“Amateur” Intercollegiate Athletics …

According to reports, the average number of viewers for the CFP Championship Game (Georgia/TCU) was a “disappointing” 17.2M people.  There needs to be some perspective on the amount of “disappointment” to be assigned here:

• The game was a blow-out.  Even college football fans like I am left that game as some point along the way.  I cashed it in when Georgia led 59-7 with about 10 minutes left in the game.  Those “defections” dragged down the average viewership to be sure.
• Some good news is that over the 3-game CFP tournament, the average viewership was up to 20.6 million fans per game which was a 9% gain in audience year-over-year.
• Despite the blow-out, the CFP game averaged more viewers than the average NFL regular season game from last year (16.5 million viewers).  Notwithstanding the “disappointing numbers here” the CFP Championship Game will likely be in the Top 50 in terms of TV audience for calendar year 2023.

ESPN pays $500M per year (round numbers) for the TV rights to the CFP – – and that number will increase significantly when the CFP expands in the near future.  It may be that other “broadcast partners” join in the merry making after the expansion but whoever is putting the games on TV will put more money in the coffers of the folks who run and organize the CFP.  What I would like for you to do this morning is to look at that amount of money and simply acknowledge that the idealistic model of intercollegiate athletics where spunky students – – who are really aspiring scholars – – use athletics as an extra-curricular activity to help them get the most out of their four years in college.  That model is not much more than a fairy tale.

Moreover, the fairy-tale nature of that model has been in place and obvious since the dawn of intercollegiate athletics.  The earliest competitions were in track and field and/or rowing; it did not take long before teams at various schools began to use “ringers” on their teams; the “ringers” may or may not have been professionals in the sense that they were paid for their “services”, but the “ringers” were also not spunky students who aspired to become scholars.

The bottom line is that college sports was never as pure as the driven snow and now that more than half a billion dollars is about to become attached to one aspect of college sports, it is lunacy to expect that purity will spring forth and thrive.  Look, more than 60 years ago when it would have been frowned upon if a college openly paid for ringers to come and play in that school’s uniform, those same colleges found it acceptable to invent the athletic scholarship.  To this day, I believe that an athletic scholarship is nothing more than a payment (by the school) for services rendered (by the athlete).  And athletic scholarships have been around since the late 1940s.

So, maybe it is time for everyone to look at college athletics for what they are instead of what someone somewhere once fantasized what they ought to be:

• Athletic scholarships are awarded to students for reasons that align with the major purpose of the university only by happenstance.
• Athletic scholarships require the continued efforts at an acceptable level of performance by the student.
• Athletic scholarships afford an educational opportunity to athletes many of whom would never be part of a college environment absent their athletic skills.
• Athletic scholarships are – in fact – some compensation for the athlete’s time and effort.
• Name, image and likeness deals belong to the athletes and not the school.
• Without rules or oversight, name, image and likeness deals have already devolved into corrupt practices and will maintain that trajectory.

And yet, I enjoy college football and basketball – – at least until the score is 59-7 with only 10 minutes left in the game…

Moving on …  Here is a Tweet from humorist Brad Dickson:

“News item: ‘Iowa officials are considering making it legal to hunt raccoons year-round.’ Who says there’s nothing to do in Iowa?

Let me book a flight to Des Moines as soon as I can …

I ran across a “listicle” – – that is an article based on a listing of something or other – – and it sought to rank the QBs for fourteen teams in the NFL playoffs.  Not surprisingly, Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and Joe Burrow are at the top of the list while Brock Purdy and Daniel Jones are at the bottom of the list.  But as I looked at the list, I was taken by the fact that only 4 of the 14 teams in the playoffs had to deal with the absence of their main signal-caller for part of the season:

1. Jalen Hurts missed 2 games
2. Dak Prescott missed 5 games
3. Tua Tagovailoa missed 4 games
4. Trey Lance and Jimmy G missed a combined 12 games

[Yes, I know Daniel Jones did not play last weekend but that was a meaningless game where the Giants had their seeding in the playoffs chiseled in stone before kickoff.]

The other ten teams basically had their starting QB “on the job” all the time.  In addition, if you look at the eight division winners from this season – – those are the teams that will host at least one playoff game – – six of those eight teams had their starting QB on the field every week:

1. Josh Allen – – Bills
2. Tom Brady – – Bucs
3. Joe Burrow – – Bengals
4. Kirk Cousins – – Vikes
5. Trevor Lawrence – – Jags
6. Patrick Mahomes – – Chiefs

It would appear that there is truth to the adage that quarterback is the most consequential position in American sports.

Finally, let me close today with two contrasting views of Oakland, CA:

“The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn’t any there there.”  [Gertrude Stein]

And …

“The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, it’s there.”  [Herb Caen]

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………