The Sporting Life category archive

Bob Molinaro sees some weaknesses in the D.

Shredded NCAA president Mark Emmert makes it too easy for his detractors when he does something as preposterous as claim that big-time college athletes are “not hired employees conducting games for entertainment.” That must come as a surprise to the TV networks that pay billions for the rights to entertain America with college football and basketball. And those stadiums and arenas on campus aren’t built with entertainment in mind? What is he thinking?

Add NCAA If college athletics aren’t meant to be entertainment, I want Emmert to explain all the basketball games that TV schedules for 9 p.m. on school nights.

Bob Molinaro, sportswriter extraordinaire*:

Former president of CBS Sports Neal Pilson said at the O’Bannon v. NCAA trial that giving players money for use of their images on TV could “change the fabric” of college athletics by turning off fans who enjoy watching teams play for the “joy of the game.” There are a lot of people who believe that, but this tends to be a generational issue. Likely, younger fans would easily grow accustomed to some college athletes getting a small cut of the spoils. They would still find plenty of joy in the games, as long as the money spent delivered a winner.

Certainly it would “change the fabric.” The fabric is rotten and corrupt; it allows old men, like CBS Sports presidents, NCAA executives, and college presidents and coaches, to profit from the uncompensated labor of the young by labeling them as “amateurs,” when they are in fact professionals.

(You do know what a “professional” is, do you not? A “professional” is someone who takes money for it. An “athletic scholarship” is money. Q. E. D.)

Our society has become based on theft of labor.

__________________

*I’m pretty much fed up with professional sports (this includes college sports, for reasons made clear above), with the possible exception of major league baseball, but I always read Bob Molinaro’s columns because he is one damned fine writer. You should too.

I’ll read about it when Bob Molinaro writes about it.

Otherwise, yawn.

From Bob Molinaro, my favorite sports writer:

Tar Heel basketball player Rashad McCants is giving North Carolina another case of the blues, telling ESPN he benefitted from bogus courses and implicating coach Roy Williams. People may never look at North Carolina the same following revelations the last three years of widespread academic fraud involving athletes. But I’d be careful before assuming that McCants is a credible whistle blower.

He may not be the most credible whistle blower, but he’s only one in a whole damn whistle orchestra in Chapel Hill.

The NCAA is going into the third OT of corruption with no end in sight.

Nothing illustrates the corruption of big-time college sports and the NCAA better than this sentence, from sportswriter extraordinaire Bob Molinaro, in a column about the proposed NCAA “Division IV” (emphasis added):

The unrest is a result of friction between the wealthiest schools and the less-wealthy over what sort of business model to follow in the future.

That that sentence makes sense is ipso facto evidence that there is no “amateurism” in big-time college athletics.

If it has a business model, it is a business.

It has employees, not “student athletes.”

It’s for money, not “love of the game.”

I am done with the NCAA.

If decisions Steve Ballmer makes for the LA Clippers are as good as the ones he made at Microsoft, the Clippers are headed for the cellar and destined to remain there for a long, long time.

Shelly Sterling reached an agreement Thursday night to sell the Los Angeles Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion in what would be a record deal if approved by the NBA, according to an individual with knowledge of the negotiations.

I knew golf had to be good for something.

For now, however, they are still two of 20 Shawnee upperclassmen learning what it takes to design and build a construction project on deadline.

For three years, technology education teacher Stefani Kirk has required her students to make mini-golf courses.

“They’re real-world projects” that let students “see their brainstorms start as pencil sketches,” she said, “and evolve into something people actually use.”

Another illegal formulation at Penn State.

NCAA “sports” need to be taken out of universities’ drivers’ seats; they’re driving drunk on money.

Why are persons so surprised when they learn that a rich person who lives in a rich person’s protected bubble of unaccountable privilege turns out to be a selfish hypocritical jerk?

Reg Henry is taken aback that golf is waning in popularity. He tells us that golf gurus are concerned that there are 5,000,000 fewer golfers than there were a decade ago.

I live next to a golf course, and I see few young golfers, except for youngsters being set on a path of corruption by their fathers, and members of the golf team from a local college, just down the road a piece.

Remedies are being considered. Here’s a nugget from his column:

Now it is suggested that these forlorn, disappointed people might be lured back to the game by gimmicks. The Times story came with a picture of a tour professional putting into a 15-inch-wide hole, which looked like a bucket.

What an appalling prospect if this should catch on. You could go play Pebble Beach because it’s on your bucket list and find a bucket being used for the hole.

Golf is an expensive sport. Other than freakish “xtreme sports,” it is probably the most expensive sport short of skiing. One wonders whether the destruction of the middle class, depriving many of the ability to pay for club memberships, not to mention golf clubs, may have something to do with its waning popularity.

Whatever, it’s still golf, a good walk spoiled.

Golf is pool on an extra-large table, with added membership and greens fees and without heat in the winter or AC in the summer.

Get a pool table. It’s cheaper, more comfortable, just as frustrating, and lacks the built-in mosquitoes.

Learning from recent experiences, Penn State selects a president with cover-up experience.

Via WTKR.

Sportswriter extraordinaire Bob Molinaro takes the opportunity provided by the end of the NCAA basketball tournament to reflect on how the NCAA fosters friendly amateur competition does business and (my words, not his) steals labor. A snippet.

On Sunday, Emmert argued that the Northwestern football team’s attempt to unionize, “would blow up everything about the collegiate model of athletics.”

And that’s a bad thing?

Do please read the rest.

Afterthought:

It’s reaching the point that, whenever I see the letters “NCAA,” I read “RICO.”

After this, Philadelphia can no longer be charged with having the Worst Sports Fans in the World.

Sports radio hosts in New York City roundly criticized New York Mets’ second baseman Daniel Murphy for his decision to take paternity leave to attend the birth of his first child.

WFAN host Mike Francesa — who has been known to take entire months off — berated Murphy for taking three days of paternity leave to be with his wife after the birth.

“What are you going to do,” Francesa asked, “sit there and look at your wife in the hospital bed for three days? You’re a major-league baseball player. You can hire a nurse.”

More Worst Sports Fans in the World at the link.

Jordan Weissmann explores NLRB Director Peter Ohr’s reason for ruling that Northwestern University’s football players are employees of the Uni and not amateurs enjoying frolics for fun on fall afternoons. A nugget:

No matter what the NCAA wants you to think, Northwestern’s scholarship football players, he writes, “are not primarily students.” It’s that simple.

Why not? Because math:

• Players spend 50 to 60 hours a week on football during a training camp before school starts.
• They also dedicate 40 to 50 hours per week on football during the four-month season. “Not only is this more hours than many undisputed full-time employees work at their jobs, it is also many more hours than the players spend on their studies,” Ohr writes. They spend 20 hours per week in class and more doing homework, sure, but they also work on football outside of official practice time. Ohr’s equation also doesn’t seem to take into account the offseason. But, he writes, it “cannot be said” that they “spend only a limited number of hours performing their athletic duties.”

Read the rest, then turn off that college basketball game.

This is a good ruling.

A group of Northwestern University football players won its first fight in a battle to form a union as a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board ruled Wednesday that scholarship football players are employees with the right to unionize.

(snip)

“[P]layers receiving scholarships to perform football-related services for the Employer under a contract for hire in return for compensation are subject to the Employer’s control and are therefore employees within the meaning of the (National Labor Relations) Act,” wrote Peter Sung Ohr, director of the NLRB’s regional office in Chicago, in his decision.

I am skeptical that this will hold up. Too many persons, including regulators and judges, like to tail-gate at their alma maters, but anything that further exposes the corruption and hypocrisy of the National Cartel College Athletic Association is a good thing.