So this claims. I have no insight into whether he is exaggerating the importance of the recent decision, but its an interesting claim. I, for one, would probably welcome the outcome–though the consquences of these things are hard to predict.
Posted in Uncategorized
27 responses to “The end of college sports as we know it?”
-
I would say his last paragraph is dead on: either the NCAA wins or gets this dismissed, or it’s game over for the current financial structure.
It’s at least very interesting to contemplate that they’re fighting it now b/c they more or less know they missed their chance to settle it in a way that would have contained the damage. The other possibility being that they think they have a solid chance of winning. I’d love to see more legally informed comments on that point.
Finally, it’s also interesting to think about what any of the apocalypse scenarios would mean in terms of the future of College sports and their relation to Unviersity system more broadly. Would this have far reaching enough effects on the overall balance sheet, or the perception of that, to make lots of schools who are currently doing the ‘big time college sports’ thing decide it was no longer viable? I can see lots of ways in which this will make things less profitable for the parties currently making lots of profits. And it may also make it more expensive for the parties (quite a number of them) not really making much in the way of profits. The former, I think, can deal. The question is whether the hit will be anything like big enough so that the latter cannot. And here, the fact that what’s at play is the schools’ ability to continue to profit off their most marketable players ad infinitum is veeeery interesting.LikeLike
-
Emmert was a fantastic chancellor at LSU, but he’s lost all moral authority since letting Penn State keep their program running.
Given how that shook out, I’d be surprised if the lawsuit goes all the way through. Sports is just too powerful an idol. And if O’Banon does win the results will probably just be that universities further subsidize their sports teams (and the athletic foundations take that much more of a bite out of the university’s donor base).
In any case, it seems like a basic issue of social justice to me. Many of these kids give end up with pretty horrendous health issues just for our* aesthetic pleasure. The graduation rate of the athletes is understandably horrendous as well. If we’re going to keep doing this we need to remunerate them at the very least enough to get a degree in something after they are finished playing for the school.
[*To be clear, not mine. I find every sport but professional wrestling to be almost deathly boring. Why do people enjoy watching other people running around doing various things to differently shaped balls? It’s bizarre. The first generation of computer screen savers were more entertaining. Maybe sports would be worth watching if they played the Bennny Hill theme song during the entire game and also sped up the tape of the people running around and doing things with differently shaped balls? I don’t know. We’d have to try it out.]LikeLike
-
As a non-US-university non-sports-follower, I have nothing at all to say on the main thrust of the article, so I’ll go on an irrelevant digression about its first paragraph: how long are we going to have to put up with the tired metaphor of the dinosaur as doomed by evolution? There’s a good forty million years until we members of the family Hominidae can lecture the Brachiosauridae about species longevity. (To say nothing about the fact that they died out forty-odd million years before any “meteor” caused dinosaur extinction.)
Okay, rant over; we now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion.LikeLike
-
Given the harm that American football does to players’ brains and given that universities and colleges are ostensibly about developing minds, how long must we wait before universities and colleges get rid of the sport?
LikeLike
-
Hi David,
We will probably have to put up with that tired metaphor as long as the world had to put up with the ill-fated Brachiosauridae. It will lumber around until some meteor comes out of the sky and wipes it out.
(sorry, had to do it.)LikeLike
-
[This is off-topic, but I couldn’t resist Jon’s rhetorical question concerning the entertainment value of ball-based sports. The only sport I care about is basketball. Here are a few reasons why I find it entertaining. (1) It’s a great creative outlet, for both coaches and players. I greatly increased my partner’s interest in basketball just by showing her clips of Manu Ginobili. (2) As anyone who’s played a good game of pick-up basketball can attest, there are times when the selflessness and general chemistry of a team is remarkably entertaining. (3) Basketball allows, plausibly more than any other sport, for teamwork to compensate for a lack of individual talent. I remember when the Spurs were cruising through the Western Conference in 2012 and you’d hear respected basketball people gush about how beautiful they were. They took a bunch of cast-offs and built them into a single, super-efficient machine. I don’t expect to convince you, but I thought it’d be worth mentioning.]
So, if things like selflessness, creativity, teamwork,LikeLike
-
Whoops, sorry for the hanging sentence.
LikeLike
-
I don’t know. I just can’t help but think that if something’s not worth doing (pointlessly bouncing a ball up and down while running all around frantically) it’s not worth doing well.
As far as selflessness, creativity, and teamwork I agree that these are important virtues. But I get all that stuff from Professional Wrestling, and the story lines are a lot better.
More seriously, I think one of the main civilizational roles of sports is that it teaches us how to lose. You can’t have a functioning society unless people can deal with failure without getting violent. Sports are brilliant in this regard because someone always fails.
This is also maybe why there is something unseemly about rooting for the Yankees? They don’t lose enough? Ted George once told me that rooting for them was like rooting for big oil. I think that’s what he meant.LikeLike
-
Hi Jon, I find your footnote baffling. If you seriously wish to understand why someone might enjoy watching (or playing for that matter) a sport, I suggest you try reading anything David Foster Wallace has written about tennis. “Roger Federer as religious experience” (alternatively titled “Both Flesh and Not”) is a good place to start.
Kind regards,
PhilLikeLike
-
The NCAA is going to lose on this, or the next suit that is sure to come along. The profiteering is outrageous. But the question was whether it would be the end of college sports as we know it. If that means a radical change for those interested in college sports, I doubt you’ll see any change there. Even with some redistribution, it is too way too profitable to change radically.
p.s. Describing college sports fans as people who enjoy watching other people do various things to differently shaped balls is a little like describing chess fans as people who like to watch other people move wooden objects around a table…. 🙂LikeLike
-
I adore David Foster Wallace’s short essays but I couldn’t finish Infinite Jest or the NY Times piece on Federer because I find tennis so painfully uninteresting. The essay just turns into a meaningless succession of words some point after the unbelievable part about his eyes looking like novelty store eyes.
A corollary to “if it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well” might be “if it’s not worth writing about, it’s not worth writing about well.”
There are some really good yogis who instantiate the kind of physical improbabilities that Wallace attributes to Federer. I can get that because yoga is good for your body and soul, but professional Tennis players just wreck their bodies. Why do I want to watch two people wreck their bodies just so they can manipulate a little tiny ball in the ways required by a completely arbitrary set of rules? Professional Wrestlers wreck their bodies, but it is in the service of something noble.
I wish I was joking. I really don’t understand why watching this stuff isn’t painfully boring to everyone else. There’s neither plot nor melody. Feh.
Sorry for thread-jacking.LikeLike
-
If our society treated chess the way it treats other sports I’d find that just as puzzling.
It’s an interesting thought experiment though. Could someone who doesn’t play chess still be a chess fan? The vast majority of people in “Football Town”* don’t play football themselves. This asymmetry maybe says something deep about the nature of the two sports. Maybe not though, as people who watch golf also tend to actually play it, and I can’t think of any deep connection between golf and chess. . .
[*Remember the Coca Cola adds they used to play before movies where the players in the locker room would say that the fans had some kind of magic power to turn the game around and they’d experienced it happening many times? This is like Stanley Fish saying that the real writer is the academic critic writing about the book, not the person who actually wrote the book. What a bunch of marks we are when people tell us things we want to hear.]LikeLike
-
Jon,
It is very bizarre (not to see someone being this smallminded but) to see you being this smallminded, given that your primary role on this blog seems to be to proselytize for bigmindedness. I’m usually a big fan of that proselytization. But this ain’t a good look.LikeLike
-
Oh jeez Grymes. I’m sorry. I’m not serious. Mike has me dead to rights.
I mean, I really don’t get sports, but I fully realize that I’m missing a pretty fundamental part of the human experience here. The Vonnegut’s Martian anthropologist schtick (“moving little balls back and forth” etc.) above was meant to be at least a little bit self-mocking.
You can do that with respect to anything that people value and if you are a great writer like Vonnegut it’s often funny.* But it can also be pretty irritating! I’ll avoid it in the future.
Theodore Dalrymple has a funny essay called “Of Snobbery and Soccer” (it’s in his book Farewell Fear) about his own sports incomprehension and how weird it is being in England during a World Cup. In his heart of hearts he can’t help condescending to soccer fans, but in the essay he realizes that this condescension of his is a pretty serious vice. I wish it was still on-line, because the moral is pretty good.
[*I saw a great talk on Heidegger’s concept of nothingness a few years ago and the guy argued that this kind of thing was what Heidegger was talking about. I don’t know if that’s right, but it’s an interesting idea.]LikeLike
-
Jon,
Perhaps considering it along the lines suggested by Randall Munroe at xkcd might help to start making sense of it?
See here: https://xkcd.com/904/LikeLike
-
“By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac-toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemisty and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music.”
LikeLike
-
Does anybody know the details of the case (or of playing college sports)? A couple of things puzzled me… First, the NCAA had to see this one coming (at least since the Fab 5 – so mid 90’s). I’d be surprised if players don’t (now, as a result) sign away their publicity rights as a condition for playing. Or at least grant the NCAA a non-exclusive right to use their image. Since both pro sports leagues and the players themselves (w/product endorsements etc.) profit off their image, that would mitigate the anti-trust concerns. If there’s such a contractual arrangement, the number of plaintiffs is going to be quite limited – to those who played before the NCAA rewrote the contracts to block such litigation.
The other way the case could easily derail is over class certification. The NCAA will appeal that one as far as they’re allowed (assuming they don’t win outright). The current Supreme Court is really skeptical of class – so in Walmart v Dukes (2011), they ruled that the women suing Walmart didn’t have enough in common to constitute a class. Similar arguments could be made here, at least from a superficial glance at things…LikeLike
-
Good questions, Gordon. I don’t know. But it definitely is an anti-trust case. So I guess the claim is that they were coerced by the absence of competition into signing those agreements. sounds plausible enough to me.
As for class certification, the judge seems to be signaling that she finds the claim of a class plausible enough to proceed.LikeLike
-
Jon,
Thanks, and apologies for the lack of charity!LikeLike
-
IANAL, but I believe the NCAA’s position is untenable because the Sherman Antitrust Act makes it illegal to conspire to depress prices of the players’ images, which is what requiring players to sign the contracts in effect does. See Part I of this post: http://winthropintelligence.com/2012/05/06/student-athlete-licensing-program-how-could-it-happen-and-what-are-the-elements/
LikeLike
-
I thought Jon’s expression “differently shaped balls” was the tip-off.
LikeLike
-
“Sports are brilliant in this regard because someone always fails.”
Unfortunately, my impression of school sports (i.e., high school and below) in the US is that this is becoming less and less the case, that team sporting events are arranged so that one team is the winner and the other is the “lesser winner” or some such stupidity as that. (Granted, my information is all second hand, maybe this isn’t a common trend and only the really egregious cases make it to news articles read overseas.)LikeLike
-
Typepad HTML Email
Wow, Sara. That could not be further from the truth.
Sent from my phone. Please pardon typos.LikeLike
-
I’m very glad to hear it — it was trend that I found appalling to read about, and I’m pleased that the news articles that made there way across the pond were the exception rather than the growing norm.
LikeLike
-
Typepad HTML Email
American high school sports are fiercely competitive. Many American high schools even recruit their players, even though this is usually illegal.
Sent from my phone. Please pardon typos.LikeLike
-
Actually, you’re both right I think. Eric is right about high school sports, some of which is now getting on national cable networks, and our local news reports on all the high school football games, often with video. This goes back a while, too: my high school (in the 80s) kept hiring more and more football coaches (who generally were otherwise qualified only to proctor study hall; they often got put in to teach the lower level science classes).
I think Sara is accurately picking up the state of “youth sports” (at least the part of it that’s not designed to prep people for high school). “Youth sports” culture is this delicate combination of giving all the kids trophies and trying to placate overcompetitive parents. The results often (I’ve coached several teams) involve not keeping score (for younger kids), everyone having some sort of special recognition, etc. etc. There’s periodically pieces about this by one of the contrarian writers in the Atlantic. I’m of mixed feelings about this: there are kids who wouldn’t play in an overcompetitive environment (especially girls), and I think it’s important that kids develop habits that will keep them fit and active, and part of that is achieved by affirming what every kid has done, however incompetently. On the other hand, the kids aren’t dumb: they know that not everybody on the team contributed equally.LikeLike
-
Hi Gordon.
Well, yes. But I think Sara specifically referenced school sports. Surely its not a bad thing that we have community youth sports where participation is trumping competition. But even there, I think the phenomenon in question is much more rare than we are led to believe.
A friend of mine with a 9 year-old daughter was telling me that the girl plays in what is supposed to be a “development” basketball league that is also co-ed (mixed gender, for those of you on the other side of the pond.) She was complaining that the coach of her team, (who in fact is a woman), was not giving the girls any playing time in an effort to make the team more competitive.LikeLike
New APPS 
Leave a reply to anon grad Cancel reply