College football: bulletproof

The one good thing for the lords of college football in the last year is that as bad as things have gotten, interest and dollars only go up. So does any of this trouble matter? I mean, how worse can it get than:

--The Heisman Trophy winner was obviously getting paid
--Just as obviously, both teams in the championship game were as dirty as yesterday's dishwater
--The most decorated player and team of the past decade were stripped of their awards, and the premier program on the West Coast and one of the top five programs in the nation is in four-year jail
--The premier program in the most historic conference had to shitcan its coach after months of embarrassment
--The Fiesta Bowl and the entire BCS were exposed as a boiling pot of corruption and graft
--One of the pillar conferences was on the verge of disintegration and only survived by giving in to the extortionist demands of its top program

And yet ticket sales go up, new TV deals are bringing dollars nobody could ever have dreamed, and interest seems, if not as high as ever, certainly on a major upward swing. Taken as its own sport, college football has to be #2 or 3 in popularity in the United States, behind the NFL and MLB.

So, for all this talk about the need for reform, can you really blame the NCAA for not wanting to mess with it? Seems like the tens of millions of people who watch have made their moral peace with the whole thing and just want to watch.

 

I'm a believer that these sort of systems just sort of evolve into what's best, even when people frequently make grandiose plans to try to change everything that's wrong with them. Immigration, college football, etc. The system we have is the system we want, we're just too big of pussies to put it in writing.

 

It's true. People don't really care if you cheat, just that you win.

Baseball attendance went up every year during the "steroid era." Now that pitchers have taken back control of the game, attendance is going down.

Shawne Merriman got suspended four games for PEDs and still almost won NFL Defensive Player of the Year. Only when he became injury prone and ineffective did his popularity wane.

 

I don't think the system we have is the system anybody wants.

 

It's the system all of the individual wants have left us with in the absence of a doable system in the service of a clear-cut collective want.

 

I find that explanation wanting

 

Me too.

 

I left you unsatisfied and confused, as is my wont.

 

I felt more disgust toward college football last season than ever before. A team bought a player who won the Heisman and led them to a national title and the NCAA looked the other way. It was disgusting.

That's not to say it hasn't happened before, but I don't think it's been this blatant since the days of SMU.

 

College athletics in general are so bloated, both in terms of its finances and its collective ego, that's its going to collapse on itself. Coaching salaries alone are beyond silly.

 

I thought the last college football season was the worst of my lifetime.

 

I don't see any evidence of that. In fact if the NFL and NBA have lockouts, the two main college sports are going to be doing better than ever, at least financially.