With more grapeshot than Captain Jack Sparrow on a 3-day bender, we’re unloading a Spanish Armada’s worth of broadsides. So much to discuss since last post; since the Hurricanes are front page at the mo, we’re leading with college football, then soccer, then a bit of baseball batting cleanup.
******
A few months back Bomani Jones proposed that we want to be lied to when it comes to major college athletics. He posited that the amateur “cachet” of the NCAA brought up warm images of young adults wearing letterman sweaters, carrying a stack of books during the week, and fighting for the honor of alma mater and country on Saturdays. He pointed out that if football and basketball players actually started getting paid a stipend, a living allowance or whatever the hell you wanted to call it, as some propose, that the luster would be lost. To highlight his point, he used the example of minor league sports and their virtual irrelevance in the bigger sports discussion, whereas college football and basketball occupy prominent places in the headlines during their respective seasons.
Well, if David Ridpath gets his way, Jones’ hypothesis may get put to the test sooner rather than later. In talking to Tim Keown, he outlines his case for privatizing BCS football. Essentially, the big boys whose gate receipts, TV contracts and the like can support football on their own would be allowed to privatize their programs; the rest, most of whom use student fees to subsidize largely unprofitable athletic departments, would keep their sports, but essentially drop down to 1AA. The upper tier would become a de facto minor league for the NFL, with the athletes at these BCS schools becoming contract employees, charged with only playing “foo’ball.” The lower tier colleges would retain their amateurism, but no longer compete at the highest levels of the sport. If this plan were ever enacted, it would be fascinating to see the results. If Jones is right, fans would start ignoring the sport in droves. My suspicion, though, is that at the end of the day, fans (to borrow the Seinfeld-ism) are rooting for laundry, and would stick with their favorite team. Hell, at least a third of the fans of any major BCS power never even went to the school. So Keown and Ridpath may be on to something here. It certainly couldn’t f*** up The U more than it already is.
*****
Gotta love FIFA and it’s never-ending parade of corruption. According to this article on Grantland.com last week, FIFA is fairly well useless when it comes to actual governance and only functions to run the World Cup every four years. This portrayal reminds me of no group so much as the Hollywood Foreign Press, a shadowy organization whose members you’d have a hard time picking out of a lineup, but who preside over one of the biggest shows of the Hollywood awards season. Except, you know, the HFP’s inherent conflicts of interest and under-the-table dealings don’t end up with people getting killed.
*****
An underrated bonus to having a USMNT boss like Jurgen Klinsmann is his experience in melding styles. One of the big complaints about Bob Bradley was his perceived unwillingness to bring more Latino players and Latin American style to the team’s lineups and tactics. One of Klinsmann’s greatest successes in 2006 was instituting a flexibility in style and and player selection that allowed him to meld Polish-German players like Podolski and Klose into the squad in 2006, and allowed Joachim Low to incorporate Arabic, Brazalian, and Spanish players into the 2010 team. If the Gold Cup final showed us anything (other than the currently huge talent gap between the U.S. and Mexico) it was the passion of the Latino soccer base in this country. By roping a few more Central and South American players into playing for the Red, White, and Blue (seriously, couldn’t someone in the U.S. government have fast-tracked Andy Najar’s naturalization papers? Priorities, people!), maybe the U.S. will start closing that talent gap with the rest of the world.
*******
Baseball umpires vs. players: Both are unionized, entitled entities that the MLB higher-ups cower before. People talk about how level-headed the refs are in other leagues; the difference is that not only are umpires penalized for overreacting and getting in a player’s face, but the player is fined/suspended for badmouthing the refs. Since both sides are being penalized, both sides stay under control (mostly). It reminds me of teachers and students. Teachers are often in the role of referee, e.g. what’s happening, what caused it, who was the instigator, etc. To extend the analogy to its logical conclusion, the league is then cast in the role of school principal. A good principal recognizes that with regard to student-teacher confrontations, there are instances when the teacher is at fault, and others where the student is at fault. Unfortunately, Selig and Co. resemble no one so much as Principle Belding, a doormat who’s getting run over from both sides.
******
Lastly, 2 weeks ago Dan Steinberg took Nationals’ color man Rob Dibble to task for insinuating that women at a baseball game could be talking about anything other than the game. Dibble’s possible male chauvinism aside, what makes the continuous talk by the women suspicious is that NOBODY can talk that long about baseball. The sport’s just not that interesting; that is, unless you’re a rabid Sabermatrician. In the immortal words of Emma Stone, “Oooh, burn!”
