Bowling for Dollars 0

Dan Gillick offers a new method for handicapping college football bowl games.

Meanwhile, Joe Nocera examines the hypocrisy of the NCAA. A snippet:

Twice a year in Vienna, the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries gather to decide on the short-term direction of oil prices. Sometimes, O.P.E.C. agrees to cut back on oil production, pushing up the price of oil. Other times, it decides to boost production. Always, the goal is to fix the price of oil, rather than allow it to be set by the competitive marketplace. Indeed, collusion and price-fixing are the main reasons cartels exist — and why they are illegal in America.

Yet, in Indianapolis a few weeks from now, a home-grown cartel will hold its annual meeting, where it, too, will be working to collude and fix prices. This cartel is the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The N.C.A.A. would have you believe that it is the great protector of amateur athletics, preventing college athletes from being tainted by the river of money pouring over college sports.

In fact, the N.C.A.A.’s real role is to oversee the collusion of university athletic departments, whose goal is to maximize revenue and suppress the wages of its captive labor force, a k a the players.

I have gotten so disgusted that I’ve watched only a piece of one football game,* semi-pro college or professional, and that was a Broncos game, to see what all the fuss was about Tim Tebow’s antics. I saw no antics.

I eventually concluded that “the fuss” about Tebow has little to do with Tebow and much to do with sportscasters’ and columnists’ discomfort at Tebow’s willingness to display (but not, so far as I can see, to flaunt) his faith. I believe the reaction is colored by the actual public antics of professional right-wing Christians who espouse a gospel of hate and who sully the teachings and deeds of Jesus with their every utterance, who invite a contempt that, unfortunately, stains sane believers in the eyes of many of the public.

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*Not counting games watched while visiting others.