College football officially begins tonight with a few games between minor programs and then this weekend with some more well-known programs. Even though the solstice is not for a few more weeks, the accepted end of summer and beginning of fall in the US is Labor Day weekend. Most years, this weekend is loaded with college football games starting on Thursday and running through Monday night. Due to the man-made panic over Covid, there are far fewer games than normal.
College football is one of those uniquely American things. In the rest of the world, sports are a solely professional thing. Teens with the talent to make a living playing ball end up in a professional league of some sort. The youth play in club leagues until they can no longer play or can sign a professional contract. In America, the only sports that work this way are tennis and golf. The other sports, even soccer, are attached to colleges in some way, until players reach adulthood.
In the case of football, the sport is made weirder by the fact that every school and region have traditions. Europeans are baffled by the bands and cheerleaders used by college football programs. That’s not a thing you would ever see in Europe. There’s also the massive expense that comes with it. American colleges have sporting facilities that dwarf most professional clubs in the rest of the world. College football alone generates two billion in advertising revenue every year.
Of course, what makes it really weird compared to the rest of the world is the players do not get paid in the traditional sense. They are paid, of course. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or ignorant. They get free tuition, books, access to world class trainers and facilities and walking around money. Big time programs give the players a hundred dollars a day for incidentals. They also try hard to cover up their crimes, which is no small thing at many of these programs.
The scale of the industry is why many colleges have decided to go ahead with playing this season, rather than continue the Covid farce. It’s one thing to send the students home to take their classes on-line. It is quite another to give up billions in revenue in order to pretend you’re heroically fighting the killer virus. The two leagues that cancelled their season are now trying to figure out how to reverse course. It turns out that posturing is not as lucrative as playing the games.
Of course, this being the summer of public piety, the colleges feel the need to bend the knee to their black players in public. Nick Saban, one of the most cynical and craven humans to ever walk the earth, put on a big show the other day. His football teams have been crime waves in every city he has worked, but he wants his black players to know he is all about social justice. The issue of cops shooting blacks resonates with his players, because they get arrested so often.
The most amusing bit of moral preening so far came out of the cuck-belt, where the Kansas State football team had shirts made up and brought in celebrity blacks to help the whites with their struggle sessions. One of the players said, “I challenge you to not avoid conversations with people who think differently than you.” These are the same players who demanded a student be expelled for not agreeing with them on the George Floyd overdose incident.
The coaches, of course, are indulging this nonsense because they get paid to indulge all sorts of shenanigans. Nick Saban makes six million per season to keep his players out of prison long enough to finish the season. From his perspective, mouthing idiotic slogans and letting his players lecture the world about social justice is a day at the beach compared to what he normally does. In the world of carny folk, dignity takes a back seat to fleecing the suckers in the crowd.
Still, you can’t help but wonder if the colleges are destroying themselves with this lurch into politics. College football is entirely funded by white people. The stands at a college football game are whiter than an Ivy League professor’s neighborhood. The schools themselves may actively discriminate against white students, but the white fans make it possible for these college football programs to exist. Those fans also tend to be very patriotic, conservative and civic minded.
Of course, sports are supposed to be an escape. Staging mock battles between groups of Africans is a way to forget about the world for a few hours. In the case of college football, it also includes reminiscing about your college days and maybe hanging out with old college buddies. Reminding these people that you hate them and want them dead is probably a bad marketing strategy by these colleges. So far it has been a disaster for the pro leagues. Their viewership has collapsed.
Paradoxically, the collapse in television viewership may save these sports from their black players. If the stands were full, the fans could boo when the players take a knee or make some idiotic gesture. There would be social proof that normal white people resent this stuff. That would also lead the players to speak out and accidentally reveal just how much they hate white people. Playing in front of cardboard cutouts means no booing the teams for their anti-white antics.
This is another example of why sports remain popular. They tend to reflect in simple ways truths about society as a whole. In this case, the players can get away with their anti-white stuff, because there is no one around them to say otherwise. That is how it always is with the Left. There is no genuine market for their ideas, so they make sure to either cripple the marketplace of ideas with censorship or simply impose their way on everyone by controlling the institutions, like colleges.
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