College football in the US is awash with money
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
While not an exact comparison, playing line during a possession is like having a series of 5 to 10-second intervals where you're either sumo wrestling or sprinting, with 10-40 seconds to recover between each. So during the off-season, linemen are trying to reach a balance of strength, speed, and cardio to meet their team's play style. Because most of our games were non-televised (and therefore we didn't get the additional breaks) our linemen conditioned more heavily for cardio/recovery. So when we'd play a televised game we'd basically feel like our cardio was "underutilized". I'd love to see an analysis of whether our team ran more line-intensive plays during these games because we had the additional recovery time.
It's weird for me to see these huge guys in D1 college and the NFL playing line, because I'm pretty sure they'd cramp up/get gassed during a drive in a non-televised game.
OTOH, I don't think anyone could realistically play both ways at D1 level. Even if we just assumed the necessary position skills into existence.
With the supreme court decision allowing NIL payments directly to players, that could change. Schools are still raking in cash in ticket sales and TV revenue. But a lot of the other sponsorship and alumni donations might be going directly to players now instead of to the athletic departments.
Many midsize schools, including state schools, lose money in football. Being a mid tier team in Conference USA or the Mountain West is much much less lucrative than the SEC or ACC.
When times were really, really bad at the uni, talking about furloughing employees, closing down schools, etc, I bumped into him:
Hey fred what's up? How is it going there in the football stadium?
"Eh fine..."
Yeah, times are rough here, we can not purchase pencils or toilet paper. Scared for our jobs.
"what!?! The football / athletics department has so much money, I am practically burning it just to get rid of it"
Yeah, I hate colleges. If their goal was to win games, I would understand. Uh-oh, I was missing the point of college... dang.
Pretty unbelievable how these institutions are creating billions of dollars of revenue / wealth off the backs of young (primarily minority) men and women. It's so gross.
I'm sure that commissioner, like any reasonable person calling for a return to those traditions, is also calling for the abolition of the NFL, all volunteer coaches, and gratis, advertising-free broadcasts of all the games, right? Right?!
For varying degrees of "amateur". A lot of nations employed their athletes to do nothing but train for the olympic and international competition.
The Soviet Union and other government-controlled-economy nations were sending essentially professional athletes to the Olympics while free-economy nations were sending amateurs. Removing the restriction allowed all nations to send their best athletes.
Ironically of course, there are some aristocratic motivations for why "amateur" was desirable in the first place that don't really align to modern sensibilities, but that's separate.
I don’t know what it is about the current zeitgeist but people with power seem quite happy to vocalize their discontent with what they perceive as “lower classes” making decent money. It’s like they don’t even pretend anymore.
Usually they try to obscure this state of affairs. When the veil breaks, their backup plan is enforcement, first through threats and then through laws and then, if necessary, through violence. We appear to be mostly in the "threats" stage.
https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/38005718/sec-...
I think it's a tricky situation. The previous NCAA rules were idiotic and unfair to players. The current situation is better for players, but I'm worried that we're moving towards a future where the best teams are just the ones with the deepest pockets (or whose boosters have the deepest pockets). Considering most teams are already unprofitable, it could further increase stratification between P5 and G5 teams.
Maybe CFB needs to implement a per-team salary cap.
Maybe schools should not be involved in professional sports in the first place, especially one that inherently causes brain damage.
Let the NFL owners pay for a minor league.
I spent a term as an exchange student at the Catholic University of America, a smallish university with a completely unexceptional D3 football programme staffed with actual students. And they got two thousand people to their football games! Much of the campus! Alumni! People who lived in Brookland and fancied some live sport!
I mean, I knew how seriously people take high school football too. But even really good UK university sport can play to an audience of the players supportive romantic partners only. A different (and quite refreshing) world.
The coaches are usually actually all for paying the athletes. It is the university MBAs who are running a business off the back of them all -- and interested in maximizing profit -- that usually aren't.
Only difference is that money don't go to athletes.
What I want to see is higher education have their tax free status stripped and their endowments taxed as a total percentage (like property tax).
Both for creating the student loan mess and for having this ridiculous sports system that uses athletes as chattel.
There is no shortage of people who want to play college football. Many would play even with out a scholarship. In Division 2 less than half the team is on scholarship. In Division 3 nobody gets scholarships. They are almost never on TV and there is very little chance they will make the NFL.
That would be like a lower weight class boxer, say Canelo Álvarez taking on a fight with Tyson Fury (each in their respective class) for the "pay day", sure he may have a "puncher's chance" but few would consider it a fair fight.
What's even the logic behind that? It's okay to mistreat people because they want to be an athlete over working at McDonald's?
I think the concept of a student athlete is an oxymoron at this point.[1][2] Either the sport really serves no purpose and could exist as a club or the student is not really a student at all and should just be a paid university employee like the coaches. But this inbetween area is odd. I guess the facade of being a student is more endearing maybe because otherwise the university sports team people cheer for is just a bunch of paid professionals basically. Maybe that would ruin the fun for people idk. Not sure I even care. It isn't right to treat some students different than others.
[1]: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/365303-cold-hard-fact-st...
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/us/unc-report-academic-fraud/...
That shouldn't be surprising, as in some areas the local college team is the only professional sporting event around.
It is a damned shame that they couldn't come up with a better system than the NIL. Yes all the players should be making money, but it should be done in a manner that benefits all players.
It seems like the better solution would be to stop taking in so much money from the sport _and_ keep the athletes unpaid. If this isn't possible, it seems best to wholly separate the teams from the schools.
Thinking about it, would universities sexualize their athletes to sell more and be able to solicit donations? Yes, this violated an NCAA rule but wouldn't surprise me if ways around it are found just like in the past where donors would sell cars to athletes for a dollar. Not sure it would be a positive development for universities.
TIL / this blows my mind. I would never have guessed that US college football trumps all those soccer stadiums around the world, by that much! :O
Weird.
The US has ~340 million people, and we're talking about 10-20 mega stadiums in college football.
$80,000 GDP per capita (nearing double that of France or Britain) with one of the highest disposable incomes and extreme amounts of wealth. It's surprising the stadiums aren't even bigger.
The thing that's supposed to be a fun side part of your education, or even a feeder program to the pros, can afford larger stadiums than the pros.
Professional teams don't have that pull, you see them a few times a year.
In college, your degree's reputation can depend on how well they are viewed nationally. For 2 decades a top school could not win games, the fanbase was outraged because they were spending record amounts of money on trying to win games. It seriously made me (and others) question how good the school was academically if they couldn't manage to win, despite setting records on spending.
Not to mention your friends go to the games, you have nostalgia from a vulnerable part of your life, etc...
That just doesnt happen as much in Pro.
Why?
Bad management.
Or consider that if some obscure school, who's players are going to school for college instead of football is beating a 'football school', their management is performing worse than supposedly lower skilled managers and lower skilled players.
Then there is the matter of building a bigger stadium means the super-expensive skyboxes are that much further away.
For someone who grew up in a different country, it appears to me that Americans do not hate working hard, they just hate working hard on academics, which is really strange.
Really interesting way to put it.
I'm not sure exactly why, but I wonder whether anti-intellectualism has a religious origin.
Opportunity has often been their biggest hurdle. While most are just as smart as you or me, the chances for them to get a "proper" education and out of their situation isn't as easy as it is for an urban dweller.
It's easy to blame the rich and urban when your community is broke and you see all the "help" going to the big rich cities.
See farm price supports, rural roads, block grants of money on the federal level between states:
https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal...
No but it goes hand in hand. Don't want to people to know what your good book actually says because it's easier to control and bilk them if they can't read.
An odd phenomenon I've seen in the last 15 years (I'm in South Texas) is a cohort of people that are actually proud to be dumb. For them ignorance is to be celebrated. I've even had several tell me that it lets them be more spiritual and in tune with the word of their god.
I am not athletic or particularly interested in sports, but I think a love of sports is good for society. Excellence in academics, wealth, beauty are obviously really valued in our society as well. Most Americans value hard work in academics-- look what we spend on education!
Now try doing the same thing, but watching sports.
Not much machismo in academics but there's tons in sports and hard physical work. That's why truck/beer and other male oriented commercials never show someone reading a book, they show someone doing hard physical work or competing in a physical activity (edit: or getting laid). That's about all there is to it.
Paul Graham's "nerds" article is fairly out of date, and I would also encourage you to read between the lines a bit. Paul and his friends graded everyone by popularity and assumed everyone else was doing the same. Were they? In my experience, probably not. Popular kids generally just consider themselves normal and don't look down on the "nerds", so much as just not think about them much because they're in a different friend group that they don't interact with.
> Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
This is not true.
> most smart kids don't really want to be popular.
This is DEFINITELY not true, and you should be skeptical of anyone saying "I don't want to be popular" in the middle of a widely published essay about how smart and successful they are.
I attended high school many years after Paul, so it's possible what he describes was true at the time, but I don't think it is anymore.
Finally, you're right that Kobe Bryant is admired more than the average hard worker in school, and that's because he was among the best in the world. Results matter in American culture, and a kid in high school working just as hard as Kobe to be the best player on his team is not going to be as celebrated as Kobe Bryant, even if he's putting in just as much effort.
All over the world, sportsmen and entertainment personalities are celebrated more than other workers who, in theory and intuitively, should be celebrated more. For example, among the celebrities, in theory and intuitively, we should find the best scientists, surgeons, and administrators that a country can offer. But do we? No, we don't.
To use a recent example, if you think about it, it is curious that the hype about Oppenheimer has been about the film itself, Nolan the director, and Murphy the performer, and not Oppenheimer the scientist and the Manhattan Project as a formidable government-sponsored science and technology initiative. Yes, there has been some minor residual interest in the real people, science and technology associated with Los Alamos on the part of viewers, but nothing particularly relevant.
Today, Mr. Oppenheimer, academic and/or govt employee, would have to work for 30+ years (probably more...) to earn the same money that Murphy earned pretending to be Oppenheimer in a movie. If that's not funny and ridiculous, I don't know what is.
Intellectual work is soul-crushing and makes me want to stop and do literally anything else within a couple hours, by contrast. And I’ve got some natural talent for it! I can’t imagine how intolerable it’d be otherwise.
But the painfully-boring leave-me-a-husk-by-EOD intellectual jobs pay better and don’t (necessarily) ruin your body by age 40, so I tappy-tappy at keyboards instead of building fences or whatever. Sigh.
Same goes for academics. Studying’s draining. Doing baseball (or whatever) drills is awesome.
But maybe I only feel that way because I’m American. I dunno.
I doubt this generalization rings true. Americans just enjoy sport more than many other nations…you can leave it at that without adding some idea of them hating academics. It’s not an either/or situation.
Snowball's chance in hell of actually happening though.
>We get US Medical Reform that actually helps the general population and doesn't just give medical workers/owners more money and power.
>Football gets a minor league
:'(
Sports have become a corrupting influence on colleges and distract from their educational mission.
Yep this is what's happening this year at my University this year - players now do a quick 30 minute autograph signing before each game.
That being said, the sheer amount of money involved in CFB at all is, in my opinion, slowly ruining it and turning it into a worse version of the NFL. If I could wave a magic wand, no one involved would be making more than trivial amounts of money (relative to today).
Unfortunately, I also don't think there's anything to be done about it (neither I nor anyone else possesses such a magic wand). It would be possible to fix, but only if schools were willing to give up the revenue voluntarily, and they obviously aren't going to do that.
The US has no power to do anything about China's emissions. The US could drop its emissions to zero tomorrow and it wouldn't alter where we're going in terms of global climate change at all. That isn't an exaggeration, that's how bad the situation actually is.
India is just coming online with its mega emissions boom and Africa is next (they'll add a billion people while simultaneously massively expanding emissions). The outcome is already set.
In the same vein, a lot of the clean air improvements in the US can be attributed to moving those factories to China. Chinese people are dying early from air pollution to make stuff for us. People in Pittsburgh used to bring two shirts to work because it was so polluted. Not anymore.
“Convincing China to stop expanding their emissions” is akin to stopping consuming manufactured goods.
Americans are also far more prolific polluters than Chinese at an individual level. Due to poor urban design endemic to North American cities, most travel involves cars and airplanes, some of the worst conceivable means of transportation from an environmental perspective.
This isn’t to say China is blameless. They’ve definitely made some choices favoring expediency over sustainability. But it seems a bit rich to shift blame to China and other poorer nations now when CO2-driven climate change was a problem Carl Sagan warned Congress about in the 80s (and he was ignored).
China still leads in total consumption-based emissions. On a per-capita consumption-based emission, China is not far off the EU average.
For hard numbers, CO2 emissions for export represent roughly 8% of China's total emission as of 2021. Considering that China emits twice as much CO2 as the next largest emitter (as measured by production), it shouldn't be hard to see why consumption-based emissions don't change the picture all that much.
[Numbers come from https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions].
However, based on that article it seems the US has also decreased emissions even when adjusted for imports. It is still higher that almost everywhere else but offshoring isn’t the only cause of the decline.
Hover over China on the nearby map. The text is written with numbers from ~2016, but the map has more up-to-date numbers.