194 thoughts on “College Sportsball”

1. I have to wonder if all the fatherless boys from Generation Single Mom have anything to do with the decline of sports.

   Moms are big on their boys taking risks and beyond that unless Dad or somebody is into a sport, the odds are good a kid will find something else to do.

2. This is a sound analysis, particularly for a pre-Kapernick #woke world. But missing is the viewership that has greatly diminished since the anthem kneelers and BLM pushers took precedence over the play of the actual game. In addition, the fake disease Covid has pushed its ugly head into the mix. Those two issues alone have permanently turned off roughly 50% of its $money$ fanbase much more than the consolidation of big fish colleges.

3. Get ready for even fewer choices in the near future. I just heard the ADL, the same ethnic lobby that tried banning Fox News, is teaming up with PayPal to ban content they don’t like. I’m sure they’ll move onto closing people’s bank and telephone accounts next. Watch out Ben & Jerry’s. Your ice cream antisemitism won’t be tolerated forever.

   • The ADL/Paypal thing is an announcement of what’s been going on for years.

     When nothing bad happens to any American Jewish antizionists, realize that the ADL Jews who are going to kill us all and the Israel Jews who only wanted our protection/money are *barely* overlapping groups.

   • Ya beat me to it, PP is how I’ve been kicking in to Z. It’s only ten a month but I had just canceled a ten spot to RFR as JJS hasent been putting any content up for most of this year. At least not with any regularity. Busy with his bride and their morning drive show.
     One way or another Z will be getting that ten.

4. College football has always been a farce. You see magical Africans who can’t spell cat attending colleges like Michigan or Stanford and talking about being “student-athletes”. Or hoop-Americans going to Duke with test scores that wouldn’t get them into a community college. Both football and basketball should have created a minor league system like baseball and quit pretending that the players had anything to do with the university other than the name on their uniform.

   • It’s ‘affletes’

   • You’re right, separate leagues should have been formed. The thing is, though, money is what makes the world go round. Building new stadiums is not cheap, and the universities have these facilities and the outside world does not. Yes, there are minor league baseball parks and teams like the Syracuse Mets play in them, and people go to attend these games with flags in hand (and hotdogs in other), but they are subsidized. again, the issue is money. It all comes back to the all-mighty dollar bill. If television were more lucrative, IT could pay for the whole shlemele but it is not. There’s only so much dough in the advertising gig. (I wrote a post about advertising recently on my blog; click on my name to go and scroll down.) Money is the thing that gets even churches built. Without donations into the common kitty, nothing gets done, nothing gets built. That’s why taxes are so nefarious: they suck money from the private economy and return little to the basic citizenry.

5. It pains me. I grew up in a household with our family’s inventors, scientists, engineers, mathematicians and minor yet highly enterprising criminals. Since the mid-1860’s, we were all raised in the Church of the Meechigan Wolverine despite generally applying common sense despite the nigh invariable 10-2 season and a loss in the playoffs foootsball. As GenX early half, and a former Meechigan intercollegiate athlete who remains friends with the Michigamua elite, like one-handed “Shifty” Jim Abbott, I hate that we’ve become a pro milking operation and quasi-professional (and unsuccessful) paid sport whether hockey or feetsball. I hate what we are, and I haven’t watched football games in a long time, the current status is not even close to what we once believed we had in the 80’s and 90’s. The school sucks now, too. (and you Staeee grads and students eff off and die, unter meschlings, I vill be zer ven you are crush-ed.) It’s all a mere shadow of its former self and risible.

6. “Both college basketball and college football offer good examples of the dangers of an unregulated marketplace. Into the 1980’s, all college sports were governed by the NCAA, which tried to maintain college athletics as amateur endeavors. With the flood of TV money, the power of the NCAA has declined to the point where they have little say over the governance of football or basketball. Instead, what has erupted is a free market free-for-all where the big try to eat the small and even some of the big.”

   This is precisely the wrong conclusion to draw from this. The problem isn’t unregulated markets, but unfettered human desire. To put it another way, if Americans could resist the impulse of greed, they wouldn’t need a regulatory body to make them. To put it yet another way, external discipline must happen when self discipline doesn’t. Paradoxically, external discipline is weaker than self discipline, which is why it fails to improve things.

   Really, this post is just an attempt to blame anyone but Americans for American culture. The common man won’t rise in revolt or withdraw in disgust from this transparent get rich quick scheme because the commoner is also playing the same game. If our culture is greedy and short sighted, it is because we the people are greedy and short sighted.

   • Agreed, but this is a dysfunction born of sustained affluence and the extinction of real hardship and existential threat. Greed and short-sightedness “works” in our modern society & culture, and is reinforced rather than exterminated. Nothing in human behavior will change until the environment changes. And regulatory proscriptions in a socio-political economy is a minor form of environmental change when civilization happens. Minor change means minor impact. On the other hand, if greed got you dead, it would be a major change.

   • Drew says, “The problem isn’t unregulated markets, but unfettered human desire.”

     How do you control unfettered human desire without regulating markets?

     My assertion is that there is always going to be a highest authority and that it should be us. There is no unregulated alternative. There will always be a highest authority.

     • Christianity is the only thing that has caused men to discipline themselves into moral improvement. Governments have historically been impotent to do so, and have settled for mostly just using people as a tax base without getting too concerned about the particulars of their personal lives.

       • “Christianity is the only thing that has caused men to discipline themselves into moral improvement”

         Thanks for the laugh. I thought satire was dead.

         • Plato? Socrates? Aristotle? Morons!

         • Well stated. We all carry around some nostalgia, or at least a fantasy, of how the “Good Old Days” supposedly were. To credit (or, in fairness) blame Christianity for the good (or evil) of mankind is absurd. There are plenty of examples of moral successes — and abject failures — in all human history, and that surely includes Christendom.

           Have you ever noticed that that posts that tell hard, cold truths here tend to get high numbers of both approve and disapprove?

   • ” The problem isn’t unregulated markets, but unfettered human desire.”

     The purpose of regulating markets is to limit the damage caused by unfettered human desire.

     • Ok, but have market regulations actually done so? There were a tremendous number of financial regulations on the books prior to 2008, yet human greed still caused lots of problems, culminating in a nasty housing and stock market crash. The issue then, as now, is not a lack of explicit regulations.

       The same logic applies to gun control. Shouldn’t we limit the consequences of human animosity by regulating weapons? And if the current regulations don’t work, doesn’t that prove we need more of them? L

       • Market deregulation of the energy sector led to rolling blackouts in California through the late 1990s. The government didn’t do that, market speculators did that. Blackouts mostly stopped as soon as the market was re-regulated. If they happen now, it’s for totally separate reasons.

         Unfettered markets, despite the belief in some quarters to the contrary, often lead to consolidation and abuse because people are generally individualistic in nature and rarely feel a desire to sacrifice self-interest for community interest. The kinds of people involved in the speculative market aren’t in it to make your life better, they are in it to make a buck — sometimes at your expense.

         Why would a megacorporation want more competition? They shouldn’t. It lowers their profit margins, so they buy up the competition in order to keep prices high and choices limited. Competition isn’t something they want, and they eliminate it where ever they can. The only thing that prevents that and countless other economic abuses is — in theory, but certainly not in practice anymore — a neutral entity (i.e. a government) that is willing to put consumer interests ahead of the narrow interests of a few individuals (e.g. constant electrification is more valuable to the public than a few market speculators getting rich gaming the system, and whatever losses in efficiency are certainly worth it to the larger community).

         There is definitely a place for market regulation. We don’t have to choose between unfettered corporate oligarchy and communism. Other nations with high mean IQs get this, thus their economies are rock’n & and innovative and their social systems are mostly okay, devoid of the worst of corporate wokeism. The West, in contrast, is collapsing because a few powerful entities are putting their interests ahead of the greater public interest and silencing the competition (e.g. mass immigration, political correctness, CRT, diversity — none of which benefit the wider public — and corporations censoring speech counter to their narratives). That’s what unfettered markets have done.

         Ask yourself, was it really worth it? In twenty years, anyone left on this board will be wishing they’ve been born Chinese for all the opportunities and amenities offered by that country — low crime, good schools, positive self-identity, community, no immigration, zero social stress (no CRT & “systemic racism” propaganda), good entertainment from people who look like you, consumer choice, and no wokeism … and a good a economy, too.

         • Good schools for teaching the fundamentals, yes. But I wouldn’t say their curriculum and method of instruction is suitable for European brains.

           Positive self-identity and community? The Chinese are pathologically self-centered. The concept of face means that anyone outside their acquaintance is essentially a non-person, therefore there’s no motivation to treat them with anything other than dismissiveness. And that includes fellow Han. Their family structure tends to be strong but the Chinese nationalism of today is a top-down creation, in the same way the “muh nation of ideas!” version of America gets peddled to us.

           It might be true that they have zero social stress if you believe they have a hive mind that allows them to overlook the ratcheting control the party and state have over even the most trivial aspects of life. It also requires you to overlook the enormous stress put on the young to achieve professional success and to accumulate material goods.

           Good entertainment! Have you ever watched a minute of Chinese television? For all their vaunted IQ, it rarely rises above the sophomoric.

         • Sorry Ez-Arms,
           I’ll take my chances over here. To be honest I was born and raised at possibly the best time in history in the best country, so I’ll stipulate to being biased. I would rather take my chances here, and try to make a world livable for my descendants. One can not argue your points, I simply think it’s not worth the tradeoff, as all of them can be dealt with.

         • Good post. Tangentially relevant to this board: at present, one of the few areas where the government does enforce a type of freedom is the “common carrier” laws. Ironically, this usually applies to an entity granted a legal monopoly such as the power company. In return for that, they are not allowed to deny service save very carefully delineated reasons, such as failure to pay.

           Now, contrast this with what has been happening with big tech. Social media censors with impunity. Many financial services are at the pleasure of the provider, and can be cut off without notice, apparently for political reasons.

           At least for the present, I’ve heard of no cases where a person’s power was cut because of their political beliefs.

           We are liable to enter a world where internet services are refused because a person is on a “terrorist watch list,” even if that person has broken no law, or that watch list is maintained by non-government entities. The government can pretend innocence saying, it’s private contracts and we aren’t involved in denying you your rights. It’s dismaying, but we already live in that world, where you can be cut off even though you’ve done nothing illegal, fraudulent, or failed to pay a debt, etc.

           Imagine a world where Zman as been deplatformed and he can’t even obtain an IP address for his server. His PayPal and credit card processing has been cut off. His bank account has been closed. But at least he’d be able to receive U.S. Postal money orders at his P.O. Box, and cash them at Amscot. He may still have freedom of the press, but he may literally need a press to print old-fashioned style newsletters which are then mailed out.

           If/when the repression comes direct from the government, not just from “private” corporations with the nodding acquiescence of the State, then we are in deep doo-doo.

           Just ask Nick Fuentes.

       • 1. Deregulation of large commercial banks and investment banks in the 80’s is the root cause of most of our current financialization woes, ie Blackrock buying neighborhoods.
         2. Re gun laws: When you refuse to address the actual problem (black criminality), the proposed cure will never work. So yes, if we refused to coherently address the actual problems with realistic solutions, we would not stop the problem. But that is question begging: if you only consider solutions that don’t work, the solutions will not work.

   • “This is precisely the wrong conclusion to draw from this. The problem isn’t unregulated markets, but unfettered human desire.”

     >There are no laws.
     >Crime is through the roof.
     >The problem isn’t that we don’t have laws, it’s that some people have the desire to harm others.

     • Murder has been illegal in the United States since it’s inception.

       Billions have been spent on preventing and avenging murder since the country’s inception.

       Tens of thousands of murders have occurred in the country since it’s inception. Is this because murder isn’t illegal enough? Or, is it more likely, that there are limits to what laws and regulations can accomplish?

       • Good oi’ Rebel identified the problem above. The root causes of most serious problems are relatively easy to identify. There are solutions that used to work and would in all probability work again. But for ideological and political reasons, such solutions are off the table. Even to discuss them invites animosity and reprisal. But, to give the appearance of “doing something,” an endless parade of potential solutions are proposed and tried. Most don’t work. Some make the problem even worse. Trillions of dollars are spent. Millions of lives are ruined. But at least the World-Improvers can say “we tried!”

7. Sportsball fandom is really receding. I personally don’t watch any sports now, apart from an occasional UFC match (sorry Dana, I don’t pay). Everybody used to be into sports, at least casually. Now, it’s really just the sports fanatics who are still into it. Any kind of excitement just feels fake now. I remember having butterflies in my stomach before my hockeypuck team played in the playoffs. I really cared.

   Sportsball fandom probably represented the peak of “positive” race relations around 1995-2008. Yeah, I’m white, you’re black, but we all cheer for the same team! Let’s grill, and have meaningless, shallow conversations about sports and pretend that we’re all the same! White men show how they’re so not racist through their adoration of black sportsballers. Whites asleep while the country is being invaded by more third world people.

   That was also the peak of the dark times for our people. The slow boil working. Now that we don’t have sports I have basically nothing to talk about with indians, or blacks, or Chinese, or whatever mystery meat, at work. The elites for whatever reason took away the opiate of the white man, Sportsball. It’s a really good thing for our side. Even normie whites can’t ignore turning on the TV and being lectured about how bad they are by a rich thug with the IQ of a potato.

   The decline of sportsball, along with the COVID lockdowns giving us time alone to think, has been a boon for our side and has many white men rethinking things, albeit quietly. But I can see alot of middle aged white guys seem to be a little different now.

   • The market works. There is nothing new here, buyers and sellers fall out all the time. It takes time to resolve these things.

     The seller is trying to redefine the terms and conditions of sale: Football is gay. Football is about progressive politics. The parties that will spell out the specifics of those politics are jews, blacks, and sexual degenerates.

     The buyers are leaving the table. If you bothered to watch, the seller’s revenues and ratings are diving. They are beginning to panic. They are a year into this, and already they are starting to panic. If you are from our side of the great divide – you have never been in a better position to put a boot up Lefty’s arse than you are right now. How long can they hold out? A year? Two? If they ever want to make a buck at the sport or recover lost profits, they will have to capitulate.

     Because of their propaganda arms, Leftie is very good at hiding his failures and weaknesses. In the market, money talks, bullchit walks. This dispute is only going to end one way: they can keep the sport fun and make a killing, or they can use it for politics and lose billions and maybe even trillions in tertiary markets.

     Don’t blink. They’re playing you. Turn it off until they come back to the table. As you say, it is a win win for us, and a huge loss for them.

     • Like all tools, the market works in the hands of the competent. The market is not some magically occurring miasma that solves all problems. It is a creation of man.

       • And it was created for a reason. It’s meant to solve problems peacefully and without violence. It may not work quickly or perfectly, but it handles it’s core function well.

       • The market is not a tool. It is a part of the human psyche and it works everywhere, from the bazaars of Trashkanistan to the NYC stock exchange. Incompetence is punished most harshly in the market than anywhere else. Markets exist everywhere, even in the backward communist countries. If you and I can’t trade honestly because of govt, we will do it illegally underground in black markets – which are often the result of ‘regulated’ markets.

         The market is working right now. Sportzball ratings and revenues are diving. If you think the owners and money men aren’t chitting bricks, you don’t know how markets or marketing work. Be patient. Football is NOT gay. The fans are not faggots, or noggers or jews. They are guys like you. This will only end one way. It is just going to take time.

         • Hammers are part of the human psyche and they work everywhere too. The hammer, like the market, is still a tool, a creation of man for the use of man. Your libertarian priors are causing your present madness.

         • I don’t mean to be a dink, Z. I may have a few screws loose… but to call me a libertarian? That’s just hurtful! 😂👍

           I want to argue about this but may have to reconsider my base assumptions.

           Regardless, if you want to regulate a market, you will need to be gawddamned careful about who does it. A Jewish hammer will look like the ones we use. A jewish market most certainly will not, and it won’t work the same way either. Nor will a black one. Unless you have a viable way of excluding them from the regulator process in today’s political climate, that is a very bad road the dissidents may not want to go down.

           Hmmmm: markets are better described as a social construct? If you dare call me a liberal, I will have Cornigulus and his BLM homies pay you a visit…

         • https://youtu.be/x3SxEOvAOEg

           I kid, I kid.

     • Imagine our country in 20 years, when the demographic balance has been clearly upended.

       Who cares if whites boycott a product if the non-whites do not?

       I don’t like that market outcome and will take my chances with the alternative.

       • Non Whites aren’t doing a lot better.

         Latino fertility is 1.8 where White’s were in the 80’s and Blacks are at 1.9 with high incarceration and early mortality.

         They also are less affluent than the aging out baby boomers were so the money will go down.

         Also with weed growing in popularity, you’ll see far more stoners than anything else. That habit costs $8k per year or more. That’s no money for the NFL

         On top of that neither Blacks nor Latinos like the rainbow faggotry on display. Both groups voted overwhelmingly to ban gay marriage in California but were overruled by the courts.

   • Turn off ESPN and bring back the tradition of the Friday night poker game. Tell off color jokes, dress sloppy, cuss a little, drink a some whiskey, speak your piece freely. Fishing, trapping, shooting, cars, woman, politics, you know, all the important stuff. Invitation only, no G men allowed.

   • Most sports are ritualized forms of battle. Now that our civilized outlet has been taken away from us, or at least corrupted to the extent that it no longer satisfies, perhaps we will return to the real thing?

8. Good gravey.

   This one must stink so bad you can even smell it even in Lagos. Did Cornigulus and his homies lay a beating on you, Z? Because this is National Review material. David Fwench or Sloppy or Jonah could have written this tripe. Ben Shapiro could have written it!

   💩

   Who’s going to regulate your football for you? The guys with funny hats and big noses that rub their palms together? Maybe that horse faced pink haired she-twink from the wahmen’s Olympic soccer team? Maybe one of Biden’s or Trump’s kids? The tech oligarchs?

   Regulating markets carries the same dangers as regulating speech. You put regulators in, in this political climate… and you will get more pozz, more nigolatry, and more faggotry than you were ever getting before. And that is in addition to an inferior product that is only going to get worse.

   The market works. Stop with the jonesing, the cold turkey DT’s, and show some spine. TURN IT OFF. Walk away, and in a couple of years the guys might have a game for you. The product is fun, not sportzball. They are not the market, YOU are. YOU are in control here, so start acting like it.

   Sheesh.

   • Just make your own NCAA, bro.

     • Don’t have to. It’s only a game, bro. It’s only a serious issue to SJWs, jews, noggers and addicts. Why would I let them be in charge of my entertainment? I’m just as happy shooting a few rounds of trap, or in the fishin’ boat or camping in the woods. I can tell those SJW mutts to shove their politics up their ass, along with their sportzball if they can’t keep them separate… and make them do it if they want to be stupid about it. Did the same to Facebook, Twitter and the mass media already and don’t miss them a bit. Fact is, I don’t want a seat at a table that has joos, SJWs and noggers on the other side of it. Become ungovernable.

       Get the big money out of sport… and you’ll probably find that the vibrant trash and their antics go with it.

   • That said I don’t even own a TV. I don’t watch sportsball, on the rare occasion I do it’s through an illegal stream.

     Cut all money out of the anti white system. No money to sportsball, no money to Popeyes, no money to Dominoes, etc. Pay cash to white contractors if you’re doing yard work. Etc.

   • This thing that only shows up in certain circumstances and evaporates at the slightest off-equilibrium action is totally fine and needs no tending of any kind.

   • Markets only exist with careful regulation. Otherwise they become a monopolistic oligarchy.

     And its not new lore either.

     From the Wealth of Nations (1776)

     People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or contrivance to raise prices” (Adam Smith, 1776, book 10, chapter 8).

     Every single time.

     You are not getting away without regulation and in some cases without outright market interference.

     I don’t want markets selling a whole lot of things or acting in ways that are harmful to the formation of a stable family.

     And sure too much regulation is often an issue. So is too little,.

9. Sportsball jock sniffery? No thanks, I put away childish things.
   Isn’t that odd how the Las Vegas betting line odds are almost never wrong even with the so called “amateurs” of the NCAA. Hmm…so hmm.
   Potemkin entertainment for a foam column facade suiciety.
   One silver lining of the COV-LARP is the decline of sportsball.

   • In my browser, Z’s blog is still described as “The Z Blog, Sports, Culture, and Other Stuff.”

     I’m glad that the “Sports” part is largely inaccurate. That said, I don’t mind a sportsball post now and then.

     • Watch your spelling. It’s a “poast”, not a post.

       😂👍

   • Sports are generally good for society

     Football makes men happy that alone gives it merit, Its also teaches useful values about teamwork, fair platy, winners. losers. While I care essentially nothing for it personally its a valuable thing succumbing to the Left .

10. Somewhat OT, a group calling themselves the Dallas Justice Network sent out letters to rich Whites in Dallas demanding that they NOT send their kids to an Ivy League school or a US News Top 50 school, so black people can take their place. And if they don’t they get placed on the racist list. Its demanded as “allies”.

    And David French, yes wrote the Conservative Case for Reparations. When did life turn into a South Park episode that never ends?

    Perhaps we should all identify as black y’all. Get that cash. Cloward-Piven.

    • “When did life turn into a South Park episode that never ends?”

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXS1sJm7QEA

      • I’m trying to fix a date of that myself. It just seems to have happened suddenly, though with more research it might have been gradual–THEN sudden.

    • They just can’t help themselves. Almost seems like a psy-op from our guys to make whites more racially conscious.

      Either way, that’s what it does. Agree and amplify.

11. While I enjoy reading here, and other sites along similar lines, the absence of actionable intel is not lost on me. Defining a problem, part of solving it, yes. Noodling around forever about problems, I guess that is called “content” and sells.

    Now I offer the readers here some actionable intel. My son received a full sports scholarship to a small Division 1 school. I still filled out all the usual aid applications and he was awarded aid, which he would apparently not need since he had a ‘full ride’.

    Not so fast. What we discovered via probing was that this aid STILL goes to the school. And they quietly let is just go to their general fund, or similar. What they do not tell parents or students is that YOUR CHILD STILL HAS THIS MONEY COMING.

    We began the process of pressing the finance people at the school. They hemmed, hawed, stalled, Stalled some more but under pressure, certified letters, buried them in emails and phone calls … ALL of the funds, each year, that my child would have received in outside aid … came his way. It totaled over $20 grand, a nice little nest egg, put aside for graduation.

    Another interesting aside. I searched Getty Images and found they were selling a handful of photos of my child for about $450.00 each for usage rights. He never signed a modeling release to that Bill Gates owned scraping company.

    • Also note the aid referenced was not granted by the school. It was state aid.

    • I had similar issues with the financial aid department in my university. It was extremely unprofessional. Having to deal with all that at such a young age was a terrible experience. I’m glad to hear your son won out in the end!

      • I shall have to clarify. My son was the beneficiary of the spoils. As a D1 athlete, they suck all your time away, and we had no intention of leaving him to hang out to dry. Coaches use conformity and group psychology to manipulate young people, some as young as 17.

        So to the contrary, as his parents we did the legwork, and basically treated it as if the school was past due on their payments to US … and hammered them accordingly. The personnel there, weak, stupid, all women and used to telling others what to do. And like women when defeated, they don’t give you any satisfaction, with the exception of THE MONEY.

        The good thing is, while paying $0 zero big effing zero for this overpriced ‘education’, dealings with the school, and through the sports program was a real education for my son, since graduated and doing well. This helped him towards a more adult, cynical view of the world, as is called for today.

        It was a multi year battle. We won, so he won. I was under no illusions about the skels infesting academia going in.

        tl;dr got the money from these skels

        • “Skel?”

          https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=skel

          Is that related to a Skeksi?

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeksis

12. “Without some entity to guard the interest of the whole, the participants will cannibalize one another until the system collapses.”

    We can only hope. If it does happen, you will see rehab programs for the junkies that waste their lives watching sports.

    • Amen to that. I don’t see a downside.

13. Kind of off topic, but international soccer is ranked by country. South Africa is 63rd, Kenya 65th, none of the African nations in the top 10. https://www.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/men?dateId=id13295 Personally, I don’t find negros entertaining anymore in sports or movies. When 7% of the population (black males) commit almost half the violent crime, it’s amazing the country isn’t more racist.

    • i have almost zero tolerance for nigs on tv or in movies now. used to love blacksploitation, too. guess i still do, but just have no desire to see it right now.

14. Zman, sportsball stories are passe. i know you know this. 1i get the very strong sense that many of your readers here (admittedly the younger ones predominantly) have no idea of the class structure of american society. there’s a little tension in your early posts, when you mention your grandfather. would you say your place on the social ladder is higher than his? only getting at the phenomena of class being innate, and existing.

    it looks to me that class identity trumps racial identity, going by what’s going on right now. and that has to be noteworthy; a strong possibility that ‘class’ is as much a part of our DNA as ‘race’ is. has there ever been a systematic analysis of homo sapien classes? is class just another way of saying ‘caste’?

    • The revulsion many have for America and social mobility is precisely because it allows nobodies to rise up and upper classes to fall down

      It’s easy for one guy out of nowhere to make it, but very hard for his offspring to keep up to that level. Whereas upper classes have proved that their genes have stood the test of time and that the string of successful people in the family is testament to that

      I saw that Z had a review of Giant the other day. I didn’t read his review, but the above was always my take on it, and that Trump was something of the James Dean character. But in America, the upper classes really haven’t had all that much time to prove themselves, the country being somewhat young, so there is always a half ass somewhat fraudulent quality to even our upper classes.

      • that goes along with being founded by people who weren’t top tier in their own countries of origin.

        • I take offense to that. Among my ancestors were some of the best distillers and horse thieves in the old country. 🙂

      • Interesting discussion. We often don’t discuss “class” here but clearly it exists. While America was the first (?) to officially prohibit titles of nobility, a rejection of the old country, of course social castes exist. They probably always will. Certainly it’s possible to move up (or down) in the rank ordering. While money is nice, it doesn’t guarantee a good life. It can certainly insulate you from the bumps of life, but it can’t insure a good outcome for (say) one’s offspring. That IQ reversion to the mean works just as well for the upper crust as it does for the urban poor. Rare is the offspring who achieves the talent/fame/etc of his parent. Yes, little Tommy or Elisha gets an expensive education, but a middling BA even from a pricey academy doesn’t prove exceptional, or even average, intellect. Sure, there will be pretend job at Daddy’s firm, or a slot of no consequence at some non-profit. But the point is most of the spawn of the rich are net zeroes to society. The super-rich aren’t exempt for the risks of life that money won’t insulate you from.

    • And people wonder why the aristocracy in Europe obsess over their family trees and blood lines.

      It was not uncommon to marry on an arrangement, have kids then get divorced and shack up with someone else out of personal preference. The blood line. connections and family asset ties were more important and these people well understood this.

      For the plebs not so much encouraged.

    • Karl wonders if “‘class’ is as much a part of our DNA as ‘race’ is.” Class is a consequence of the natural aptitudes of each person and so class will always be with us.

      The major division seems to be between:
      1. Jobs that require physical exertion or discomfort, and
      2. Jobs that don’t (office jobs)

      A great mechanic may use his brain as much as a computer programmer but since the mechanic has to get into uncomfortable physical positions and get dirty, there is a divide between the mechanic and the programmer.

      The office job guy looks down on the physical job guy. The physical job guy resents how easy the office job guy has it.

      • The programmers work product can be sold many times, even millions of times.

        • Yes, that’s true. But only if there is a market where the invested research, design, programming, testing, etc. can be replicated many times. This is why, on a per-unit basis, the cost of the latest fighter plane’s propulsion control system will be rather more expensive than, say, the engine control module on your automobile. It’s possible to both those products required roughly the same amount of research, code writing and testing and so on. But in the former relatively few are built, while the latter is being produced in the millions.

      • Class is more about manners and social customs than job type. By your logic, surgeons are lower class and receptionists are upper class.

        • Excellent point.

        • Drew: Important point. I grew up middle class, and no one I knew ever went hungry. The wealthier got new cars at age 16 and others got used cars, and some of us had use of parental cars some of the time. Just about everyone worked part time.

          I first met many people from prep schools when I went to college. And I then worked a summer for an extremely wealthy family who used The Social Register for arranging playdates for their children. I learned quite a bit about what manners were appropriate over those months (upper class casual nudity in front of servants/strangers seemed to be one of them).

          The biggest difference seemed to be far less emphasis on appearance (old or worn furniture that had been in the family for years was treasured, not hidden) because the presumption of genetic superiority was taught almost from birth. The difference between those who inherited family wealth and those who were newly ‘comfortable’ was fairly stark, even in the confines of The Country Club in Brookline, Mass.

          Race didn’t even enter into the equation – pre-1980, no one who wasn’t White would have been considered upper class, regardless of income. And that’s purely an American trait, to conflate income with class. I later worked for an English family of faded gentility. They didn’t have much money or property left, but their behavior and manners were light years away from, for example, wealthy New Yorkers or Californians (who I also met for the first time at college, and pretty much loathed, and yes, they were almost all Juice).

          • Living in Taiwan in the late 90’s, I had an English friend who belonged to exactly the class you mention. His grandfather had lived in Burma and he himself was born in India, though after independence. He spoke fluent French and dressed better than many of the increasingly slovenly foreigners in the area. Never once did I see him in shorts, despite the torrid weather.

            I was sharing a house with a few others, including an “English” girl of Hong Kong descent. One evening my friend and I were sitting at a table outside a McDonald’s conversing about nothing in particular when my housemate walked by. I introduced my friend to her and she was immediately cold and took her leave. Being a naive Yank, I asked her the next day if I had read her reaction correctly. Oh yes. She told me that as soon as he spoke, his RP told her he came from a colonial background, and as one whose parents were from Hong Kong she felt an instant dislike.

            This guy’s family, from what I could gather, had been reduced to fairly modest means, while her family had benefitted greatly from British rule and the opportunity to emigrate to the British Isles. But she still felt herself the victim of his class oppression.

            An impartial observer could see that he had tact and manners, while she was the type to wake up in a stranger’s bed after a night of boozing. Yet, she still assumed for herself an air of superiority.

          • Thank you for this 3g4me. There once was a time in our culture when people would congregate IRL and exchange stories like this as part of normal conversation. And this type of storytelling was highly beneficial on many levels. It propagated wisdom. It was entertaining. It was memorable. It forged bonds between strangers. In many ways the internet has killed that, which is incredibly sad. I don’t drink, but I would frequent a neighborhood pub if I could still find such an experience. Alas, nowadays, all I find in US bars are drunks.

        • Can a trash collector who is well mannered, well spoken, well read and knows classical music ever be “upper class?” Don’t know.

          • Yes. My hard drinking, potty mouthed cousin, working as a golf course groundskeeper in flyover country, is probably the most intelligent member of the Noname family.

            Either sober or drunk, he is always witty, erudite and informed on the subject of conversation (or he listens attentively until he can contribute).

            He knows which fork is to be used during the salad course, does not use the word “got” while writing or “at” at the end of a sentence and is one of the few people who can not only spell “Kierkegaard” (without spell check), but has read his works.

          • For what its worth, there’s a Frasier episode about this.

        • Class is signaling behavior that takes an entire upbringing to have the nuances imprinted on you.

          Almost impossible to perfectly imitate, no matter how much you earn or what you do for a living.

          This goes across all class variations, not just the upper echelons.

          Honestly, you could just as well say “tribe.”

          • Ah, but a “tribe” is out of fashion as a term. Nowadays the American Indians are all Peoples or First Nations. Never mind that they never had a government or a city and lived by the river fishing for salmon like itinerant homeless peasants…

          • When I was in graduate school in Philly I went on a couple dates with a guy from old money. The second date we went out to dinner and when the check came i had the distinct impression he was waiting for me to pull out my wallet to split the check. I was living in a studio apartment the size of a walk-in closet while this guy’s family (most people, especially Z, would recognize the name) owned a professional baseball team. The cloud people, especially the old money ones, really are not like us at all. And he was a weirdo to boot.

      • I prefer to labor. If I didn’t I think I’d become a scumbag.

        I resent the office guy who thinks labor is for plebs. To my mind that attitude is on the criminal spectrum, i.e., laziness and cunning. The office guy who will get on the floor and get his hands dirty when needed is OK.

    • The communists thought the Great War would become a class war. Nationalism trumps Class. The traditional nation is descendant on race.

      • I was trying to think of a way to test Karl’s idea that “class identity trumps racial identity.” On one hand, the entire white/whitish elite have embraced BML and on the other hand, some successful whites identify with their less affluent co-ethnics.

        The fact that the media molds everyone to be anti-white confuses the question as well. Are there any examples of a racial class bonding with their less affluent co-ethnics?

        • Rich blacks almost always associate, politically and socially if not in the literal sense, with the black underclass. That billionaire’s son at U Texas or whatever who was marching for BLM was a great example; literally the 1%, marching with the oppressed about how repressed he was. Or, every sportsball jogger, or Michael Jordan only giving interviews to blacks.
          Of course, if you don’t have the right melanin content, that’s illegal and gets you sued and harassed, so hard to think of examples IRL for the non-jogger (except asians and dot-indians, though call-center-not-casinos have caste issues that preclude easy examples).

        • i was thinking how token blacks sell out their own people, like the mayor of chicago, jesse jackson, etc. so they can keep their seat at the table.

15. Only tangentially related, pardons… but…

    I hated that Lennon song, Imagine, and that R.E.M. song Losing My Religion. The excommunication of Christian faith has made room for the state to move in to fill the void, giving us Saint Floyds, Wokeism, Pope Obama.

    Losing My Patriotism, is that a song? I smiled widely when I heard that the American basketball team lost a game in the olympics – to the French! The woman lost a soccer game too! 🤣

    The real John Wayne would never have rooted for the French over the Americans.

    • Speaking tangentially, I’m still laughing at that bitch from AZ who got booed off stage at TP USA

      If you haven’t seen it you have to

      If you watch it over and over, noticing something new each pass through, it provides 20 minutes of pure entertainment.

      What I like is at the end when she starts talking about how she’s going to win, she gets a dreamy faraway look in her eye. So you know she is thinking, if I can only get past these losers in the audience, I can reach my promised land, every great person must deal with adversity.

      And when she’s walking briskly off stage she goes the wrong way

      Then the stupid basketball halftime type music starts playing

      It is just too funny on several levels

      And it’s the first time I ever took notice of the platitudes of a “conservative” event. “We the people”. “Our founders empowered us”. I can just see Hannity saying the same stuff

      I was laughing all morning

      • I thought the “listen to me..”.. “why are you not listening to me?” repeats were best.

        It was the exact echo of a hectoring shrew in a school classroom. Its how they all think, they just normally don’t get booed and it doesn’t show.

        “We the people” indeed.

    • The real John Wayne was named Marion Morrison and his toughness was an act, a make-believe.

      • “The real John Wayne was an act.”

        Who cares? You miss the point. Thus is so of most icons, archetypes, heroic caricatures. You gonna tell me Clint Eastward, Achillies, and Hercules were fakes too? Who cares? Make my day.

        • exactly duke. Its like gitprop “Forget The Alamo”. Its not about exploring and debating the “truth” about our icons and historical figures; its about destroying them. The process is the point. To enter such a debate is to cede frame and lose.

          Its all to render them inert so our oral history and folklore can go fallow and then be replanted with blackwash and identity politik.

          Who we are as a people and our shared history is not about the exact details of some person or event.

          The tell is always there. The rainbow coalition of academics never find “New Evidence” that supports a positive vision of our stories.

          Its ALWAYS deconstruction to be replaced with three black lesbians doing algebra or noble savages who were any day now about to invent solar power except MacArthur ordered them bombed with small pox blankets.

          I don’t know another culture other than western whites that seem to enjoy following the long noses into the guilt mines of their own history to find another layer of sin.

          Unfortunately, the NPR-NYT ivory tower revisionist history is like catnip. Too many whites would rather sound “smart” than honor the story of their people. Lately its seems everybody is super smart.

          I’ll take John Wayne slapping those hysterical bitches and mowing down savages and bandits and then smirking off a round of whiskey any day. Interesting thing, for all JW’s not-a-real-tough-guy he was still “bad” enough to lose his namesake at the SNA airport.

          Taking a knee won’t save you from what they want. Which is why remember the Alamo still applies.

          Also, to keep it OT, JW had a scholarship to USC* but lost it when injured in a bodysurfing accident. Not exactly peak snowflake. *Nobody is perfect

16. any sports market which doesn’t have a massive fanbase in china is doomed to fail.

    something tells me american college sportsball is in this category.

    • Astute observation. I’m rapidly losing interest, and perhaps not enough years left on this mortal coil to see it all unfold – but the (de)volution will be interesting.

17. So what is going to stop the runaway train that is turning college football into a mega business enterprise run by an oligarchy? Is it rational to presume that the political actors in DC are going to suddenly acquire sanity and pass a law banning monopolistic practices in the US economy? One could argue that the very act of believing that DC will become sane is, in itself, an act of insanity among the population at large. As so, if everyone is insane, what next? The answer is the age-old remedy of collapse. It’s coming, sooner or later. And I often argue that sooner is better, because higher bottom. And don’t be in a big city when it happens, of course.

    • A country that is too weak to rein in a complete dork like Zuckerberg has to over compensate in the toughness department by beating up the little guy like those 1/6 protectors.

      Pathetic

      • Both anxiety & repressed anger are building as a result of the avalanche of crazy coming out of DC. In ancient Rome, this was defused with spectacles like gladiator fights. And violent sports can provide a similar tonic, especially if it leads to a bloody display occasionally. We’re not that far from Road Warrior’s Thunderdome and it would be magnificent if we could Zuck and Gates in there as a death match. If we’re going to hit bottom, let’s do it in style.

        • Killbill is kinda busy wiping out most of humanity with his patented shlomo juice. Plus there’s a farm or 2 he has’nt bought yet to starve the rest of us, so give the guy a fuckin break. Mark’s up in the spaceship getting personality implants. Scheduling problems for all concerned.

    • Barring a miracle, collapse has to happen, otherwise the future is like a large dairy operation: confined to your stall consuming what Farmer, Inc. feeds you, Government Sancho coming around to give you antibiotics, clean up the dung, and milk you dry. If you aren’t culled out first, that is.

    • “So what is going to stop the runaway train that is turning college football into a mega business enterprise run by an oligarchy?”

      Disinterest.

18. Thanks. I’ve always been confused about how college sports work in the US.

    I can’t say your column changed that, but now my confusion is now on a higher order.

    • College football = Serie B but no money

      Pro football = Serie A and lots of money

      And only way to get to A is to go through B first, there are no other substitute leagues or training grounds

      Make sense ?

      • Yeah… but no.

        How does anyone get an idea like: “we’re a university, but also a pro sportsball club?”

        It makes as much sense as chess boxing.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK5TQSKmS3o

        • The “students athletes” at the big schools are essentially in their own world. They have a class schedule put together that is much easier than what the average student takes and tutors help them with those easy classes. Roughly 90% of football players would not meet the academic requirements for the regular student body. Some schools take this farther than others and occasionally if a situation blows up the NCAA tried to crack down. North Carolina had a series of essentially fake “African American studies” classes about a decade ago. Almost no work was required a football and basketball players were getting A’s for turning in papers with two or three semi-literate sentences on them. The only reason this blew up was word got around campus this was a fake class and non athletes started signing up for the class.

          • ‘North Carolina had a series of essentially fake “African American studies” classes about a decade ago.’

            How does one distinguish this from a normal African American Studies class?

        • They’ve bastardized the concept of a university by allowing it to be infiltrated by pro sports concerns

          Preachers lost. Pimps won.

          • Yes – and to be honest, I’m just indulging in a bit of idle trolling; for all the bile I’ve heard piled on college sports, I’ve rarely heard anyone suggest you separate the two: if you kid is good with a swine bladder, enroll him in a sportsball club. Where you pay membership fees. And train outside school hours.

            And maybe, if he’s good, he could get recruited by corporate sportsball.

            That way, you’d get rid of the Mickey Mouse-coursework Barnard mentions, and probably most of the sportsball wokeness too.

        • “University” is a high-end lodging & leisure enterprise that converts third-party debt into income – and ideally, long-term assets via tax-dodging endowments. Athletic facilities and other infrastructure amenities are cover for leveraging the public balance sheet for private revenue. But its not just sports revenue, but tuition and fees (student loans).

          My alma mater in my era was staunchly against the “country club” trend. So we lived in concrete bunkers with no A/C. That changed very quickly when the snowflake generation and their helicopter parents were tiger-momming them into cloud status. Now the place looks like a golf resort.

          Sportsball is an important amenity. Come for the indoctrination, but stay for the lifestyle. The whole thing is built around rent-seeking gubmint cheddar while acquiring subscriptions (“students”) to debt agreements.

          The market for student loan acquisition is competitive, there are many nice hotels. So the “university” is constantly having to build-up the amenity pool to attract those assignments of debt.

          Most sportsballs lose money in the normal sense of things, but they are loss leaders like breakfast buffets or “resort credit” and much of those losses are attached to the public balance sheet anyhow.

          • Assuming letter grades are still de rigueur – an A+ for the cynicism and truth

        • Part of it is historical. In the ancient times before the 1970s, professional sports in America were dominated by baseball and boxing, neither of which were collegiate. Baseball and boxing were working class sports. In these ancient times, professional feetsball was tiny and barely profitable, but collegiate feetsball was culturally significant. Only a few Northeastern Coast cities had professional sports teams at all, but every state, nationwide, had a college or university that substituted for a pro team that locals followed. It was only after the invention of television that professional feetsball became a popular and profitable sport, and since professional players had to come from collegiate teams as there was no minor league as in baseball to draw talent from, college football began changing to tap a lucrative market. Admissions to college had an effect on this as well in the postwar period. College was for a very small upper class prior to the war, thus not very marketable to the working class. After WWII, and especially in the 60s and 70s, college became accessible to working class children and this marketable to the new white collar alumni in a mass market.
          It wasn’t planned, or conscious. It grew organically until suddenly it became a monster.

        • “Yeah but that doesn’t make any sense”
          —
          Sounds like you understand it perfectly.

          Maybe part of it is that people who are not American Whites do not derive as much identity from their collegiate alma mater? For instance, every doctor that I’ve visited who has gone to Ohio State has their diploma framed in a prominent location in their offices with big arrows on the wall pointing to it (I kid, somewhat). I always found it kind of pathetic, not much better than bragging about where they buy their groceries.

        • As these things do, it started with a sensible idea: physical education, the idea that competitive physical exertion helps you learn persistence, how to practice, and overcoming challenges whilst not becoming a lardass. As always, someone figured out how to make a buck from it, financialized it, and now we have illiterate 70 iq rapists at elite edumacational instant-tutionz because it’s a hundred-billion-dollar per year business. “Welcome to Costco, I love you.”

19. The remote is the couch potato’s friend. I’ve watched two full periods of hockey during NFL and soon to be collegiate commercial breaks.

    Girls softball could break out as a TV sport, as college football and basketball go into network and cable decline, IF they slow down the pitching. Watching one strike out after the next quickly gets dull.

    • Girls softball could break out as a TV sport,

      The problem is not the specific kind of sportsball, the problem is that video games, YT-videos and fagging on FB are more fun.

      (Girls’ softball? Really? I hereby revoke your mancard, it is null and void! Please return your male privileges to the nearest patriarch.)

      • Every now and them I’m in some “captured” place where girls softball is on, it’s like watching junior high kickball game.

      • what if they played in ‘uniforms’ like the beach volleyball women wear?

        • Haven’t watched much softball, have you? 😉

          There’s a reason “she looks like she played a little softball in college” is always followed by “if you know what I mean, and I think you do.”

    • Women’s college softball is like every other women’s “sport”: it could get amazing ratings, but only if they played topless.
      As to Severian’s point, the attractiveness of the occupation is reflected in the attractiveness of its female participants. Women diesel mechanics look like they do, and trendy location cocktail waitresses look like they do, on account of this principle.

20. I think the biggest change in he economics literature over the last 20 years has been the empirical failure of the Chicago school thinking on antitrust in favor of the approach of guys like Jean Tirole.

    It was possible, as recently as the late ’90s, to be relaxed about combinations in industry. Well, the Chicago people said, there is some optimal size of a firm, see? And firms that get inefficiently large will attract nimble and efficient competitors who will take advantage. So, the problem solves itself.

    Tirole and others made the point that there is no ocean of risk-takers out there just waiting to exploit inefficiencies like sharks follow blood. Instead, capital is looking for a return and does not much want to see itself obliterated. In this environment, the incumbents can use market power to affect the game and foreclose market entry. One of the “efficiencies” of bigness, it turns out, is the ability to rig the game. And that’s not even counting the ability to bribe government officials, which is also something that happens when you get big.

    We were wrong about that, bigly.

    • Do you have any ideas about how these markets can be regulated?

      Feels like Chicago school interpretations of market regulation are entrenched in legal and regulatory bodies.

      • Crudely, with a hammer. Anyone with more than 10, 15, 20, whatever market share gets broken up.

        The real shift in thinking is simply the general disbelief in scale economies. They don’t really exist, but everyone thinks they do.

    • Chicago big brains missing the reality of how Chicago itself has worked for decades sums-up academia pretty well.

      • True enough. The school that regularly loses students to the local vibrancy also assumes that legal corruption and regulatory capture won’t interfere in the equilibrium outcome. Though in defense (since someone above said we have been conditioned to have loyalty to our alma mater), what’s the point of theorizing the outcome of fraud and force? That’s just “the guy with the gun (or guy paying him) wins.” Where is the fun in that analysis?

21. “I smell socialism”. Said some libertarian somewhere.

22. Kind of a microcosm of our society where the government isn’t strong enough to impose order on the tech companies

    • They are strong enough. They don’t want to because the tech companies have bought them off, at least the ones who don’t have some stupid ideological aversion to giant tech companies running the world.

      So, Congressman, have you thought about what you’ll do after public service? I mean, you don’t want to scrape along on a lousy $200,000 a year for all your life, do you?

      • That’s the same thing, no?

        A government that can be bought off is not strong enough to impose order

        • Strength is the wrong term to argue. It’s whether the government represents us, or serves the interests of the politicians. We have lost that battle.

          • Still a form of strength from my perspective

            Strength of character in other words

            A government filled with people of strong character would have slapped down Zuck by now, but they’re weak —morally, spiritually. And that’s what allows them to be bought off.

          • Good point, Falcone. It’s also a lack of strength to not fight back against a corrupt system that ostracizes anyone not on the take.

          • Falcone:

            The corollary is that a nation filled with people wouldn’t be on Facebook in the first place, and therefore it wouldn’t need regulation.

        • Governments are always bought off. It is their nature. The only question is who does the buying off?

          At least with a monarchy or oligarchy its more obvious.

          The fantasy of a democracy for most believers is that the majority vote is the buyoff for the politician, whereas in reality that is the entry ticket you just need to pick up by whatever means necessary, to get into the ever running cash prize draw that is the payoff inside politics.

          • Yeah but in our democracy we have people from the middle class so desperate to raise their station they will do anything including allowing themselves to bought off with something as cheap as tickets to a basketball game.

            We just have a bunch of low rent shits in our “democracy” being bought off by nouveau riche merchants

            Stinks top to bottom

            Give me the aristocracy any day

23. A guy I know from my hometown played for a D-1 National Championship team in the 70’s. One time his father, who wound up as Chief of Police in our town, went down for a game. When he saw the opulence of his son’s apartment, he went nuts, accusing him of dealing drugs. My friend, who played in the defensive backfield, told him “if I get an interception, you’ll understand what’s going on.”

    Sure enough, he picked one off that day. So after the game, his dad is waiting outside the locker room. My friend comes out after showering and changing. Immediately, a couple alumni go to him and shake his hand, congratulating him for his pickoff. He then walks over to his dad and shows him that they’d placed in his palm a wad of cash.

    • Actually, I am happy he got that much. Suffering brain damage and permanent disabilities for a worthless degree, when you help generate billions for the college complex, is absurd. My neighbor played D-1 in the 90s. He has already had a hip replacement and is awaiting replacements for both knees. He takes responsibility for the choice he made to play and doesn’t blame anyone. But I still feel he was exploited terribly when I see him hobbling down his driveway to get the mail.

      • My brother played D1 football in the 1980s. He had 2X knee injuries that were poorly repaired by today’s surgical standards (ACL replacement + lost knee cartilage). He had a knee replacement a few years ago.

        He said he valued the football experience over his destroyed knees. Said it was awesome being a high school and college football player. Loved getting angry and physically beating the sh1t of other players. Misses the experience to this day.

        • Sorry, Al Bundy came to mind

          • I’m giving you a real life data point (not a fictional TV one).

            Bro wasn’t a pro prospect. After football got a scholarship to grad school from the NCAA because of his grades. He is now a partner in a regional construction company with a normal family and middle class life.

            Saying that these football players are being exploited in college because they are only getting scholarships, partying their tails off and hooking up with all sorority girls is a cope of insane proportions. The only terrible thing about this situation is when it ends (and they have to get normal jobs).

          • I’m not so sure, Acetone. I think the “cope” is from disabled former college players who are justifying their current pain and possible future CTE by convincing themselves that “partying their tails off and hooking up with all sorority girls” for 4 years was the way to happiness. I did enough partying and hooking up in college to know it was a path to despair that was thankfully outgrown, and without suffering lifelong disabilities.

          • To DLS: I’m not saying NCAA business practices are good (they are terrible). And sure, kids that share your view can simply step away from this situation if they want. Its not compelled participation.

            But I think you (and others) are too quick to dismiss the things you get out of sports, even the dangerous sports like football. Modern life is boring and dull, particularly for men. The immediacy and presence felt when competing for something is energizing, much more so than earning a pay check (link video semi-related). And women like guys that are athletes. Guys that are athletes (even in mediocre club sports) have an easy time getting girls. And its not even like you have to turn down getting paid later in life to play sports. Sure you don’t get paid much in college but lots of people (like my brother) got paid at normal jobs later. Basically everything I described above lays out a path to happiness for men and boys.

            Also, the arguments I am making here for sports participation are the same one for joining military. Some guys are just bored with normal life and want to join the military to shoot people in the desert. And its not really all that risky (for the last 30+ years at least). Better than staring at a screen all day for alot of people.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWn68_lLRFU

          • Acetone, I agree with the positives you lay out. And I realize those positives occur whether the universities make a fortune or not, as unfair as that may be. Even many professional athletes would compete for free if sports did not monetize like they do. I know I would. I played enough football and baseball in high school, even though I was mediocre, to understand the glories. My main issue is football, and CTE, in particular. No amount of fame or sex for four years could compensate me enough for the very real probability of living 60 years with disabilities, or the last 10 years of a shortened life with scrambled brains.

      • College football is a classic example of exploitation, if anything is. The NFL gets a minor league without having to pay for it, or for the players, the Universities rake in tons of money, alumni get to strut around with “bragging rights” over their rivals, and the players get a little cash under the table, a worthless degree (if they graduate, which many do not), and some female attention, if they haven’t been rendered impotent from the steroids. Because, hey, they’re “amatures”, playing for the glory of old alma mater. What an obscene joke. It’s no coincidence that such a messed-up system would attract scumbags like Sandusky. All of these factors have been present for a long time, but yeah, Z-Man is right – all this really slipped it’s leash sometime in the mid-eighties.

24. I don’t know what is going to happen with college football. There is no minor league and due to the exposure any owners would have to concussion lawsuits, no one is ever going to start one. Youth football participation rates have also been declining rapidly. My guess is that the number of colleges who field teams will be drastically reduced. A number of small colleges in the lower divisions may go out of business as a long term result. ESPN is essentially a co-owner of the SEC now and is willing to cover the financial penalties Oklahoma and Texas would have to pay to get out of the Big XII. This blatant conflict of interest is being ignored by any government regulators. Long term it would probably be in ESPN’s benefit if someone blocked this move.

    Basketball is a different situation. The NCAA tournament is more popular than the NBA playoffs now. More people watched the National Championship game and Final Four than watched any game of the NBA Finals. The NBA has started their own minor league and is offering to pay players rather low salaries to play in it rather than go to college. This league is not popular and now that college players can get endorsements the best ones will make more money doing that than in the minor league. On its current trajectory, the NBA will have to move a division to China just to avoid the embarrassment of teams playing in mostly empty arenas in the U.S.

    • There’s that too

      Going to be a large shakeout because the dwindling number of players available will only support a smaller league made up of only the top programs. The lesser programs will go bye bye. I guess it’s similar in the academic realm where the only the top schools are in contention for those few prized high achieving black students, leaving everyone else with only the bargain bin

      Football is a white and black kid thing anyway. Not seeing lots of asians and Hispanics lining up to play in high school, and if they do they won’t be all that good — broadly speaking.

      • I have heard about small private schools who play NAIA sports where 30-35% of the student body participates in sports. Most are getting small scholarships, but just want to keep playing after high school. Football has the most athletes at any school and those players will get the biggest scholarships. I can’t see most of these football programs surviving the decline in available players for the sport. The rest of the sports are likely to suffer without the revenue and donations they get from football.

25. > It will soon be like tennis, in which promising players turn pro once they hit puberty. Also, like tennis, the interest from the general public will decline. A few stars will make millions, but the rest will be used to maintain a system that was busted out by the usual suspects.

    The hopelessness of the Tennis model can be seen in the fact that a forty-year old man is still in the top ten. As much as I like Federer, the reason he is still in the game has less to do with his talent and more to do with his generation, along with Nadal and Djokovic, being probably the last generation where the institutions heavily invested in young, promising talent in a way that could sustain the sport.

    A #100 tennis player should be able to live comfortably if the #1 player is making tens of millions, but that’s simply not the case. It’s a myopic view that looks at present sales while ignoring how they are going to keep sales like that twenty years from now.

    A shame, since Tennis is one of the few sports that tries to foster wholesome role models. Attention whores like Osaka might ruin that too though like McEnroe, amusing as he was, did decades ago.

    • Money in tennis is a lot better than it used to be and is still bad for a pro sport. When Jimmy Connors was in his prime he would give lessons to people who wanted to pay a premium to hit with him for an hour. Back then only a handful of players could make a living at it, now it is at least 60-80. Still terrible,

      • Yeah but I will say this.

        The top 10 tennis players are better than the top 10 in any other sport. Every match is like watching Jordan vs Byrd. The system selects for only the very very best.

        The quality at that level is superb. Only thing I have seen that comes close is the World Cup where the best of the best from each country puts on a great show and “great product on the field”

    • You have a decent life if ranked #100

      You can make about $100,000 to $200,000 a year, in addition to the babes

      But without a sponsor the traveling and payroll becomes a problem

      But that also assumes you only always hover around #100 and never have a breakthrough year etc

      • The expenses players for pro tennis players are significant. They pay their own coaches and travel. A player who makes $150k in a year, probably has around $60-$70k left after expenses. A player at that level will get modest endorsement income and probably be out of the sport by 30-33 years old. A limited number can get jobs at country clubs giving lessons after retirement, I don’t know what the rest do.

        • The rest go back to their burg or village and get fat and become forgotten

26. As an alumnus from a traditional Big Ten university and formerly huge college sports fan, the WTF event that really hammered home what college sports is about was the conference admitting Maryland and Rutgers. Neither is anywhere near the furthest east school (Penn State), so the midwest regionalism and pride was killed off. Neither even had a big football program. It was pure greed of wanting to get the Big Ten Network in the DC and NYC markets. It was completely appalling to everyone I knew who was a fan of a school in the conference, and it was when I stopped watching so much college basketball and football. I’m pretty much now down to just the basketball tournament in March.

    • That TV network is looking like a white elephant now. The economics behind were simple. Get the network on the basic tier in states with a Big Ten school. That means every cable home gets taxed a buck, whether they watch or now. Now with cord cutting, the cable operators are dropping these deals. The Big Ten network will be a premium optional channel. Since few people watch it, that revenue stream is about to collapse, but the cost of having doormats like Maryland and Rutgers will remain.

      • Several people pointed out once the Oklahoma and Texas discussion started last week that from a streaming perspective the Big Ten would have been better off adding Iowa St. than Rutgers. No one cares about Rutgers football, they have no natural rivalries in the conference and create a travel headache for the other teams. With the Big Ten network most of the big sports fans I know who subscribe to it, drop it in March once college basketball ends and don’t add it again until football starts in September. Hilariously, the Big Ten still claims they try to enforce some sort of academic standards to adding more schools. They are not interested in Cincinnati because they don’t meet the academic requirements, but they would love to add North Carolina.

      • College basketball can still garner interest in that mid-majors can still make a run, It’s still fun to see a farm kid play good basketball that has no shot at the NBA make a name for himself in the tournament. The amount of infrastructure in college football is staggering!

    • Was this before or after Jerry Sandusky? Shifting around conferences to chase money is less reprehensible than covering up a serial child rapist on campus to protect the precious feetsball program, the cult of Joe Paterno, and the millions of dollars they brought in.

      The facts of that case and the reaction of college feetsball fans to rally around Saint Joe is a symptom of a culture in terminal decline.

    • The teams went full mercenary and so go the conferences. There is one level of cringe, which is a bunch of corfned white boys worshipping inner city blax – but at least they were from their state. Then there is the next level; cornfed white boys kneeling toward ghetto rats all from three or four urban centers in CA/TX/FF.

      March madness is peak cringe now, like the NBA, with teams that reflect almost nothing of their region. Gonzaga in spokane WA comes to mind.

      The olympics, having succumbed as well, is similar ugliness to watch. With players trading nations like practice jerseys in order to improve their chances – and our nation being a multiculti carnival of paperwork americans with sappy music backstories of overcoming oppressions and racisms precisely because they are not white.

      As a former college athlete it saddens me to see the decline. But then the entire institution needs to burn and be rebuilt so its hardly reasonable to hold onto my nostalgia of sports. This is the crux. Our people need to let go of that nostalgia and get on with the burning and staving of these perverted institutions. Send your kids to the local sandlot to play and teach them to build things. The rest is gone.

27. No one has a solution to the monopoly problem. Everything rides on an entity existing with a monopoly of force or power to impose their will.

    Someone always has to hold the whip hand.

28. How do you think the new unions (Northwestern won their case IIRC) and the ruling that college players must be compensated for the use of their likeness play out? I see it doing what unions and such always do — a few big firms can afford it, all the others are priced out. A ray of hope: since there are a zillion schools that only have teams to be the creampuffs at the start of the Power 5 schedule, maybe they’ll to back to being truly *amateur*… A man can dream anyway.

    • My bet is most college boards would like to be free of college football entirely. They get pressured into it by rich alumni who think it is good for the schools. I can easily imagine a time very soon when we see leagues like the MAC downgrading their athletic and eventually dropping out of semi-pro ball entirely. Of course, the ticking time bomb is college debt. That may wipe all of them out.

      • From your lips to God’s ears. I’ve always wondered who these rich alumni are, though. Not denying it happens — I went to a school that very seriously considered dropping football altogether, as the cost of upgrading the stadium etc. to meet divisional requirements wasn’t worth it. And then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the stadium got renovated, the football team got this stunning new practice facility — I mean, it was magnificent (I’ve heard; not that we students were ever allowed near the place) — and all of a sudden we were a regional powerhouse and got into those Christmas week games you sometimes catch on ESPN 8, the Ocho…. for a season or two, and then “we” went right back into the “why do they even bother having a team?” discussion, because anyone that was any good either got hired by a big school (the coaches) or transferred (the players). What a bizarre way to throw your money around…

      • It’s more likely the ticking time bomb of college debt explodes on the taxpayers than on the universities. It’s beyond belief that schools with billions in endowments aren’t responsible for student loan defaults. In what other industry does the government warranty a private product. Pharmaceuticals come to mind.

      • Biden’s infrastructure bill will bail out colleges like crazy. Just like Obama’s funded grievance studies for a decade.

      • There is a famous quote by [] something to the effect of:
        “A University Administrator has three duties: parking for the faculty, sex for the undergraduates*, and football for the alumni.”

        *Having attended two large universities, I would add parking for the students, as well.

    • The Northwestern football players who tried to unionize lost badly.

      • I didn’t know that. Thanks.

29. Don’t forget about gambling. Without gambling, I think football in general would disappear. They certainly wouldn’t get the TV deals they get now.
    As for watching a bunch of joggers run, jump and play catch with a child’s toy, I never understood the appeal.

    • Most of my colleagues watch solely for Fantasy Football, and switch channels in a mercenary way based on who is on their roster. I would bet that the vast majority would not have the attention span to watch an entire game anymore.

      • I used to waste a lot of time on sports watching, especially the NFL. I still play in a fantasy football league formed 20 years ago at my former company, but only because it allows me to stay in touch and socialize with old colleagues. If not for that, the NFL would be as dead to me as the WNBA.

30. I was at a party last night and they were talking about our pro baseball team. The first time in my life I couldn’t contribute or make small talk. Other than that japanese freak hitting homeruns and pitching also, I know nothing.

    I have either come a long way or fallen a long way from sports interest. I do like boxing, is Tyson due for another title defense soon?

    • David
      I think it’s called maturing and putting away childish things.

      • Yes, bound to happen to some of us. These pozzed enterprises have also given us a nudge with all the blm, woke politics. Even hockey with knee taking and cringy cuck bowing to trannies is just too much.

        Not to mention the overly produced entertainment backdrop at all games. Constant barages of drivel on the scoreboard, kii-a-trons, and public messages and intermissions. Finish it off with the military recruiting .

        • It’s so jarring to watch hockey from the 80s. Even with the ads on the dasher boards, it was still fairly devoid of all the gimmicks. Only Chicago was using a train horn for goals. Most rinks still had an organist play during breaks. And if you went to a game, your senses weren’t constantly assaulted by light shows, trivia contests, t-shirt guns, and throbbing jungle music.

          • I’ve been watching old TV broadcasts of baseball from the late 70s-early 90s, (some with the broadcast commercials intact) and the difference in the announcers not pandering to the negro/leftist political propaganda that modern announcers are reading off the script today is stark, much less seeing the ballpark without rap blasting, jumbotrons, spectators that don’t look like circus freaks, etc.

            It’s like seeing an entirely different sport being played by a lost culture. The gulf that separates us from them is frightening.

          • Baseball and hockey were much better back then. Politics aside, “moneyball” and sabermetrics have done a lot to ruin baseball for me. In the 70’s and 80’s, you had lots of different managers using different strategy, base stealing, set plays, creative platooning, etc. Now you have a bunch of roidheads taking pitches waiting for a walk or a homerun ball. It may be better percentage ball, but it’s boring as hell, at least to someone who grew up with the faster, more wide-open game of the 1980’s. Give me Ricky Henderson and George Brett any day.

          • Amen. I had the honor of meeting the Golden Jet, Bobby Hull, at the old Montreal Forum back in the 80s. I also caught a game at Maple Leaf Gardens the year it closed. I find St. Louis still nice in ambience with the organist and the trumpet player doing When The Saints Go Marching In.

            The new Forum (whatever it’s called this week) in Montreal also uses the organ a lot and they always have good anthem singers unlike the trash in most US venues, notably that awful black woman with the blue glitter on her lips doing the Tampa games.

            Of course nothing beats Jim Cornelison in Chicago.

            Totally agree that the experience at the rink in most cases is a most unpleasant aural and visual assault. One reason I was happy Montreal beat Vegas, even though the Habs only had 3,500 fans with face diapers while tens of thousands were crowded outside maskless.

    • My sports interest has collapsed. Ten years ago I’d listen to a baseball game at night while working, watch football on the weekends and go to a game once in a while with friends. Now, I scan the sports sites once a week just to have some idea of what is happening, so I can make small talk, but my interest is just about gone now.

      • You and me both. I was still interested in MLB, the NHL, and the Premier League until March 2020. It only took two weeks of abstention to flatten my curve. Of course, all the St. Floyd (pbuh) monkeyshines wound up as the coup de grace .

        As someone else mentioned, I’m now confronted with awkward moments as old friends attempt to discuss something related to sports and I have no idea what’s going on.

        • Twenty years ago I was newly married and poor. I couldn’t afford any decent cable package, and I got used to watching the Cubs on WGN because it was free. After a while I started caring about them, so I bought an official Cubs “away” hat (blue cap with red bill). I would wear it proudly.

          Well, I still have the hat. But I stopped paying attention to MLB when I realized that A-Rod was making $25 million per year. Now, I am not a communist, but something literally snapped inside of me when I heard this. Additionally, I realized that ‘roids were helping these devils destroy all the old homerun records and such, and I simply stopped watching baseball. I literally cannot care about it anymore.

          I no longer wear the Cubs hat when I’m out, because I’m afraid a real fan will ask me what I think about the Cubbies latest win streak or whatever, and I literally won’t know what he’s talking about.

          I don’t want to look like a poseur.

      • and the thing is, it just dies on its own, as a reaction to the changes in the sports. it’s not a political reaction based on emotion (which can be short lived). like love, once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.

        • Yes, once you quit watching, for whatever reason, it’s remarkable how quickly you start wondering why you were ever interested at all. I still like horse racing, along with an occasional hockey game, but I spend about one-tenth of the time watching sports that I did even ten years ago.

      • The elevator in my office would show sports stats on my way up in the morning.

        That was more than enough knowledge for whatever sportsball was in season.

        In the brave new world of the Wuhan Tyranny, I don’t go into the cube farm. Added bonus, I no longer pretend to care about what any of my colleagues think about anything.

      • Decades ago, Seinfeld had a joke about how modern sportsball watching is basically rooting for clothing. Now it’s clothing on people that despise us. Once you detach and see the absurdity, it is impossible to go back.

      • This is exactly where I am after 40 years of being a passionate NFL fan. My interest evaporated over night once we were made to worship our black deities.

    • This is a real problem in red states. I guess similar to the dot mil and thin blue line stuff, the sportsball proxy for community and culture linger here in spite of the obvious mercenary kneegrow rosters with their campus rapey habits and after hours vibrancy.

      Buncha good old patriots in Tennessee that forget all about diversity, borders, economic sabotage from globohomo etc as long as tailback devontarious makes 5 yards a carry.

      At least in coastal blue shitlib states I’ve lived in the sportsball apathy by Whites was more in line with the reality of being already dispossessed and fandom was mostly a poc thing.

      I know longer read the espn box scores for superficial white guy water cooler small talk fodder. I call it all “cuckball” which wins me no new friends but does work to sort out the suicidal white cucks in the group from the doughy ourguys still trapped in the habit of fanfom, so I take that as a win.

      • Yes, the fact that football fandom was one of the few areas of life, despite the Vibrancy of many of the players, that still allowed white men to display unit loyalty, form group bonds and friendships, and have a good time doing it is one of the reasons that it had to be politicized and destroyed. They just couldn’t stand it, even though it was channelling these emotions and loyalties into a harmless area; white men were enjoying themselves, and that just couldn’t be allowed. Our adversaries will come to regret this, eventually.

        • Yep. It wasn’t enough to squeeze the white boys out of playing, they had to humiliate them in the stands as well.

          They are going scorched earth. When will we stop being paying spectators of our own demise and retake the field?

          • When the Right embraces ideas, cultural reform by force and kicks the money boys to the curb.

            At that point when they embrace authority and someone steps up to lead.

            Our people are all either “muh family and no one else.” or Ghost Nation/Grey Man and that is a losing proposition.

            Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way doesn’t mean everyone get out of the way and no one lead or follow.

        • They’re already going after hiking and visiting national parks, out to desert those pastimes

          Soon they will be going after fishing and hunting. Probably do it through licensing

          • Hunting is a problem for them to infiltrate. Blacks do not like the outdoors, its as bad as swimming. Then, 1/3 of black males over 30 are prohibited persons unde 18usc922, so are they going to bow hunt, maybe spears? Then there’s the lack of group activity – you gonna have Daqwarius hop in some stranger’s climbing stand or something? A lot of hunting is on private lands, you’ll be at the “cold dead hands” point when paleface landowners have to let stranger armed joggers come hunt on their land.
            Finally, there’s the compliance. Figuring out tags and draws and points keeps a lot of people out, you’re going to have a bunch of black bow-hunters on public lands who can figure out the regs, then that “invasion” of white male space is going to be 3, maybe 4 poc per state.

    • Shohei Ohtani. He’s kind of a national hero in Japan. I actually sold one of his cousins a roadbike a couple of years ago. The surname is kind of unusual in Japan and i didnt connect it at first.

31. When I was a kid, I was friends with the son of the president of UVA. Its when Jessie Jacksons’ son was playing for the Wahoos. My friend dared me to approach Jackson, who was there with us in the presidents box. Jackson and his body guard were arrogantly keeping away from us crackers (actually, my friend was Jewish). But I went up and slapped Jackson on the should and said, “good job, MR Jackson”!

    Oh, highschool. Good times…

    • you should have said ” hi mr jackson, my name’s nicky ray earle, you know my uncle!”

    • But I went up and slapped Jackson on the shoulder and said, “good job, MR Jackson”!

      WHITE: It’s not just a color, it’s a way of life.

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