton 2018

Our marriage is tested a little during the Olympics. My wife loves them. I endure them. My reasons for lack of enthusiasm range from petty to political, but it mostly boils down to personal preference. The Olympics force me to confront my biases and allegiances, and that makes me uncomfortable.

First of all, I have never much enjoyed individual sports. I grew up in Oregon and lots of my friends were skiers; but when many of them came back to class in casts after a weekend on the slopes, I decided that was not the sport for me. It is an expensive form of recreation, too, one that was beyond the means of my family. That idea of privilege also put me off, and it still does today. How many athletes could be competing in international competition if only they were wealthy enough?

Meanwhile, the Olympic coverage on NBC fails to show in its entirety the one sport that they might get me to watch: hockey. It is the same way in the summer games with basketball and volleyball and soccer. Unless you have a cable or satellite package, you will not get to view team sports. Bah-humbug. This time it is the spectator who is punished for not having enough privilege to afford those subscription services. It is unjust, unfair, and I am not going to apologize for feeling that way. They need a new model for broadcasting. What a concept it would be to have coverage over NBC, FOX, and CBS, for example. God forbid they put the public's desires above their own bottom line for two weeks. Two weeks.

It pains me to say this, but I also have an increasingly difficult time telling which team is the Americans, especially in figure skating. The sport has become dominated by Asians, even on Team USA. Don't get me wrong. If you are the highest-performing individual in the sport, then you deserve the right to represent, regardless of your ethnicity. I just personally find a Dorothy Hamill or Sarah Hughes easier to watch. I know, I'm so shallow! I at least have the guts to admit it. These are spectator sports, and every spectator has their own preferences. I will also be the one to tell you that the failure to attract an audience for the WNBA stems largely from the fact that there are too few "cute White girls" on the court. I truly wish we were beyond that, believe me, but the average spectator is a middle-aged White male who wants to be entertained instead of being a supporter of equal opportunities for all female athletes. Yes, we need to grow up, I only wish I knew how.

What did give me a perverse sense of satisfaction is that Team USA was not the leader in medal totals. At this point in time I find it difficult to cheer for my own country. It goes back to privilege and entitlement again, and choices. We Americans would rather pour our money into training elite sports figures for the extremely short duration of their careers, instead of investing in the next generation of scientists, scholars, musicians, artists, writers, and social leaders, to name but a few more enduring occupations. Our public schools might suffer, but by golly we are going to have sports champions! We will cut school lunch programs before we have a skater go without blades. Several sets of blades. Many, many sets of blades. Huge blades.

Ironically, at this point in history, our USA athletes may be the best face of our country. Most have demonstrated humility and grace, win or lose, and a spirit of camaraderie with their brothers and sisters from another country. I wish we here at home could learn from that. Instead, we experienced another mass shooting while our competitors were in Korea, and are now talking about arming teachers and other school staff as a viable preventative measure. Wow. I wonder how our biathlon teams feel about that. Maybe they'll volunteer for school guard duty, but I doubt it. I suspect they want schools to be something different and better than a prison.

When they arrive stateside, maybe our athletes will seek endorsement deals with the Ad Council, and non-profits extolling the virtues of public lands, safe drinking water, clean air and energy, a rejuvenated public education system, and freedom to pursue excellence in whatever career path you choose, even if it doesn't put you on a podium or a pedestal.

Sports Mentality

I think I have at least a partial answer to why men get so worked up over spectator sports. Women, and a few men I suppose, often react by saying something like “Why are you so upset, it’s only a game?” Well, no it is not, and I’ll explain why.

Sports are symbolic, a metaphor for justice (or injustice), success and failure, even good and evil. We want desperately to believe that we can triumph over adversity ourselves, succeed through hard work, and vanquish our own demons. Increasingly, men are feeling disempowered and seek symbolic justice through spectator sports.

We believe, these days at least, that we are at the mercy of employers, bosses, banks, government, and maybe even spouses. Real or imagined, we feel powerless to change our own circumstances and have largely lost faith that the “good guy” can finish anywhere but last. We rail against “America’s team,” the franchises and universities rolling in wealth and entrenched in “tradition,” as they represent the evil overlords of our own jobs, careers, and personal finances.

When “our” team wins, we feel vindicated, hopeful, and energized by association. When that team loses, we sink further into despair and hopelessness. It doesn’t seem rational, you say. It doesn’t have to be. It just….is. It is about respect, or lack thereof, and we feel disrespected much of the time in our personal lives. We are disgraced, humiliated, and repeatedly dismissed when we attempt to advance in the workforce. We bring home smaller wages, driven down by “illegal immigrants.” Our jobs are shipped overseas, not unlike professional sports teams that abandon one city for greener pastures elsewhere. It isn’t fair, and that is the bottom line.

I guess that is what irritates me the most. I don’t get people who respond to the disappointments, trials, and tribulations of others with comments like “life isn’t fair.” Maybe not, but why the hell aren’t you working to make it fair? Why is that not a priority with you? Why is it not a priority with our society, and why are those who want to make life more equitable for all labeled as “socialists” or “communists?” Why is that a bad thing?

We won’t talk about any of this, of course, engage in meaningful dialogue, or God forbid take action to change the status quo. We may not even have voted on Tuesday. No, we will turn up the volume on the TV so we can better hear the sports announcers. We’d rather be at the game in person, but the team owner jacked up the ticket prices to pay for those new luxury boxes at the stadium.