Venting and Realization

Ok Jon. Point made loud and clear. It is very POSER to abandon my team when the chips are down. And yes, a true fan sticks it through thick and thin. If I were to abandon the Cougars after a 10-3 season then jump back on if they run the table, I’d be no better than your average Ute fan who loves his team only when they go 13-0.

So, I admit, my post yesterday was venting after a very frustrating week at an “underachieving” season after expectations were extremely bloated after the UCLA shutout.

My secondary team has always been Washington State from the PAC-10, who used to have a good football program, but now has a really good basketball program. I have an affinity for the PAC-10 and I even like USC. Although their head coach Pete Carroll can be very quirky, he is quite the interesting individual. It just blows my mind that USC always has the best talent during the past decade, yet they have to run the table to get into the title game.

They have the biggest college football TV market in the nation! They have the most talent! Yet towns like Austin (Texas), Norman (Oklahoma), Baton Rouge (LSU), Gainesville (Florida), and Columbus (Ohio State) don’t have to run the table to get the nod in the title game over a team (USC) who can beat these teams anytime, anywhere. It is some sort of a bias even when USC is just as rich in college football history in tradition as these other schools.

Ohio State just lost again, and Oklahoma will lose again on Thursday, yet I know that USC could beat Florida in Gainesville on any given day.

So, I was listening to the radio broadcast of the Fiesta Bowl last night while driving and it hit me that sports aren’t for the smartest people around. I guess that shows how stupid I must be if it took me 29 years to realize that.

But seriously, who likes sports? It’s not all the “smart” people who follow politics and business and own all the property in town. It’s Billy Joe Bob southern guy who eats, drinks and tailgates away as he roots on Alabama Crimson Tide football. Sports are for bars, gamblers and little kids who are easily impressionable.

ESPN, the biggest broadcaster of sports, who needs a class action lawsuit like the one put on Microsoft nearly a decade ago for monopolizing practices, is owned by Disney. What does Disney do best? Sell garbage to little kids.

Think of some of the biggest sports fans you know. Do they even have jobs?

The way these announcers talk down to their general knowledge like we can’t even read really started to bother me. Think about all the lame sports clichés out there. None of them make sense and any rational intelligent person would question almost all of them.

I don’t know what my point is to this realization. Maybe I am smart enough to come to any conclusion yet, but if I invested as much time into sports into something worthwhile, I could have a post graduate degree right now.

Don’t get me wrong, the determination and teamwork a child can learn in sports can be crucial for their future development. But throwing a football down a field or skating backwards won’t solve life’s problems. I guess it’s just keeping your fandom in perspective, but learning to appreciate art, music, religion, business and politics are important to living a balanced and healthy life.

ESPN already has like 6 channels anyway, so they need to launch a sports channel called ESPNerd, that applies sports to real life situations and actually gives us an intellectual breakdown of the game, and not some former jock who had his brains bashed after seven football-related concussions telling me that the BCS got it right and I’ll just nod my head and agree just because ESPN paid millions of dollars to broadcast and support an obviously flawed system that anybody over the age of 5 can figure out is blatantly nonsense.