The former star quarterback/safety/punter of the Cal Tech freshman football team takes me to task here for my ecstatic preview of the upcoming college football season.
Wherein he recycles his usual bag of neurotic tropes against the game:
* Nike is evil and the University of Oregon is now Nike U., run by the malevolent and despicable Oregon alum Phil Knight, whom Deemer once interviewed and found disagreeable. Also a Stanford Business School graduate, Knight has famously endowed that fine university as well as the University of Oregon. He is also known to have put up the cash so that Oregon State University could keep its excellent baseball coach, Pat Casey.
Corporate patronage exists in the university system? I had no idea.
Let's focus on the real issue in plain sight here. The endowment/patronage system, coupled with increasingly high tuition costs at every university in the land, is creating a new class of permanently impoverished former college students with mountains of debt and limited opportunities for advancement. That system aids two elements within the structural makeup of the education hierarchy: Bankers and college administrators. The very notion that in order to "succeed" in life one is required to accumulate massive debt is a cruel joke being played on everybody.
It is better to have a rich uncle named Sam. The merit system is all but dead because there are too many bright, unemployed people out there and too few good jobs.
The nation needs more poor intellectuals like it needs another hole in its head. Perhaps one advantage that may come from this, likely long after I am buried and forgotten, is that the disenfranchised intellectuals will rise up and one day seize control of the instruments of power. Education along with health care will become available for all and not just for the privileged.
* Corruption is rife in college football. I agree. It is also rife in Congress. I'm more worried about Congress than I am the simple-minded game of football, which after all is merely an entertainment. We are possibly losing the fight against corruption on an enormous scale, one that matters, one that causes our worries about mere games to pale. Corruption is everywhere. There is no getting around it. To eradicate the corruption in big-time college football the designers and funding bodies of all our institutions must first deal with the grieving spirit of the body politic. All of it is linked to the almighty dollar.
Football is a gnat on a fly's ass, in other words. It is sitting in the third-class section of the collective flight to ruin that is the corruption inherent in the flailing U.S. empire.
Well, I can be a generalist, too.
* Dancing in the end zone upsets Deemer. He apparently doesn't realize that dance steps have been outlawed in college football for years now. To dance is to be penalized and draw the wrath of the head coach, never mind the player's position coach. The corrupt NCAA made that rule in case you are interested.
Oh, how today's players would love to dance if they could.
*The "thugs" versus "character" issue in college football is an interesting one, albeit rife with racial overtones. There are thousands of college football players in the U.S. I don't have a clue as to how many are thugs or how many are "character guys." I read the sports pages and see that players year in and year out get arrested for a variety of criminal behaviors. Many, particularly recently, are kicked off their teams.
I don't read much about the upstanding guys in college football because they're seldom written about. I do recall a story awhile back about Oregon's John Boyett volunteer-mentoring in his hometown high school every summer, so I know there is at least one character guy at Oregon.
Bless us.
* Deemer has an issue with the student/athlete and sees a landscape wherein the athlete is perhaps getting a free pass academically. I've been to college. I've seen many students who failed to grease their academic wheels. Few of them were athletes, perhaps because the numbers were disparate, but most failed because they were too immature to study and take academic training seriously. In my own case, I nearly flunked out the year I played college football at a small Oregon school. I'm absolutely certain this was because I didn't apply myself to the work.
I eventually made things right.
At the University of Oregon, I watched a trust-fund kid or two flunk out, laughing all the way. Here's a story about an Oregon, yes, "student/athlete," who did a bang up job last year. In the classroom and on the field.
The same kid has intimated he left Los Angeles to escape some poor scenery and bad acting in his old neighborhood.
*As for Deemer's constant comparison of futbol and football (soccer and American football), I'd like to say that I too think soccer is a wonderful sport, though the American Major League Soccer organization is another cruel joke. Millions around the world can't be wrong about soccer, particularly those in the traditional soccer nations.
Soccer, however, is not remotely related to American football and should be part of a separate discussion. All they have in common is the name football.
My short video on the subject of Charles Deemer will appear here soon. Watch it or turn somnambulant.
TS
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