A rant: Taking a wrong turn
There are days I am convinced we have lost our way.
I’m never sure where we made the wrong turn or how we can get back on the right road.
Since the first pig was skinned, college football has been corrupt.
John Watterson, a James Madison University history professor, wrote the seminal, unvarnished work on the college sport, “College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy.”
From 1869 on, it would appear cheating was an integral part of the game. One player might play part of the season with one institution of higher learning and the remainder with another — if the money was better.
The hotbed of such shenanigans was the Ivy League, chi-chi places such as Harvard and Yale. Winning was important, don’t you know, for school spirit and a well-rounded education.
Money, of course, was never a consideration. These schools, after all, are institutions of higher learning.
It may be argued that the only such institution to escape the clutches of pigskin corruption was the University of Chicago. The Maroons won seven Big Ten Conference titles from 1899 to 1924, including a national championship in 1905.
Betcha didn’t know that.
Sick unto death of the corruption, cheating and ill manners of his school’s football team, the school president cut the program in 1939.
The school produced the first Heisman winner, Jay Berwanger, in 1935. It has also produced 81 Nobel laureates.
One could ask which is more important, but we’ll move on so I can finally make my point.
College football rules the fall Saturday sports landscape. Money flows like water. Newspapers capitalize by promoting the local gridders. Alums buy coaches and players.
But answer me this: When did the money start flowing into high school football?
Last week, the state high school sports association put Trotwood-Madison on two-years probation, suspended the head coach for three games, declared two players ineligible and told the team’s offensive coordinator to take a hike.
The coaches were accused of recruiting players. In addition, according to Trotwood school officials, a number of parents/guardians lied about whether their child lived in the school district.
That’s pathetic.
Is high school football that important? Important enough that adults are willing to bend and break the rules?
Apparently so.
The Trotwood-Madison team is traveling to Dallas next month to play in Texas Stadium. The school is being paid a $30,000 appearance fee by the promoters of the prep football extravaganza. That’s supposed to cover the school district’s cost.
Many area high school teams play on state-of-the-art artificial turf worth millions. The money for these fields come from a health care corporation.
That has to be the final irony.
Schools and communities have enough money to outfit their 60 finest gladiators. Many of those same districts can’t afford regular physical education classes for the remaining tens of thousands of students.
The leading cause of childhood obesity is lack of exercise.
Does it feel like we took a wrong turn somewhere?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Random musings, Trotwood-Madison
Comments
By Riverdale Ghost
August 4, 2008 8:18 PM | Link to this
Really good editorial there. As for getting back on the right road, it may be possible, partly, if schools that — say — carefully provide for the physical education aspect of the education of all students get plenty of publicity and things like that; but, more likely it will be a matter of enduring things until the world collapses and then picking up the pieces.