> For the past two seasons, college players have been able to sign deals to allow third parties to use their "name, image or likeness" - NIL, for short - and receive money in return.
Yep this is what's happening this year at my University this year - players now do a quick 30 minute autograph signing before each game.
I saw the commissioner of the SEC on TV this week. He called on Congress to put in place limits on how student-athletes can earn from their NIL as well as put in restrictions on the transfer portal, calling it a "return to traditional American values in college sports".
Pretty unbelievable how these institutions are creating billions of dollars of revenue / wealth off the backs of young (primarily minority) men and women. It's so gross.
And then they’ll turn around and pay adjuncts a non-living wage to teach students at the University. Students who are paying thousands more than previous generations to learn. Greed and exploitation is given the thumbs up in many higher learning institutions.
The amateur tradition in football was, at one point, strong enough that professional football was viewed as grubby and second class.
I'm sure that commissioner, like any reasonable person calling for a return to those traditions, is also calling for the abolition of the NFL, all volunteer coaches, and gratis, advertising-free broadcasts of all the games, right? Right?!
That's actually why the amateur requirement was dropped.
The Soviet Union and other government-controlled-economy nations were sending essentially professional athletes to the Olympics while free-economy nations were sending amateurs. Removing the restriction allowed all nations to send their best athletes.
Ironically of course, there are some aristocratic motivations for why "amateur" was desirable in the first place that don't really align to modern sensibilities, but that's separate.
Gross is the perfect word here. “Traditional American values in college sports” means “we make the money, and lots of it. You (the athlete) get free exposure! Who do you think you are, getting your cut?”
I don’t know what it is about the current zeitgeist but people with power seem quite happy to vocalize their discontent with what they perceive as “lower classes” making decent money. It’s like they don’t even pretend anymore.
It's easy to lose sight of the fact that it's been like this for the vast majority of American history. The only change is the mechanism.
Usually they try to obscure this state of affairs. When the veil breaks, their backup plan is enforcement, first through threats and then through laws and then, if necessary, through violence. We appear to be mostly in the "threats" stage.
Besides wanting to keep all the revenue, the NCAA talks up all that sanctimonious crap to justify their non-profit status so they don't have to pay taxes on it either.
I imagine he's actually being out-earned by some of top players' NIL deals.
I think it's a tricky situation. The previous NCAA rules were idiotic and unfair to players. The current situation is better for players, but I'm worried that we're moving towards a future where the best teams are just the ones with the deepest pockets (or whose boosters have the deepest pockets). Considering most teams are already unprofitable, it could further increase stratification between P5 and G5 teams.
Maybe CFB needs to implement a per-team salary cap.
This is America, where being against-slavery-in-theory - but unable to reconcile that theory with the real-world property rights and financial interests of the slave owners - was an enormous legal and "moral" problem for a century or few.
How about returning to the tradition of college sports being merely a recreational break from academics, where scholastic merit cannot be trumped by athletic ability, and where the highest paid employees of states are not football coaches?
That actually exists. It's called Division 3 NCAA sports. There's no redshirting, no financial aid because you're good at sports and no making a profit from sports or paying coaches million dollar salaries in D3. The conferences are also based on where the colleges are geographically located. You just don't hear about D3 because their games usually aren't televised and 99.9% or so of their athletes actually go pro in something other than sports.
And it's still massively more of a deal for spectators then academic sport in, say, the UK.
I spent a term as an exchange student at the Catholic University of America, a smallish university with a completely unexceptional D3 football programme staffed with actual students. And they got two thousand people to their football games! Much of the campus! Alumni! People who lived in Brookland and fancied some live sport!
I mean, I knew how seriously people take high school football too. But even really good UK university sport can play to an audience of the players supportive romantic partners only. A different (and quite refreshing) world.
I think I would prefer the UK model for things like football. Where there is local community teams that are not limited just students, but larger age ranges. And then possibly also having kids programs.
Primarily young black men. Some of these coaches make 10s of millions of dollar and they are against paying the people who helped them make all this money. College football is the 2nd most popular sport behind the NFL.
The coaches are usually actually all for paying the athletes. It is the university MBAs who are running a business off the back of them all -- and interested in maximizing profit -- that usually aren't.
The point here is not mainly focused on athletes ability to make money off of their work, although that is a part of it. The issue in this particular instance is that players are being bribed to switch teams.
It's not supposed to be a job. It's supposed to be secondary to education. Admittedly, it's getting away from that, but I would like to hold on as long as possible.
I might be misunderstanding you, but if athletes fail at sports, they do not loose the education. Once a scholarship is given to a player, it is not allowed to be taken away for performance. If a player is kicked off the team (barring something like discipline issues), they still get the scholarship.
You can loose athletic scholarship for performance or injury. There are some exceptions where athlete gets to keep them for four years. But generally, coach has a lot of power to not renew scholarship the next year.
There is no shortage of people who want to play college football.
Many would play even with out a scholarship.
In Division 2 less than half the team is on scholarship. In Division 3 nobody gets scholarships.
They are almost never on TV and there is very little chance they will make the NFL.
And yet when you see the Big Schools, like an Alabama or Clemson, playing much lower Division schools, those schools are getting a massive payout for that game, while their students get whooped, and not getting anything for the abuse other than experience.
That would be like a lower weight class boxer, say Canelo Álvarez taking on a fight with Tyson Fury (each in their respective class) for the "pay day", sure he may have a "puncher's chance" but few would consider it a fair fight.
Actually why not franchise the whole thing? Have the players be paid athletes. Let the schools own the teams and spot in franchise league. Thus allow them to keep the brand and whatever goodwill there to extract money from students.
Athletes are not forced to be play sports. They are there because they want to be. If they don't want to do it without pay, no one is making them do it.
One thing I am bothered by is student athletes who don't even have to attend classes and have tutors do their work for them or there are special classes set up for them that guarantee an A.
I think the concept of a student athlete is an oxymoron at this point.[1][2] Either the sport really serves no purpose and could exist as a club or the student is not really a student at all and should just be a paid university employee like the coaches. But this inbetween area is odd. I guess the facade of being a student is more endearing maybe because otherwise the university sports team people cheer for is just a bunch of paid professionals basically. Maybe that would ruin the fun for people idk. Not sure I even care. It isn't right to treat some students different than others.
They basically ran one of the most beloved coaches in NCAA football - Jim Tressel at Ohio State - out of town. The reason? Because while these ghouls were profiting off of his players' NIL to the tune of millions per year, a couple of them had the gall to take a couple hundred bucks for themselves - and Tressel didn't do enough to "turn them in" proactively.
Honestly, what's even more bullshit, is the schools' excuse: We need the money from Football and Basketball to fund the other sports. So: "Sorry Johnny, I know you've been busting your ass scoring TDs, and 100,000's of fans pay to see you play in-person and millions more on TV, but we need that money so the Tennis and Golf teams can afford scholarships and travel to go to their tournaments. But don't worry if you break your femur and can never play again, we'll rip away that scholarship so fast you'll never think it existed to give it to the next guy."
I always thought it'd make sense to have something like a minor league that is separate from universities, but perhaps initially owned by them so they don't lose out on the money, or something to that effect. Let football people concentrate on football, and let colleges be about learning and research.
Snowball's chance in hell of actually happening though.
There's the D-league for basketball and the minors for baseball. The problem is that the best players want to play where they'll be seen. This means college is the place to play for now for the revenue generating sports like basketball and football.
College football (and to a lesser extent basketball) revenue has traditionally funded almost all the other so-called "non-revenue" sports. Track and field, tennis, cross-country, swimming, wrestling, rowing, etc.
With the supreme court decision allowing NIL payments directly to players, that could change. Schools are still raking in cash in ticket sales and TV revenue. But a lot of the other sponsorship and alumni donations might be going directly to players now instead of to the athletic departments.
Many midsize schools, including state schools, lose money in football. Being a mid tier team in Conference USA or the Mountain West is much much less lucrative than the SEC or ACC.
Actually, there was a fairly long interruption during Coco Gauff's US Open match last night where protesters apparently glued their feet to the floor of Arthur Ashe. So at least people can test that theory in tennis.
What would that do in terms of convincing China to stop rapidly expanding their emissions output (which is now greater than the US + EU combined and still very quickly climbing)?
The US has no power to do anything about China's emissions. The US could drop its emissions to zero tomorrow and it wouldn't alter where we're going in terms of global climate change at all. That isn't an exaggeration, that's how bad the situation actually is.
India is just coming online with its mega emissions boom and Africa is next (they'll add a billion people while simultaneously massively expanding emissions). The outcome is already set.
Claims that China is the world’s biggest polluter ignore the fact that so much of the rest of the world has outsourced their manufacturing to China. Those emissions mostly aren’t going towards bettering the lives of Chinese people, they’re for producing the stuff we buy.
In the same vein, a lot of the clean air improvements in the US can be attributed to moving those factories to China. Chinese people are dying early from air pollution to make stuff for us. People in Pittsburgh used to bring two shirts to work because it was so polluted. Not anymore.
“Convincing China to stop expanding their emissions” is akin to stopping consuming manufactured goods.
Americans are also far more prolific polluters than Chinese at an individual level. Due to poor urban design endemic to North American cities, most travel involves cars and airplanes, some of the worst conceivable means of transportation from an environmental perspective.
This isn’t to say China is blameless. They’ve definitely made some choices favoring expediency over sustainability. But it seems a bit rich to shift blame to China and other poorer nations now when CO2-driven climate change was a problem Carl Sagan warned Congress about in the 80s (and he was ignored).
> Claims that China is the world’s biggest polluter ignore the fact that so much of the rest of the world has outsourced their manufacturing to China. Those emissions mostly aren’t going towards bettering the lives of Chinese people, they’re for producing the stuff we buy.
China still leads in total consumption-based emissions. On a per-capita consumption-based emission, China is not far off the EU average.
For hard numbers, CO2 emissions for export represent roughly 8% of China's total emission as of 2021. Considering that China emits twice as much CO2 as the next largest emitter (as measured by production), it shouldn't be hard to see why consumption-based emissions don't change the picture all that much.
Not sure where you got the Chinese 8% number, that seems to be the percent for USA imports on that page. For Chinese exports, the number is almost twice as much (14%). That means at a per-capita level if you account for manufacturing the average Chinese person emits 0.86x10.1=8.7 tons of CO2 while the average American emits 17.6x1.08=19 tons. Thus the American lifestyle causes 2.2x the pollution of the Chinese lifestyle.
However, based on that article it seems the US has also decreased emissions even when adjusted for imports. It is still higher that almost everywhere else but offshoring isn’t the only cause of the decline.
The atmosphere doesn't care about arbitrary man-made geographical divisions, so comparing emission totals by country to determine if some group of people is emitting more or less than they fair share of whatever total world emission level we decide we have to stay under makes no sense.
It's no weirder than, say, the European obsession with their football programs.
The US has ~340 million people, and we're talking about 10-20 mega stadiums in college football.
$80,000 GDP per capita (nearing double that of France or Britain) with one of the highest disposable incomes and extreme amounts of wealth. It's surprising the stadiums aren't even bigger.
Colleges are able to spend 4 years promoting their brand, its kind of a cult of sorts.
Professional teams don't have that pull, you see them a few times a year.
In college, your degree's reputation can depend on how well they are viewed nationally. For 2 decades a top school could not win games, the fanbase was outraged because they were spending record amounts of money on trying to win games. It seriously made me (and others) question how good the school was academically if they couldn't manage to win, despite setting records on spending.
Not to mention your friends go to the games, you have nostalgia from a vulnerable part of your life, etc...
Or consider that if some obscure school, who's players are going to school for college instead of football is beating a 'football school', their management is performing worse than supposedly lower skilled managers and lower skilled players.
NFL teams have to do deal with a city government to get their stadiums built. I'm surprised there's any at all. Colleges football has more autonomy and can actually accomplish things.
I suspect this isn't a surprising news for anyone who's been following the college football scene for the last 20 years. TV deals matter quite a bit (especially for money and exposure) and most universities worth their salt will gun for the SEC or the BIG 10 when the opportunity is there. PAC12 essentially imploded this year for this reason.
For someone who grew up in a different country, it appears to me that Americans do not hate working hard, they just hate working hard on academics, which is really strange.
> For someone who grew up in a different country, it appears to me that Americans do not hate working hard, they just hate working hard on academics, which is really strange
I wonder if it's in the US's pro-agrarian, anti-urban roots. Thomas Jefferson famously thought of America as an agrarian democracy, and you see this even today where "Main St", "the real America", "small town America", etc. are all callbacks to the nation's rural roots.
I don't buy that, not all rural people are moronic hicks or hillbillies.
Opportunity has often been their biggest hurdle. While most are just as smart as you or me, the chances for them to get a "proper" education and out of their situation isn't as easy as it is for an urban dweller.
> I'm not sure exactly why, but I wonder whether anti-intellectualism has a religious origin.
No but it goes hand in hand. Don't want to people to know what your good book actually says because it's easier to control and bilk them if they can't read.
An odd phenomenon I've seen in the last 15 years (I'm in South Texas) is a cohort of people that are actually proud to be dumb. For them ignorance is to be celebrated. I've even had several tell me that it lets them be more spiritual and in tune with the word of their god.
I don't think generalizing a country of 330 MM people is reasonable. Americans like sports, not all Americans like sports. Of those that do, not all of them idolize and worship sports. There are people who studied STEM that also like sports.
As an American, it is not strange to me! There is a long cultural tradition, going back to the Greeks or the English, putting an emphasis on "sportsmanship" and athleticism. Besides hard work, most sports put an emphasis on competing within a framework of rules, teamwork, and discipline.
I am not athletic or particularly interested in sports, but I think a love of sports is good for society. Excellence in academics, wealth, beauty are obviously really valued in our society as well. Most Americans value hard work in academics-- look what we spend on education!
> it appears to me that Americans do not hate working hard, they just hate working hard on academics
Not much machismo in academics but there's tons in sports and hard physical work. That's why truck/beer and other male oriented commercials never show someone reading a book, they show someone doing hard physical work or competing in a physical activity (edit: or getting laid). That's about all there is to it.
Your links don't really support your view that Americans despise working hard in school. As an American, my perspective is that working hard in school is widely respected and encouraged in US culture. The poll where a majority says "other people don't pursue STEM because they're lazy" is just another in a long history of American polls where respondents assume something incorrect about everyone else in the country. You should not put much stock in these opinions.
Paul Graham's "nerds" article is fairly out of date, and I would also encourage you to read between the lines a bit. Paul and his friends graded everyone by popularity and assumed everyone else was doing the same. Were they? In my experience, probably not. Popular kids generally just consider themselves normal and don't look down on the "nerds", so much as just not think about them much because they're in a different friend group that they don't interact with.
> Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
This is not true.
> most smart kids don't really want to be popular.
This is DEFINITELY not true, and you should be skeptical of anyone saying "I don't want to be popular" in the middle of a widely published essay about how smart and successful they are.
I attended high school many years after Paul, so it's possible what he describes was true at the time, but I don't think it is anymore.
Finally, you're right that Kobe Bryant is admired more than the average hard worker in school, and that's because he was among the best in the world. Results matter in American culture, and a kid in high school working just as hard as Kobe to be the best player on his team is not going to be as celebrated as Kobe Bryant, even if he's putting in just as much effort.
Ya I don't think Americans dislike hard academic work and STEM is not every single job. Most jobs don't even really require a bachelor's degree and I think most Americans are aware of that. There just isn't a need for everyone to get a PhD from an elite university in STEM, that's a recipe for disaster. I actually think what OP is saying is kind of an offensive and inaccurate view of Americans.
"Finally, you're right that Kobe Bryant is admired more than the average hard worker in school, and that's because he was among the best in the world."
All over the world, sportsmen and entertainment personalities are celebrated more than other workers who, in theory and intuitively, should be celebrated more. For example, among the celebrities, in theory and intuitively, we should find the best scientists, surgeons, and administrators that a country can offer. But do we? No, we don't.
To use a recent example, if you think about it, it is curious that the hype about Oppenheimer has been about the film itself, Nolan the director, and Murphy the performer, and not Oppenheimer the scientist and the Manhattan Project as a formidable government-sponsored science and technology initiative. Yes, there has been some minor residual interest in the real people, science and technology associated with Los Alamos on the part of viewers, but nothing particularly relevant.
Today, Mr. Oppenheimer, academic and/or govt employee, would have to work for 30+ years (probably more...) to earn the same money that Murphy earned pretending to be Oppenheimer in a movie. If that's not funny and ridiculous, I don't know what is.
Describes me. I love hard work—love it—if it’s making me sweat. Will go ‘till I puke, keep going, then tell you I had a great time afterward. Sports, physical labor, any of that. Just don’t ask me to run for the sake of running—there’s hardly a more-boring activity on the planet, to me.
Intellectual work is soul-crushing and makes me want to stop and do literally anything else within a couple hours, by contrast. And I’ve got some natural talent for it! I can’t imagine how intolerable it’d be otherwise.
But the painfully-boring leave-me-a-husk-by-EOD intellectual jobs pay better and don’t (necessarily) ruin your body by age 40, so I tappy-tappy at keyboards instead of building fences or whatever. Sigh.
Same goes for academics. Studying’s draining. Doing baseball (or whatever) drills is awesome.
But maybe I only feel that way because I’m American. I dunno.
> For someone who grew up in a different country, it appears to me that Americans do not hate working hard, they just hate working hard on academics, which is really strange.
I doubt this generalization rings true. Americans just enjoy sport more than many other nations…you can leave it at that without adding some idea of them hating academics. It’s not an either/or situation.
California and Stanford, literally on the Pacific coast, just joined the Atlantic Coast Conference. That tells you everything you need to know about college football. It's not about the athletes, not about amateur competition, but all about the money.
Sports have become a corrupting influence on colleges and distract from their educational mission.
In reality, educational mission is just a small part of the college experience these days, it is all about building up their brand and making as much money in process as possible.
No kidding. Conferences are signing megadeals with ESPN, et al for broadcasting rights which gets split between the members schools. Look how quickly all of those Pac12 schools jumped ship when realized their commissioner dropped the ball and they won't be getting the big payouts. Decades of 'tradition' for schools like USC, Stanford, UCLA thrown in the trash over media rights.
For now, when the cable bundle falls apart and programming goes DTC, revenue to pay the sports leagues will drop tremendously. My prediction is that the streaming services will turn back into the cable bundle via longer term contracts and selective packaging.
They really should let folks skip the ‘school’ charade if the athlete wishes like the NBA’s G League (or go straight pro). Some use it for the education, & that scholarship can be great for those without the means otherwise, but a lot of college sports is just a cash grab for universities on the talent & training of its athletes (thankful NIL actually happened for those kids). The halfback market would see the greatest benefit to this too as they are seen as worn tire treads by the age of 24 wasting a lot of the positions most valuable years in college where they are not getting anywhere near the pay they’d see in the NFL as they are just used for their cheap rookie contract, franchise tagged, then often tossed in the trash (see: Jonathon Taylor, Saquon Barkley, Josh Jacobs, et al.).
It's hard to know what to think here. I really don't like or care about college sports at all. Most of the debate tends to focus on how the kids are "exploited" because they're not paid while the coaches, administrators, and schools make a huge amount of money on the unpaid athletes. The general remedy seems to be that people want the athletes to be paid. This seems backwards to me. What does a sports team have to do with a university? Why are they even associated? The athletes get a free ride, and often don't really engage in much education. Why are they even there? And why are the coaches paid well at all? It seems like an enormous waste of money.
It seems like the better solution would be to stop taking in so much money from the sport _and_ keep the athletes unpaid. If this isn't possible, it seems best to wholly separate the teams from the schools.
that's how I feel about it. Also you see things like this pop up https://deadspin.com/haley-hanna-cavinder-miami-nil-infracti... where a super rich donor met with the twins. Maybe I am completely wrong but I get the suspicion the meeting wasn't just to say hi out of the kindness of the donor's heart.
Thinking about it, would universities sexualize their athletes to sell more and be able to solicit donations? Yes, this violated an NCAA rule but wouldn't surprise me if ways around it are found just like in the past where donors would sell cars to athletes for a dollar. Not sure it would be a positive development for universities.
College football was once more popular and made more money than the NFL. If it wasn't for the absolute mismanagement by the NCAA, Disney/ESPN, and various big money stakeholders College Football would still be more popular and make more than the NFL.
That shouldn't be surprising, as in some areas the local college team is the only professional sporting event around.
It is a damned shame that they couldn't come up with a better system than the NIL. Yes all the players should be making money, but it should be done in a manner that benefits all players.
I worked at a uni (just left), a high school friend went into accounting and is the CPA / Accountant for the football team (ok, _one_ of the accountants)...
When times were really, really bad at the uni, talking about furloughing employees, closing down schools, etc, I bumped into him:
Hey fred what's up? How is it going there in the football stadium?
"Eh fine..."
Yeah, times are rough here, we can not purchase pencils or toilet paper. Scared for our jobs.
"what!?! The football / athletics department has so much money, I am practically burning it just to get rid of it"
This was the norm at the university. Research labs? Not updated in 30 years. Football stadium needs a paint job, $@#% that, we are going to build a 100Million dollar new one. Oh, the AC in Engineering is broken, screw them. Oh, its hot outside? 50Million dollar indoor training for the football team.
Yeah, I hate colleges. If their goal was to win games, I would understand. Uh-oh, I was missing the point of college... dang.
A slight tangent - I played small college football as a lineman and every once in a while we'd be in a televised game. Those games were almost a different sport because they'd stop play during commercial breaks, so it was as if 10+ random time-outs were sprinkled through the game.
While not an exact comparison, playing line during a possession is like having a series of 5 to 10-second intervals where you're either sumo wrestling or sprinting, with 10-40 seconds to recover between each. So during the off-season, linemen are trying to reach a balance of strength, speed, and cardio to meet their team's play style. Because most of our games were non-televised (and therefore we didn't get the additional breaks) our linemen conditioned more heavily for cardio/recovery. So when we'd play a televised game we'd basically feel like our cardio was "underutilized". I'd love to see an analysis of whether our team ran more line-intensive plays during these games because we had the additional recovery time.
It's weird for me to see these huge guys in D1 college and the NFL playing line, because I'm pretty sure they'd cramp up/get gassed during a drive in a non-televised game.
Most interesting comment in the thread. Anyone who has been to a D1 game know the commercial breaks are so long in person. Never thought about non TV games being different pace but makes sense.
I was just a mediocre high school player, but I'm pretty sure you're on to something there. I was a DT; the other DT and I alternated 4-on-4-off at right OT. Playing 1.5 ways is tough. The worst was to go in on second down, have to punt, and immediately resume playing defense, and know that you had to play their entire possession and one last play on offense before you got a rest.
OTOH, I don't think anyone could realistically play both ways at D1 level. Even if we just assumed the necessary position skills into existence.
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[ 9.7 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadYep this is what's happening this year at my University this year - players now do a quick 30 minute autograph signing before each game.
Pretty unbelievable how these institutions are creating billions of dollars of revenue / wealth off the backs of young (primarily minority) men and women. It's so gross.
I'm sure that commissioner, like any reasonable person calling for a return to those traditions, is also calling for the abolition of the NFL, all volunteer coaches, and gratis, advertising-free broadcasts of all the games, right? Right?!
For varying degrees of "amateur". A lot of nations employed their athletes to do nothing but train for the olympic and international competition.
The Soviet Union and other government-controlled-economy nations were sending essentially professional athletes to the Olympics while free-economy nations were sending amateurs. Removing the restriction allowed all nations to send their best athletes.
Ironically of course, there are some aristocratic motivations for why "amateur" was desirable in the first place that don't really align to modern sensibilities, but that's separate.
I don’t know what it is about the current zeitgeist but people with power seem quite happy to vocalize their discontent with what they perceive as “lower classes” making decent money. It’s like they don’t even pretend anymore.
Usually they try to obscure this state of affairs. When the veil breaks, their backup plan is enforcement, first through threats and then through laws and then, if necessary, through violence. We appear to be mostly in the "threats" stage.
https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/38005718/sec-...
I think it's a tricky situation. The previous NCAA rules were idiotic and unfair to players. The current situation is better for players, but I'm worried that we're moving towards a future where the best teams are just the ones with the deepest pockets (or whose boosters have the deepest pockets). Considering most teams are already unprofitable, it could further increase stratification between P5 and G5 teams.
Maybe CFB needs to implement a per-team salary cap.
Maybe schools should not be involved in professional sports in the first place, especially one that inherently causes brain damage.
Let the NFL owners pay for a minor league.
I spent a term as an exchange student at the Catholic University of America, a smallish university with a completely unexceptional D3 football programme staffed with actual students. And they got two thousand people to their football games! Much of the campus! Alumni! People who lived in Brookland and fancied some live sport!
I mean, I knew how seriously people take high school football too. But even really good UK university sport can play to an audience of the players supportive romantic partners only. A different (and quite refreshing) world.
The coaches are usually actually all for paying the athletes. It is the university MBAs who are running a business off the back of them all -- and interested in maximizing profit -- that usually aren't.
Only difference is that money don't go to athletes.
What I want to see is higher education have their tax free status stripped and their endowments taxed as a total percentage (like property tax).
Both for creating the student loan mess and for having this ridiculous sports system that uses athletes as chattel.
There is no shortage of people who want to play college football. Many would play even with out a scholarship. In Division 2 less than half the team is on scholarship. In Division 3 nobody gets scholarships. They are almost never on TV and there is very little chance they will make the NFL.
That would be like a lower weight class boxer, say Canelo Álvarez taking on a fight with Tyson Fury (each in their respective class) for the "pay day", sure he may have a "puncher's chance" but few would consider it a fair fight.
What's even the logic behind that? It's okay to mistreat people because they want to be an athlete over working at McDonald's?
I think the concept of a student athlete is an oxymoron at this point.[1][2] Either the sport really serves no purpose and could exist as a club or the student is not really a student at all and should just be a paid university employee like the coaches. But this inbetween area is odd. I guess the facade of being a student is more endearing maybe because otherwise the university sports team people cheer for is just a bunch of paid professionals basically. Maybe that would ruin the fun for people idk. Not sure I even care. It isn't right to treat some students different than others.
[1]: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/365303-cold-hard-fact-st...
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/us/unc-report-academic-fraud/...
Snowball's chance in hell of actually happening though.
>We get US Medical Reform that actually helps the general population and doesn't just give medical workers/owners more money and power.
>Football gets a minor league
:'(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61TMtH3Qw4s
With the supreme court decision allowing NIL payments directly to players, that could change. Schools are still raking in cash in ticket sales and TV revenue. But a lot of the other sponsorship and alumni donations might be going directly to players now instead of to the athletic departments.
Many midsize schools, including state schools, lose money in football. Being a mid tier team in Conference USA or the Mountain West is much much less lucrative than the SEC or ACC.
The US has no power to do anything about China's emissions. The US could drop its emissions to zero tomorrow and it wouldn't alter where we're going in terms of global climate change at all. That isn't an exaggeration, that's how bad the situation actually is.
India is just coming online with its mega emissions boom and Africa is next (they'll add a billion people while simultaneously massively expanding emissions). The outcome is already set.
In the same vein, a lot of the clean air improvements in the US can be attributed to moving those factories to China. Chinese people are dying early from air pollution to make stuff for us. People in Pittsburgh used to bring two shirts to work because it was so polluted. Not anymore.
“Convincing China to stop expanding their emissions” is akin to stopping consuming manufactured goods.
Americans are also far more prolific polluters than Chinese at an individual level. Due to poor urban design endemic to North American cities, most travel involves cars and airplanes, some of the worst conceivable means of transportation from an environmental perspective.
This isn’t to say China is blameless. They’ve definitely made some choices favoring expediency over sustainability. But it seems a bit rich to shift blame to China and other poorer nations now when CO2-driven climate change was a problem Carl Sagan warned Congress about in the 80s (and he was ignored).
China still leads in total consumption-based emissions. On a per-capita consumption-based emission, China is not far off the EU average.
For hard numbers, CO2 emissions for export represent roughly 8% of China's total emission as of 2021. Considering that China emits twice as much CO2 as the next largest emitter (as measured by production), it shouldn't be hard to see why consumption-based emissions don't change the picture all that much.
[Numbers come from https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions].
However, based on that article it seems the US has also decreased emissions even when adjusted for imports. It is still higher that almost everywhere else but offshoring isn’t the only cause of the decline.
Hover over China on the nearby map. The text is written with numbers from ~2016, but the map has more up-to-date numbers.
TIL / this blows my mind. I would never have guessed that US college football trumps all those soccer stadiums around the world, by that much! :O
Weird.
The US has ~340 million people, and we're talking about 10-20 mega stadiums in college football.
$80,000 GDP per capita (nearing double that of France or Britain) with one of the highest disposable incomes and extreme amounts of wealth. It's surprising the stadiums aren't even bigger.
The thing that's supposed to be a fun side part of your education, or even a feeder program to the pros, can afford larger stadiums than the pros.
Professional teams don't have that pull, you see them a few times a year.
In college, your degree's reputation can depend on how well they are viewed nationally. For 2 decades a top school could not win games, the fanbase was outraged because they were spending record amounts of money on trying to win games. It seriously made me (and others) question how good the school was academically if they couldn't manage to win, despite setting records on spending.
Not to mention your friends go to the games, you have nostalgia from a vulnerable part of your life, etc...
That just doesnt happen as much in Pro.
Why?
Bad management.
Or consider that if some obscure school, who's players are going to school for college instead of football is beating a 'football school', their management is performing worse than supposedly lower skilled managers and lower skilled players.
For someone who grew up in a different country, it appears to me that Americans do not hate working hard, they just hate working hard on academics, which is really strange.
Really interesting way to put it.
I'm not sure exactly why, but I wonder whether anti-intellectualism has a religious origin.
Opportunity has often been their biggest hurdle. While most are just as smart as you or me, the chances for them to get a "proper" education and out of their situation isn't as easy as it is for an urban dweller.
It's easy to blame the rich and urban when your community is broke and you see all the "help" going to the big rich cities.
See farm price supports, rural roads, block grants of money on the federal level between states:
https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal...
No but it goes hand in hand. Don't want to people to know what your good book actually says because it's easier to control and bilk them if they can't read.
An odd phenomenon I've seen in the last 15 years (I'm in South Texas) is a cohort of people that are actually proud to be dumb. For them ignorance is to be celebrated. I've even had several tell me that it lets them be more spiritual and in tune with the word of their god.
I am not athletic or particularly interested in sports, but I think a love of sports is good for society. Excellence in academics, wealth, beauty are obviously really valued in our society as well. Most Americans value hard work in academics-- look what we spend on education!
Now try doing the same thing, but watching sports.
Not much machismo in academics but there's tons in sports and hard physical work. That's why truck/beer and other male oriented commercials never show someone reading a book, they show someone doing hard physical work or competing in a physical activity (edit: or getting laid). That's about all there is to it.
Paul Graham's "nerds" article is fairly out of date, and I would also encourage you to read between the lines a bit. Paul and his friends graded everyone by popularity and assumed everyone else was doing the same. Were they? In my experience, probably not. Popular kids generally just consider themselves normal and don't look down on the "nerds", so much as just not think about them much because they're in a different friend group that they don't interact with.
> Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
This is not true.
> most smart kids don't really want to be popular.
This is DEFINITELY not true, and you should be skeptical of anyone saying "I don't want to be popular" in the middle of a widely published essay about how smart and successful they are.
I attended high school many years after Paul, so it's possible what he describes was true at the time, but I don't think it is anymore.
Finally, you're right that Kobe Bryant is admired more than the average hard worker in school, and that's because he was among the best in the world. Results matter in American culture, and a kid in high school working just as hard as Kobe to be the best player on his team is not going to be as celebrated as Kobe Bryant, even if he's putting in just as much effort.
All over the world, sportsmen and entertainment personalities are celebrated more than other workers who, in theory and intuitively, should be celebrated more. For example, among the celebrities, in theory and intuitively, we should find the best scientists, surgeons, and administrators that a country can offer. But do we? No, we don't.
To use a recent example, if you think about it, it is curious that the hype about Oppenheimer has been about the film itself, Nolan the director, and Murphy the performer, and not Oppenheimer the scientist and the Manhattan Project as a formidable government-sponsored science and technology initiative. Yes, there has been some minor residual interest in the real people, science and technology associated with Los Alamos on the part of viewers, but nothing particularly relevant.
Today, Mr. Oppenheimer, academic and/or govt employee, would have to work for 30+ years (probably more...) to earn the same money that Murphy earned pretending to be Oppenheimer in a movie. If that's not funny and ridiculous, I don't know what is.
Intellectual work is soul-crushing and makes me want to stop and do literally anything else within a couple hours, by contrast. And I’ve got some natural talent for it! I can’t imagine how intolerable it’d be otherwise.
But the painfully-boring leave-me-a-husk-by-EOD intellectual jobs pay better and don’t (necessarily) ruin your body by age 40, so I tappy-tappy at keyboards instead of building fences or whatever. Sigh.
Same goes for academics. Studying’s draining. Doing baseball (or whatever) drills is awesome.
But maybe I only feel that way because I’m American. I dunno.
I doubt this generalization rings true. Americans just enjoy sport more than many other nations…you can leave it at that without adding some idea of them hating academics. It’s not an either/or situation.
Sports have become a corrupting influence on colleges and distract from their educational mission.
It seems like the better solution would be to stop taking in so much money from the sport _and_ keep the athletes unpaid. If this isn't possible, it seems best to wholly separate the teams from the schools.
Thinking about it, would universities sexualize their athletes to sell more and be able to solicit donations? Yes, this violated an NCAA rule but wouldn't surprise me if ways around it are found just like in the past where donors would sell cars to athletes for a dollar. Not sure it would be a positive development for universities.
That shouldn't be surprising, as in some areas the local college team is the only professional sporting event around.
It is a damned shame that they couldn't come up with a better system than the NIL. Yes all the players should be making money, but it should be done in a manner that benefits all players.
When times were really, really bad at the uni, talking about furloughing employees, closing down schools, etc, I bumped into him:
This was the norm at the university. Research labs? Not updated in 30 years. Football stadium needs a paint job, $@#% that, we are going to build a 100Million dollar new one. Oh, the AC in Engineering is broken, screw them. Oh, its hot outside? 50Million dollar indoor training for the football team.Yeah, I hate colleges. If their goal was to win games, I would understand. Uh-oh, I was missing the point of college... dang.
While not an exact comparison, playing line during a possession is like having a series of 5 to 10-second intervals where you're either sumo wrestling or sprinting, with 10-40 seconds to recover between each. So during the off-season, linemen are trying to reach a balance of strength, speed, and cardio to meet their team's play style. Because most of our games were non-televised (and therefore we didn't get the additional breaks) our linemen conditioned more heavily for cardio/recovery. So when we'd play a televised game we'd basically feel like our cardio was "underutilized". I'd love to see an analysis of whether our team ran more line-intensive plays during these games because we had the additional recovery time.
It's weird for me to see these huge guys in D1 college and the NFL playing line, because I'm pretty sure they'd cramp up/get gassed during a drive in a non-televised game.
OTOH, I don't think anyone could realistically play both ways at D1 level. Even if we just assumed the necessary position skills into existence.