NCAA football, 2013-14

[Ed Anger]

Yessssssss it's official:  Bobby Petrino back to Lville.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/eye-on-college-football/24403353/bobby-petrino-says-louisville-is-his-destination-job

Lolz

[The Minsky Moment]

I don't want to clog up the thread by responding to lots of other comments, so I will summarize.

I agree with grumbler's proposal.  Part of the problem in football particularly is the the way the NFL structures itself.  First by using the draft procedure to fix prices for entering labor.  Second by setting draft rules that effectively force prospects into the collegiate developmental system, thus saving themselves the cost and trouble of establishing such a system.   

In a world where good prospects without college skills go directly to professional leagues, college football would still be very popular.  Quality of play would still be very good at the top programs and school spirit and rivalries would still generate interest (just as Army-Navy and Yale-Harvard do now regardless of how good the teams are).  It would be a little less intense and perhaps a little less lucrative, and not IMO for the worse.

One more thing - I use UT as an example earlier.  That was not intended to single out UT (or its alumni  ) but just as an example of what many institutions are doing.  I picked UT because there was CNN data and because of its otherwise strong rep scholastically.  I suspect that if I were in Valmy's position as an alumnus, I would wear the colors and root enthusiastically for the Longhorns.  But I would like to think that I would feel a lot better about it if I knew what was happening on the field didn't involve any compromises off the field.  And the only way to get there is to stop accepting the legacy of the past, and agree on mutual disarmament.

[Admiral Yi]

If I were a UT alum I would buy season tickets right down by the chaps-and-thong squad.

[Valmy]

Yessssssss it's official:  Bobby Petrino back to Lville.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/eye-on-college-football/24403353/bobby-petrino-says-louisville-is-his-destination-job

Lolz

That is amazing. 

[dps]

Yessssssss it's official:  Bobby Petrino back to Lville.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/eye-on-college-football/24403353/bobby-petrino-says-louisville-is-his-destination-job

Lolz

That is amazing. 

What the heck has the Louisville AD been smoking?

[jimmy olsen]

If you replaced the current system with something else, you would not really be replacing the current system at all - you would be discarding the current system, and creating a new one that nobody would care about. Just like the NBA D-League. At best, you could hope for the level of support you see for AAA baseball, but even that would be unlikely, since minor league baseball, for as tepid as it's support base it, is at least based on decades and decades of history.

Tepid?

The Pawsox stadium is always packed. Is that an anomaly?

[Valmy]

Tepid?

The Pawsox stadium is always packed. Is that an anomaly?

Well if we are comparing it to Michigan Football sure.

The Pawsox are middle of the pack for AAA teams as far as income is concerned so I wouldn't think they are atypical.

[Eddie Teach]

Is "Interuniversity" hockey big in Canada?

Not really.  University teams will get a small amount of coverage, a few hundred to a couple thousand fans at games, but the major developmental league is major junior hockey.

Now that I am Dorsey again, I can finally say fuck you for stealing our hockey team. 

Actually, no one really cared except to comment that it sucks we aren't a 4 sport city anymore. Which is probably why we lost the team.

I think "Big 4" is a lame misnomer foisted upon us by Northeastern media. The NHL is as irrelevant as MLS, the Premier League or a professional ultimate Frisbee team. 

[Valmy]

I think "Big 4" is a lame misnomer foisted upon us by Northeastern media. The NHL is as irrelevant as MLS, the Premier League or a professional ultimate Frisbee team. 

This is why I hate all Southern NHL teams and I always root for them to fail.  Pearls before swine I say.

[Eddie Teach]

Dude, you're talking about hockey. Snobbery makes you look foolish.

[Valmy]

Dude, you're talking about hockey. Snobbery makes you look foolish.

I just want to see crazy passionate fans doing crap like destroying downtown Montreal and throwing octopi on the ice.

[Rasputin]

Dude, you're talking about hockey. Snobbery makes you look foolish.

qft

[Valmy]

Dude, you're talking about hockey. Snobbery makes you look foolish.

qft

Eh whatever.  I don't want to see teams whose fans do not give a crap win.  Boringsville.

[Eddie Teach]

I'm sure Thrashers fans cared if they won or lost. I just didn't know any. 

[frunk]

It has to be financially viable as well. It has to "work" as a league in its own right, at least to some extent.

Like I said, what you propose is fine if you want to propose a system that just destroys college sports altogether. But if that is the case, who cares who it is done?

You are arguing like there is some compelling argument being made that we have to preserve college sports for the sake of the major professional leagues, and that argument is being made by people who care about college athletics, as if your typical college sports fan is a college fan because they want to make sure the NFL has a good way of developing players.

But this has been my point in response to your posts (and maybe you don't even disagree with it, and maybe you don't even care):

Proposing a means to replace a particular function of college sports (evaluating and preparing players for a professional career) as an argument for why it would be ok to get rid of college sports is kind of, well, irrelevant. It's like arguing that it would be ok to ban bicycles because people could still get exercise by cross country skiing. It might be true, but who cares? Certainly not the people who care about riding bicycles.

I was addressing why there isn't an alternate feeder league for the NFL and NBA.  It's because it has one, and it's college sports.  The arguments being presented were as if the professional sports leagues needed college sports, which isn't true.  It uses college sports because it can and because setting up a competing system would be difficult, not because it wouldn't have alternatives if college sports didn't exist.

I'm not out to destroy college sports, but I think that because of the money and (paradoxically) the fan's fervor for their school it isn't and hasn't for a long time been about amateur athletes playing for their school (at least in division I).  The players themselves are being paid even if it is through scholarships (and a diploma) instead of salaries, and because the costs for the players is kept low the amount of money that can be spent on everything around them goes up and up.  The dishonesty involved in pretending that the players are "amateur" or "student-athletes" or even participants in the student body in the same way as everybody else at the school bugs me way more than anything else.  I don't see them or the sports program around them as being representatives of the school in the same way as someone whose primary reason for being at the school is education, and so I find it weird that it would engender so much more affection than any other professional sports team.

Of course there are exceptions to this, and there are athletes and sports programs that are about getting an education and/or be a part of the school as something other than hired guns.  I don't see that as an increasing trend though.