Huge developments have arisen on the college sports scene this week. Colorado is now in the Pac 10 and Nebraska has become the 12th member of the Big 10. The Big 12 now has 10 teams.
(Should the Big 10 and Big 12 now just switch names? Then Nebraska can claim they never sold out and left the conference. just like the NFL maintains the fiction that the team currently in Cleveland is the same one Otto Graham and Jim Brown played for.)
Texas is being pursued by the Pac 10 and the SEC (I don’t mean the Securities and Exchange Commission). Rumor has the SEC also wooing Florida State and Miami, among others. the Big 10 isn’t done yet. The Big 12 may be done as a conference if other teams defect. Mountain West has added Boise State and perhaps others.
The Baptists at Baylor are worried no one will offer to totally immerse them. In Fort Worth the Disciples of Christ of TCU are positioning themselves for the best advantage even if that involves derailing the ambitions of their fellow religionists in Waco. Ahhh, Christian charity and ideals.
All this movement and whatever is to come is further evidence of the total corruption of big time college sports, especially in the realm of football and men’s basketball, the only two sports generating significant revenue.
2 1/2 years ago upon the departure of Rich Rodriguez for Michigan and the subsequent trauma to the good people here in the Mountain State, I wrote a little essay to distribute to my fellow Mountaineer fans.
In this essay I explored this notion of corruption in metaphorical terms, assigning to college coaches, administrators, coaches’ agents and even fans, equivalent roles to the functions of the chain of human scum involved in prostitution. (To be fair the actual practioners spending an inordinate amount of time on their backs and knees, likely have higher moral standards than the folks running college athletics.)(And the real human scum dwells in academia, not crack houses or bordellos).
In that scenario the coaches were the hookers, selling their wares indiscriminately. The college presidents and athletic directors were the johns, willing to sacrifice every last bit of integrity to avail themselves of the coaches’ services.
In turn the agents for the coaches, fittingly enough, were the pimps, offering their clients for sale regardless of other relationships and not caring who gets dirty in the process.
Finally the fans , which is short for fantacists not fanatics as is usually espoused, play the role of the public, deaf and blind to the shenanigans occurring in their midst, until they are personally affected. In athletics that is only when their school suffers negatively. In prostitution they react usually only when hookers move in next door or work under the streetlight in front of their house, or when their favorite politician gets caught with his pants down.
So now the same metaphor is apt except this time the hookers are the college AD’s and presidents demeaning themselves for the dollars inserted into their g strings by TV executives. Do not listen to the rationalizations about academically compatible educational institutions or that any realignment will result in lower shared costs or cooperative research opportunities or collective synergy. Lies!! Nothing but lies.
It is all about food. Specifically pie. That is they seek to create a larger pie that, even though divided more ways, provides a bigger slice to each of them.
As an aside, if the Big 10 is all about academics, shouldn’t prospective students ……real ones not scholarship “student-athletes”…. be wary of schools than can not even count to ten without coming to eleven?
As all this plays out in the coming days it will be exceedingly interesting to see who gets screwed worst in the end. Why do I have a feeling the main protagonists will benefit in the end while those less culpable will suffer?
Where’s the vice squad when you really need it?
I first posted this last night. This morning I read the following story about FedEx offering $10 million/year to any BCS conference willing to take Memphis as a member.
For an interesting, droll take on the coming demise of the Big 12, check the link below.
http://sports.espn.go.com/dallas/columns/story?columnist=mosley_matt&id=5276293
For a view from a Nebraska perspective
Umoc193's Blog 