I'm not sure why this is to tell you the truth, though I think I simply prefer the college game's aesthetics. Despite making inroads recently, the NFL lacks the creativity of the college game. It is more brute strength and dominant speed. The game's best players tend to equalize each other on the field. The game becomes a grind. Explosion plays are rarer than they are in college, where explosion plays are a great part of the game and fun to watch.
I watched a little of the 49ers/Broncos game this evening. I liked the 49ers' LaMichael James when he starred at Oregon. In the pro game, he's just another player. He'll be fine and likely have a good, if short, career. But the explosiveness I'd come to unrealistically expect from James wasn't there tonight. Everybody on the field was as strong and fast as LaMichael James.
Once his first-team line exited the game, Denver's defense stopped him cold. That's the pro game. It can be as brutally boring as soccer.
The pro game likely isn't as corrupt as the college game because it doesn't have the NCAA in a corrupt leadership role. Businessmen run the pro game, and all you can make of it is what it is--a very expensive business venture that very rich elites promote as entertainment. With television deals and sellout crowds, they make a lot of money after paying out initially for players and ownership rights. They take a share of everything, including hot dog and beer sales in some places, I'm sure.
If the pro game is corrupt it is corrupt in a way completely different than the college game. Call it a more subtle form of corruption.
Pro players are well compensated, though their careers are short. A certain honesty necessarily steers the game, I think. Everybody wins--until they lose. That's the nature of real business.
Here is what happens to unfortunate former college players at the moment of truth--the moment they learn the future is uncertain and a big contract is unlikely.
One of the more fortunate ones, James signed a four-year deal for $10 million guaranteed.
Decent money, but it comes with risks people don't like to talk about. Like all players, professional or collegiate, he might lose his future good sense, as head injuries happen. Football, particularly pro ball, has a huge PR problem and even greater financial risks for the future. The game is dangerous, like mining and fighting fires. The social costs of football are being weighed for the first time by critics. People are striving to make the game safer.
The NCAA likes to pretend the game is more than a business. Sure, if select kids want to get an education while playing the game at one of the 120 big-time programs in the US they can honestly do that. It's up to them, though. The scholarship is a good deal for a kid who can snag one. The education, the very degree, promises nothing--for a football player who earns one for free or for a scholar who pays to play the education game.
The NCAA reaps billions in profits off the labor and risks its college football athletes take, and if the football idol the institution has created and used sells his autograph his career is potentially over.
Two equally abhorrent things are happening here. They are relative to one another only to the degree that capitalism allows them to be. The college player is being exploited like a low-wage earner at Wal-Mart. And regular college kids are getting ripped off by a system that forces them to pay too much for an education.
No, I shouldn't like big-time college football as much as I do.
TS
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