Football season is upon us, and I'm an American, so dadgumitt, whatever that means, I'm going to start paying attention! One problem that jumps right out at me is how so many college players make it through college in the first place when, after they've turned pro, they demonstrate clearly that they have IQs similar to the average special-needs squirrel. I saw The Blind Side — isn't there some kind of academic standard that players have to meet?
But we pad these gifted athletes up in imaginary passing grades so that they can go play ball for the school, the alumni, the community, and eventually the American sports fans, all in the hope that they can attain the American dream: To turn pro and be paid millions of dollars for being an utter moron who can catch, jump, hit, or throw.
The first sign of problems pops up when one of our athledemically unbalanced heroes is put in front of a camera and asked to form a partial sentence. That's when the where-the-hell-is-my-agent look suddenly appears, or a name gets changed to a number for no apparent reason, or someone shoots himself in the leg with an unregistered firearm. And these might be a couple of the smarter moves. Hell, we've just had one bible-thumping senior who actually volunteered information that he was still a virgin! I mean, it's bad enough being a 22-year-old guy who's never gotten his bean snapped, or believes that God might care who wins his football game, but actually sharing this information with the general public? At the very least such an unforced error should warrant an F in social sciences. (Personally, I believe I'd rather shoot myself in the leg with an unregistered firearm or stab myself in the sack with a concealed Sharpie.)
But seriously, when these guys get to the pro ranks, many of them are clearly unable to deal with the incredibly difficult tasks that are expected of them, those being, playing ball and shutting the f*#! up. Take Terrell Owens (Buffalo did, and got a paltry 55 catches and 5 TDs for its trouble) as an example. I live in Dallas, and am therefore expected to be a Cowboys fan, but when the oxygen-thief Owens arrived, it was too much for me. And what's worse, the remedy was so simple. All Jerry Jones had to do was take away T.O.'s face mask! With a mouth that size, you know that man could have caught a basketball (let alone a football), held it firmly under his tongue to ward off any strip attempts by one of the league's psychotic outside linebackers, and had his hands free for double-Heisman straight-arms, with the net result being more touchdowns and less noise from his infamous failing-grade pie-hole.
College teams are huge fund-raisers for schools that are at least partly interested in educating our children, who are at this moment being mentally brain-whipped by nerdy little anklebiters from places like China, India and Finland, who are respectfully brilliant at playing the piano, playing cricket, and sliding down icy cliffs without dying. I know, these are not huge crowd-pleasers or money-makers, but dammit, the children who play them are smarter and thinner than ours, and what's more, most of the little bastards speak English better than ours.
Perhaps there is room for a different kind of college in America, and a way for the government to make a fast buck or trillion to help reduce the deficit. That's right, I said government. College sports are too big to fail. It's no coincidence that the schools with the best athletes also have the best-looking women. That's a legacy of evolution, like the big male Dall sheep up on the mountainside, running headfirst into each other until one of them is dazed enough to go back to the Dall dormitory, content to beta his kappa to the latest copy of Sheeptang, or whatever sheep outside of Ireland do these days. To the winners go the spoils, which in this case are the best-looking, most fertile females. For eons, all this has done is ensure that the boys at the top of the hill are good-looking, strong imbeciles with defective short-term memories, and most of them end up over some hillbilly's mantelpiece, looking good, strong, dead, and stuffed. Sounds like a sport to this fan of the sheepskin! But whatever, if we were to call these "Survivy League Schools," and sold the rights to the cable networks not just for the games, but also had their whole campuses covered by cameras, showing classroom and sorority/fraternity action, too, along with parents' day and homecoming etc., I think we'd be onto a winner — created entirely by losers.
Let's see the Chinese make that work.
US and college coaches all over SUM U-17 CupGolf Magazine Interview: Drew Brees
