As I said last year, I sort of like this bizarre event. I’m in the minority, though.
In truth, I do think they ought to do something like the “Chicago College All-Star Game“. But they should change it around so that the professional all-star team plays the college champions. I think that would attract a lot more viewers.
They might even be able to find a way to make the results of that game impact the college rankings for the next year. Because the current system isn’t nearly convoluted enough.
Former quarterback Boomer Esiason, in the course of making his playoff predictions, said this:
“I’m already calling it that it’s going to be Pittsburgh and New England. And I think it’s going toe [sic] a very, very tough game, especially with the way that New England defense has been playing. I know they got the turnovers last week against Ryan Fitzpatrick, but this is Ben Roethlisberger. This isn’t a team that tends to throw the ball 45 times in a game. They’re going to run it, they’re going to keep it tight.”
It’s an interesting prediction, and on the surface, looks right enough. In fact, only one time all season did Roethlisberger throw 45 or more passes, and in that game he threw it 50 times, and completed 36.
The only problem here is that that particular game was against New England. And it was a Pittsburgh victory, which shocked many observers, given Pittsburgh’s historical difficulty with them.
I’m just saying maybe they shouldn’t run the ball on them.
According to a new study, when a college football team does well, it is correlated with a drop in grades among male students of that college.
Of course, this study must be taken with some salt, since they only studied one school. And correlation, as we all know, is not the same thing as causation.
In my opinion, this study would make a lot more sense if they had looked at test scores instead of GPAs. If they could look and see if there was a noticeable decline in test scores around the time of a big win, for instance, that would bolster their case. Although that’s probably too much data to acquire, and in any case, it probably would violate some privacy policy.
A final note: the article I linked to says this study “could give ammo to critics of big-time college sports.” Well, yes, but it shouldn’t. Ultimately, it seems to me, this is the students’ responsibility. There is no mystical force that makes them stupider if the team wins; it’s just that they lack the discipline to prioritize effectively.
UPDATE: Maybe I should clarify a little. I can see how having a big-time football program might distract students a bit through no fault of their own. However, I don’t see how it could be so severe that they couldn’t, with sufficient dedication, manage to get past that and do academic work. For more of my thoughts on college sports, see this post. But also know that my thinking has changed some since that post.
Rush Limbaugh believes that “the Left” will attempt to ban the sport of football. This strikes me as unlikely, although it is possible that the game will decrease in popularity in a few more decades, for that is the way with all such pastimes. And if that should come to pass, Limbaugh has left himself with a convenient scapegoat: the nebulous “Left”.
While making this prediction, Limbaugh mused:
“You know, nothing in the fifties, Leave It To Beaver was never as great and peaceful, painless, and idyllic as people’s memories make it. But there were things about the past that were worth preserving that aren’t being preserved. We have a genuine cultural rot taking place and an overtaking of our culture — the chickification and the New Castrati and so forth. I’m just telling you, it’s gonna happen. Somebody is going to propose banning football as it’s played, whether that thing the league fears or not happens — and it may even be a member of the media that suggests it.”
The first three sentences of that excerpt are fascinating. The first and second are so because Limbaugh immediately and instinctively thinks of the 1950s as a “good time”. He is careful to qualify it, of course, but it’s still the first thing that sprang to his mind as an example of things “worth preserving”. It’s not even relevant to his football point, because football didn’t really catch on until the 1960s. It’s a gut reaction.
(It also ought to be noted that, in a convenient coincidence given the topic of my last post, that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was talk of banning football, but it was nixed by Theodore Roosevelt, who simply called for changes to the rules of the game, rather than its abolition. The parallels with his approach to socialism previously discussed may be of interest.)
The third sentence of Limbaugh’s is really quite something. He, like most nationalists, is quite keen on preserving traditional gender roles. However, it seems to me that one could oppose football even from a nationalist perspective, by arguing that harming oneself in a meaningless game is simply not a productive way of serving the nation. Not that I am interested in making such an argument. I like watching football, after all.
I may be wrong, but I believe Limbaugh has articulated an entire worldview in these three sentences. The 1950s are supposed to have been the zenith of “traditional values”. (Here’s what I have to say about that story.)
The 1950s are really quite important, I think. I have never tested this, but I suspect it may be possible to know a person’s politics quite completely by listening to the tone with which they say “the 1950s”. For the cosmopolitans, it is a time of repression and discrimination and ridiculousness; for the nationalists… well, you have just seen for yourself.
A final note: I wonder if the Limbaughs of the world ever stop to think that the groundwork for the prosperity in the 1950s was laid by FDR. Probably not.
DET: 40
GB: 37
Sorry, Thingy, but I just have this feeling…
UPDATE: So, yeah, about this… um… not exactly.
The Atlanta Falcons’ coach is being criticized a lot for his decision to go for it on fourth down yesterday. However, statistically speaking, he made the right decision.
People–fans, at least– are rarely willing to listen to this sort of reasoning, however. As N. Gregory Mankiw said of a similar situation two years ago, sometimes taking the correct choice results in a bad outcome, but that doesn’t make it the wrong choice.
Me and a friend of mine were arguing about whether it was disrespectful of the Detroit player to imitate Tim Tebow’s “praying” gesture. (If you haven’t heard about it, you can read the details here.) I took the position that it was as legitimate a thing to do as any such celebration is. She argued it was disrespectful and rude.
Personally, with this sort of light-hearted taunting, I don’t think it’s wrong in the context of a football game. Obviously, you wouldn’t mock somebody’s religious practices in the course of daily life. But then, you wouldn’t run up and tackle someone in the course of daily life, either.
I predict: