A MORE MEASURED CASE FOR THE IRRELEVANCE OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL.

We noted Matthew J. Mayhew and Musbah Shaheen of Ohio State getting lit up for their alleged insensitivity in advocating that college football be treated as an essential service.

Retired American Association of University Professors honcho John Warner had already reacted, in a way that was not so over-the top as to bring down either the woke-scolds or the heckling from Normal observers of Collegiate Weirdness.

Reading an essay on “Why America Needs College Football” by two education scholars from Ohio State University makes me wonder if we have reached the bread and circuses period of our pandemic response.

I personally found the essay disheartening, and not just because I was raised a Michigan fan who loathed Ohio State. If college football is “an essential element of a functioning democracy,” I’m here to declare: RIP democracy 2020.

The notion that we can and should prioritize the (relatively) safe playing of college football over prioritizing maximizing the quality of college instruction is mind-boggling coming from two scholars/educators.

Their argument that we need the “distraction” of football leads to a CNN article that offers remedies for mental health challenges of the pandemic age that have nothing to do with watching football. We are told by the authors that we must “essentialize” football, which sounds like fancy academic talk that says football is more important than anything else.

To be sure, this attitude is nothing new. When I was at Clemson, it was strongly suggested we cancel Thursday afternoon classes when the Tigers had a weeknight home game that was going to be featured on ESPN. A walk around Clemson (and many other campuses) while looking through the eye of an ethnographer will reveal that football is very important to the modern university indeed.

I think that "essentialize" was a bit of bureaucratese, referring to the identification of work that must go on during the lockdowns, rather than the verb form of an academic pejorative. (The lockdowns must end. I'm simply weighing in on the usefulness of football.)

But weeknight football at Clemson, which ought to be a Saturday staple among the power conferences?  It's a bad idea for the Mid-American Conference, and it ought be blasted and sponged and purged from the face of the earth.

If American public universities need college football, then I’m afraid we have gone past the point of the necessity of the educational mission of the public university. I hope this is not true. I’m about to publish a book that argues very strongly that this is not true, but then you read an essay by a couple of honest-to-goodness academics saying how important football is, and a guy starts to wonder.

I’ve been institutionally affiliated in various ways with a college for the last nine years that does not have a football team, and it appears to be functioning just fine. Has College of Charleston been misguided all these years?

It’s true, I am fed up with life lived under a pandemic, but in my view, the fastest way to a life with fewer restrictions is to take the steps necessary to get the pandemic under control so our rates of infection start to look more like some of the countries of Europe that seem to be doing better on this front.

Over the years, my personal fandom has waned as the corruption of the NCAA and exploitation of athletes began to weigh on my conscience. It didn’t seem like something I could support while also believing in the educational mission of the institutions, so I stopped watching, and I’m here to tell you there’s other things to do with your Saturdays.

The pandemic is revealing many things, one of which is the incredible divide between the importance of football and the importance of academics at institutions like Ohio State. I have no desire to see the end of college football, but I support the end of the fiction of the “student athlete.” I believe we should work toward a system where the players are treated as professionals playing in the NFL minor leagues, which has the benefit of being accurate.

Let's also note that the high-school-to-the-NFL pipleline might run parallel with the school-to-prison pipeline.