As usual,a movie dealing with sports tries to be serious but ends up making me laugh with it's condensed version of making serious matters comical.Take for example the movie The Program about college football that aired last night on Starz that was made 15 years ago.It wasn't as funny as the college basketball movie that Robbie Benson was in back in the 70's but it still had it's moments especially when the steroid player went ape shit on the groupie tutor or whatever she was hanging around the football dorm.The guy was over 300 pounds and he was like a gymnast trapeze artist and it took how many guys to subdue him and she was flying around like a rag doll in a lions den.
OK,I wish someone without an axe to grind would write a thorough book about college football top to bottom.The good,the bad,the ugly and all the audited costs involved showing balance sheets,graduation rates,crime coverups,illegal alumni kickbacks to players and coaches etc.
Colleges in both the movie version and real life do one heck of a job smoothing things over and painting a pretty face on how football prigrams are run covering up the horror stories.I can see right through the snow job they perpetrate saying that these kids are all qualified to be in college in the first place.They practically have to have a pit crew with tutors,den mothers,host families,guidance councilors etc.just to have them function.Then the credits-degrees-courses these kids pursue that are crafted and arranged for them are friggin laughable.It used to be the joke that an athlete took courses like basket weaving and golf green maintenance engineering and got extra credit-work study keeping the alligators out of the gym.Now it's womens studies,Nelson Mandella 101,Martin Luther King 101,Malcom X 101,Bella Abzug 101,Bea Arthur-Maud 101, diversity training studies etc.All fuzzy fluff social science B.S.Then when the athlete can't even show up for these simple classes the tutors and the mothers of these athletes get all upset saying,what will become of you if you don't get an education.These mothers actually believe that even if you get a degree in this crap that it's as valuable as some math-science-engineering degree.
I have seen this take place 100 times where I live in the twin cities of Minnesota.Players play a few years then retire and stay in town because they are doted on ,get in deep trouble with drugs,financial dealings,criminal activity,assault,domestic abuse you name it.All of a sudden,the next thing you know they are all civic activists,non profit group ordained ministers,youth councilors,inner city advocate group heads etc.and they make 50-100K a year collecting some form of government check to do this make-work.One guy that was a player was put in the athletics department at the U and got canned for wrongdoing and the next thing you know another government agency in town paid him 400 K to do a study on how the city could better serve youth in parks and recreation.It was revealed that the guy turned in a few pages from a scribbled notebook as his study.
Then to top it off,not a week goes by on those ESPN round table talk shows where idiots like Mike Wilbaun and Woody Paige go nuts on some kid either not going to college and signing a multi million deal or leaving college early to sign one entering the draft etc.They are all mad because these kids won't get an education when you damn well know they fit into getting a degree in the fluff social science courses at best where the best they could do it to use the degree to imposes themselves as a worthless public servant ripping off the tax payers.
I think it's time for the NFL to treat college football like a minor league.Tell the players that they don't have to go to these fluff classes if they don't want to and pay them a little and give them college-vo tech tuition down the road if they want it after they finsih their playing days.Why waste an athletes time preparing for a career in sports taking away from practice making him go to social science fluff courses.Maybe if a kid washes out of sports after a few years and then goes to college he can pursue a more meaningful degree when he can put the time and efort into it without distractions.
OK,I wish someone without an axe to grind would write a thorough book about college football top to bottom.The good,the bad,the ugly and all the audited costs involved showing balance sheets,graduation rates,crime coverups,illegal alumni kickbacks to players and coaches etc.
Colleges in both the movie version and real life do one heck of a job smoothing things over and painting a pretty face on how football prigrams are run covering up the horror stories.I can see right through the snow job they perpetrate saying that these kids are all qualified to be in college in the first place.They practically have to have a pit crew with tutors,den mothers,host families,guidance councilors etc.just to have them function.Then the credits-degrees-courses these kids pursue that are crafted and arranged for them are friggin laughable.It used to be the joke that an athlete took courses like basket weaving and golf green maintenance engineering and got extra credit-work study keeping the alligators out of the gym.Now it's womens studies,Nelson Mandella 101,Martin Luther King 101,Malcom X 101,Bella Abzug 101,Bea Arthur-Maud 101, diversity training studies etc.All fuzzy fluff social science B.S.Then when the athlete can't even show up for these simple classes the tutors and the mothers of these athletes get all upset saying,what will become of you if you don't get an education.These mothers actually believe that even if you get a degree in this crap that it's as valuable as some math-science-engineering degree.
I have seen this take place 100 times where I live in the twin cities of Minnesota.Players play a few years then retire and stay in town because they are doted on ,get in deep trouble with drugs,financial dealings,criminal activity,assault,domestic abuse you name it.All of a sudden,the next thing you know they are all civic activists,non profit group ordained ministers,youth councilors,inner city advocate group heads etc.and they make 50-100K a year collecting some form of government check to do this make-work.One guy that was a player was put in the athletics department at the U and got canned for wrongdoing and the next thing you know another government agency in town paid him 400 K to do a study on how the city could better serve youth in parks and recreation.It was revealed that the guy turned in a few pages from a scribbled notebook as his study.
Then to top it off,not a week goes by on those ESPN round table talk shows where idiots like Mike Wilbaun and Woody Paige go nuts on some kid either not going to college and signing a multi million deal or leaving college early to sign one entering the draft etc.They are all mad because these kids won't get an education when you damn well know they fit into getting a degree in the fluff social science courses at best where the best they could do it to use the degree to imposes themselves as a worthless public servant ripping off the tax payers.
I think it's time for the NFL to treat college football like a minor league.Tell the players that they don't have to go to these fluff classes if they don't want to and pay them a little and give them college-vo tech tuition down the road if they want it after they finsih their playing days.Why waste an athletes time preparing for a career in sports taking away from practice making him go to social science fluff courses.Maybe if a kid washes out of sports after a few years and then goes to college he can pursue a more meaningful degree when he can put the time and efort into it without distractions.
