Thursday, January 11, 2024

Breathtaking stupidity from the NCAA

 The President of the NCAA is saying that nobody can say that the University of Michigan didn't earn their "national championship" fair and square.  OK, let's give it a try:

The cheating Michigan Wolverines didn't win their championship fair and square, since in the past couple of years, they've been caught with recruiting violations and stealing signs from their opponents in violation of NCAA rules.

One would figure that the president of the NCAA would have enough self-awareness to realize that a lot of people would assume that a program subject to multiple rules investigations might not have won fair and square, but apparently not.  So I think we can dispense with the notion that the NCAA is about "student"-athletes who might know how to think.

 But that said, college football is dying to me in many ways.  Is this a sport, or a competition to see who can have the most tattoos?  Is this an amateur sport, or are championships going to be determined by the amount to which corporations and alumni sponsor their team's athletes?  It's never been pure as the driven snow--the 1987 MSU Spartans that I cheered on to the Rose Bowl had a lot of players on the muscle juice, and a few of them were arrested for very real crimes--but the mercenary spirit of the game seems to have grown exponentially since I was a young pup.  It's pretty sad, really.

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