BY RON HART
OPINION —
It’s that time of year: football season, when we can put aside our political divisions and just start hating each other for the college football team we support.
Football is the modern-day “bread and circuses,” meant, as the Roman politicians did, to distract the proletariat from their shenanigans. Bread would be Mayor Mamdani’s “free” grocery stores. The circus is football.
In the South, football is akin to a religious experience. Psychiatrists will tell you that football satisfies our primal human thirst for war. But, just to be on the safe side, the government gets us in a bunch of wars, too.
A majority of Americans now consider football our national sport, replacing baseball. We enjoy more violent sports, like a Republican appearing on “The View,” Mixed Martial Arts on the White House lawn and, our latest, Whack-a-Mullah.
Only in the South do you see a high school with test scores in the bottom 15th percentile play in a new $40 million football stadium across the street from a guy selling boiled peanuts, airbrushed Elvis portraits and Confederate shot glasses out of the back of his pickup truck.
“It just means more,” as the Southeastern Conference motto goes.
Like the fear of AI consuming us all, traditionalists fear payments for name, image and likeness (NIL) will destroy college football. Panickers have done this for years. They feared the automobile, integration, nuclear power plants, the internet, global warming, Y2K and social media would ruin mankind. And to date, they’ve been only right about social media.
The South has even embraced Australian punters, which is the only certain path to full citizenship in Alabama.
The SEC looks good again this year, with Texas beating Ohio State and Michigan having to cheat to beat Western Michigan. I am more afraid of LSU than I am of AI.
And speaking of artificial intelligence, after trashing football as “slavery,” leftist Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed is acting as if he loves it going into an election. This is the clown in the “circus” part.
NIL now defines college sports. This billion-dollar business of college sports no longer has free labor. If college football were “slavery,” Ole Miss is paying its quarterback $4.5 million in reparations.
Colleges that have profited from tax-dollar-assisted, monopolistic bureaucracies (like themselves) and the NCAA for a century have taken the labor of a few great athletes to help build their costly fiefdoms. No more, but some balance will need to be calibrated over time.
Liberal colleges fear that if athletes are allowed to learn to make money for themselves in the free market, they might graduate Summa Cum Republican.
Donald Trump, who is a capitalist and a college sports fan, has chimed in. But I am not sure whom New Yorker Trump pulls for; I presume the Syracuse Orangemen.
Coaches are paid $10 million a year these days. Bill Belichick is a man who had committed his whole life to football, was paid a lot and failed. Belichick did not even have a high school girlfriend until he was 72.
Paying players fairly is costly. Just ask the billionaire owner of the 49ers, who’s so broke he can only afford $140 trailer park hookers now.
The infant and opaque NIL rules are a perfect landscape for Lane Kiffin of LSU. Lane tried to get two players who had played in the NFL. It’s Louisiana, where half the state is under water, and the other half is under indictment.
NIL is the free market, and it has been fair. LSU’s top NIL recipient to date is former gymnast Olivia Dunne. She racked up $9.5 million. She is so young, hot, blonde and rich, it will be all Trump can do not to name her his next press secretary.
There is a wide range of Division I NCAA players, from the running back at Alabama to the punter for Kent State. Clearly, not all “student athletes” are in college for their education. The free market recognizes that; so must the NCAA.
Some colleges still seem to be doing it the traditional way, with true student-athletes. I saw where the Davidson College football team did a charity event visiting a foster home, signing footballs and meeting all those orphaned kids in North Carolina.
“It was heartbreaking and really put things in perspective, seeing all those faces with absolutely no hope,” said one of the orphans.
We love sports and now gambling is ubiquitous. Sydney Sweeney did sexy ads for a gambling website in which she is invested. She’s half-naked in football and other sports equipment, showing cleavage and looking fantastic. I do not gamble, but I did check out the site. For some inexplicable reason, I bet $100 on the Twins.
