Goodbye, Again, College Football

Last week, the Indiana University Hoosiers football team won the national college football championship. It provided a heck of a story, as a football program that had historically been not very good rose to become an undefeated champion in just a couple of years. Some folks even invested in some considerable hyperbole, such as suggesting that the Indiana football team had “saved” college football.

Years ago, I quit following college football, as I documented on this blog. In recent years, I had allowed myself to gravitate back into following it again somewhat. I’ve enjoyed sports, including college football, since I was a kid, and I wanted to feel that entertainment again. Yet, even as I followed this year, I repeatedly returned to the concerns that led me to give college football up years ago. For example, when I read about the Texas Tech donor whose money essentially made the university into a football contender and who now has considerable influence at that university (and, to boot, was even characterized in the article to which I have linked as possibly “fixing” college football), I felt rather disgusted. It seems like no one should have that degree of power, and if they do, that they would invest their resources so heavily in football seems inappropriate. My reaction is compounded when I consider that specific example alongside the Texas Tech system this fall prohibiting faculty from being able to teach theidea that there are more than two genders. The entire situation seems emblematic of misplaced priorities in U.S. society, aligning with my thoughts when I gave up college football years ago. In a market-driven economy that uses the logic of that economy to justify expenditures on college football, I feel compelled to spend my time and money elsewhere and to encourage others to do the same. Especially at a time when education, the arts and humanities, scientific research, and so many other things that are vital to universities are under attack and losing funding, I can’t justify contributing to the inequitable financial resources thrown at college football.

To add to this, in the week before that college football national championship game, I read a nationally syndicated column arguing for universities to lose their nonprofitstatus and the tax advantages that go with that. The argument was predicated on the amount of money flowing into college football. The columnist admitted that, despite his concerns, he would be watching the national championship game. This seemed not only like a case of being unwilling to address one’s own complicity in a problem one has identified, but also a case of mistaking college football financial success with supposed financial success of universities themselves. As I see the significant budgetary drains that occur within the educational, research, and creative parts of universities, the argument in the column becomes particularly obnoxious. On the one hand, if we want to have a philosophical debate about whether universities should be considered nonprofit organizations and receive tax breaks because of it, I’m willing to engage in that discussion. On the other hand, on a pragmatic level, if we did remove those tax breaks and universities now had to account for that in their budgets, do you think for one moment in the current situation that it’s the college football teams that are going to bear the brunt of that? Over the last couple of decades, we have seen expenditures on bigtime university athletics soar at the same time as other aspects of those very same universities, most notably the educational services that are the core of the universities, face even greater budgetary constraints. I see no reason to expect that further economic constraints on the university will go any other way, unless those constraints directly impact the bigtime athletic programs, whether through required reductions in funding to those programs; mandated additional flow of financial resources from those programs to other areas of the universities; or, as in the market-driven response I have advanced, less people consuming the sports. (Of course, maybe other educational services bearing the brunt of the budget cuts is exactly what folks such as that columnist ultimately want and just aren’t explicitly saying.)

In the end, I’m back to where I was in 2012 when I gave up college football. I’d really like to follow it, getting back into my pattern of putting it on television and radio on Saturdays and on weekday evenings in the fall. I can’t in good conscience do so, though. As much as I have let myself drift back into college football, I have to force myself back out. It’s not about saving college football; it’s about saving all the other, frankly more important, things that go on at higher education institutions.