I don’t write much about sports here at Dissident Thoughts. That is not because I have no experience or love for the games. Quite the opposite. Growing up in the Toledo area meant I was in the No Man’s Land between Ann Arbor and Columbus, and the annual game between Michigan and Ohio State was a major event in the area. I wrestled and played football in high school although I wasn’t as good as I should have been at wrestling because I was lazy and I lacked any natural instincts for football. I mostly did sports for social reasons.
Sports back in the day were wonderful, something for families to watch. We followed our teams and the guys that played for them. At one point I had to ask myself why I was so invested in games played between a bunch of people that were probably terrible human beings who wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire. When the Detroit Red Wings won their 11th Stanley Cup in 2008, my wife and the kids had to leave the room because I was so fired up during the games. So I pretty much just cut the cord and stopped following sports at all, I didn’t have room for it in my life.
I got out before the worst of it started imploding, the players kneeling to honor a piece of shit violent thug who died of an overdose after committing a crime and before what little was left of sports traditions was eviscerated.
When you come from where I come from, you are in Big Ten country. It was a conference that made sense, and it had as the name would indicate ten teams. For forty years, from 1950 to 1990, there were just ten teams until Penn State joined while it was still coached by Joe Paterno. The logo in the meme above includes the “hidden” number 11 to reflect that there were actually 11 teams in the Big Ten but for me the Big Ten was always just those original 10 teams although at least Pennsylvania borders Ohio.
It is about an 11 hour drive from Ohio Stadium in Columbus to the University of Minnesota. A state like Indiana that is home to two Big Ten teams, Indiana and Purdue, borders three other states with Big Ten teams (Michigan, Michigan State; Ohio State; Illinois and Northwestern). Wisconsin actually borders four if you count the UP of Michigan. The Big Ten was our conference and it played football like a conference where the teams would line up in the snow: lots of running, stingy defense, and conservative play calling that reflected the natural conservatism of the Midwest. The Big Ten championship was usually decided in the Michigan-Ohio State game and the winner would go on to lose in the Rose Bowl to a PAC-10 team but no one cared. If Michigan beat Ohio State, I didn’t give a crap about winning the Rose Bowl. It was nice if they did but what we cared about was who won the Big Ten.
Today the “Big Ten” has 18 schools from Rutgers in New Jersey to USC and UCLA in Los Angeles. It is over 2,700 miles and 40 hours of drive time from one end of the “Big Ten” to the other. It is a meaningless conglomeration. The Big Game between Michigan and Ohio State and other old rivalries like Michigan-Michigan State and Purdue-Indiana are still focal points but when a team from the Midwest is playing a team from the West Coast, it will always feel like a non-conference game.
If that wasn’t bad enough, now college football has a “transfer portal” which means that signing a letter to commit to a school doesn’t really mean anything because you can always leave later and go to a better school where you can get that sweet NIL (name, image, likeness) money. Money has always been a problem in college sports, these players made millions for their school in return for free tuition that none of them cared about and room & board. Players have been getting money under the table for a long time. I remember reading the biography of Brian Bosworth who recounted the ridiculous stuff that went on in colleges including cash being thrown around. I have long advocated getting rid of the NCAA and creating developmental minor leagues for the NFL in small cities as most Division 1 scholarship players have no business being in college.
The transfer portal means that it is difficult to get to invested in a player, especially a good player at a mediocre school, because they will just leave anyway for greener pastures. It is going to turn lower tier schools into a sort of developmental league where players can prove they can play at a higher level and then get picked up by an upper tier school. What was supposed to be a solution of some sort has turned into this:
Marshall football opts out of Independence Bowl vs Army due to mass exodus to transfer portal
After the coach of Marshall, Charles Huff, left for Southern Miss a stampede happened to the Thundering Herd with 29 players leaving the school for other schools. That basically left Marshall without enough players to play in their crappy bowl game and that deprived tens of football fans from the opportunity to watch the Independence Bowl featuring Marshall and Army. Instead Louisiana Tech will face Army because Louisiana Tech is close to the location of the Independence Bowl. Louisiana Tech was also 5-7 this season. A team that lost almost 60% of their games gets to go to a bowl because the team that was supposed to go can’t field a team. WTF.
Between the animals and criminal playing sports, the endless woke bullshit, the diminishing quality of play, the goofy rules changes that were made to make it easier for blacks to be quarterbacks in the NFL and the gutting of college football traditions, sports is mostly ruined. I am glad for a bunch of reasons that I stopped following sports although I will still find myself watching if I am somewhere and a game is on because deep down I still love football. Small town high school sports are still fun although even that is being ruined. My alma mater is one of the few decent sized high schools in the area that still plays on actual grass instead of some BS field turf or whatever, and since the stadium where they play is inexplicably similar to an inground swimming pool, it gets muddy as hell but that is how football should be played.
It really is a shame but sports are just one more nice thing about our society that has been intentionally ruined. In the grand scheme of things it is small potatoes but it still pisses me off. One more thing that They will have to atone for.
How were rules changed to allow black quarterbacks?
“How were rules changed to allow black quarterbacks?”.
Desegregation, Affirmative Action, DEI.
We are long past the point where most major sports are played by our people, for the enjoyment of our people. Football and Basketball are just affirmative action programs for rampant niggotry, baseball is much the same for various and sundry brown minorities, soccer is of interest mostly to Europeans and South Americans (and has teams also heavily overrun by nogs, at least in Europe) which leaves hockey as the only mainstream sport with majority White players.
I don’t know (other than out of tradition, and for the social aspect) why so many White people still follow football and basketball. Even without the politicized aspects of all the virtue signalling (kneeling, blm logos on uniforms and helmets, etc.) it is still nigger worship to plow ones money, time and attention into these spectacles. Don’t even get me started on White men wearing (very costly licensed) jerseys bearing the name of some black player who is the star of “their” team.
Baseball suffers from being a long format game in an era of diminutive attention spans and an overabundance of other distractions that the masses find more interesting. Hockey is ok, and is paced well enough that it doesn’t get boring, though I can’t say I personally ever got much into it.
Really, I just look at the whole of professional sports as another giant asset stripping scheme for the primary benefit of the aristocratic team owners, and the league. Not only do fans pay huge sums of money to attend games, buy licesend merchandise, and purchase TV packages, but many major league teams also extort the taxpayers for massive handouts for new facilities under threat of relocation to another market. And yet the profits are always privately held, even when the public has shelled out enormous sums for a new stadium, or renovations thereto. Strikes me as a lot of bullshit, but clearly I’m in the minority as goes these opinions, since the scam goes on unabated.
I won’t even bother to expand on what all is wrong with college sports, as others have done so extensively. Nothing has been or will be done to fix it, at least until the present system dies under its own weight. Then it will be perverted into some other screwed up system, no doubt. I guess the real take away is that we have lost the ability and the will to operate any major institution in the up and up. Everything is a scam, riven through with corruption and self dealing. This is a reflection on the general state of society, and it certainly doesn’t speak well to who we are on a collective basis.
Well said.
I was a rabid football fan until the kneeling shit began, and looking back on the 20+ years that I followed NFL and college ball I wondered how that squared with my supreme loathing for blacks. I think it had to do with the fact that when players are in full uniform, including helmets, pads and gloves, all eleven team members on the field look rather similar, and it is easy to dissociate their individual race from their team identification.
Yeah, I knew that Lawrence Taylor and Michael Strahan were black as the Ace of Spades. But their uniforms hid the fact just enough, and their names were sufficiently White-sounding that I could suspend belief long enough to cheer them on during a contest. But you can’t hide a black face and skin in basketball, and all I see on the court is sweaty negros throwing elbows and shit-talking. Hence my lifelong disdain for monkeyball.
I played football in high school and college, and my son made all-state his senior year. We used to bond over the sport well after he hung up his cleats, and I miss that aspect of the game. But in all honesty, we aren’t missing much. There are plenty of other things to bond over besides passively watching a child’s game that has been turned into a circus, complete with monkeys and clowns paid millions to act like monkeys and clowns.
Grew up in Cincinnati, a few years older than you Arthur. Back then if we didn’t have snow before Halloween it was shortly after and generally the snow stayed from mid-November on until spring. So for me it wasn’t football unless the field was white. I got disgusted long before you, about when the Bengals left their damn fine rookie status behind and became the Bungals.
Cincinnati had one of the best intra city college football rivalries in the country, Xavier University vs. University of Cincinnati. It all ended in 1974 when Xavier dropped football. I saw the last one in 1973. Also, getting the NFL Bengals franchise in 1968 didn’t help much either. Gave up watching TV, including sports. By the way, I started viewing the boob tube back in the late 1950’s! It was a Cincinnati made black & white Crosley set with the ant ears antenna which you had to adjust every five minutes. Dad finally got around to putting up an outdoor antenna. Slight improvement.
And with paid athletes, it’s just NFL lite.
When I was in my twenties I had a resting heart rate in the low thirties and ate somewhere between 5,000 to 8,000 calories a day due to an extremely strenuous exercise program in addition to cutting meat 40 plus hours a week. I laughed out loud whenever football was discussed, arguing that anyone that is clinically obese is in no way an athlete, and that football was not a sport, but rather a kid’s game. As my life slowed down and I got married i eventually eased back into sports spectatorship, although growing ever more uncomfortable with the whining, the arrests, fights in titty bars, cocaine binges and then…wait for it…kneeling at the National Anthem. That stung. Turned off the sports and haven’t watched any college or pro sports since. Excepting of course during my daughter’s D1 soccer-goalie-career with full ride scholarship. Man, I do NOT miss watching women’s soccer from the grandstand. I doubt I will ever even glance at a game of soccer ever again. At least the schooling (BA in Business Admin) was free.
I was never a ball sports fan. As someone pointed out on a comment section on a different blog a number of years ago, ball sports are just games of keep away.
What I got interested in was riding a bicycle. Although I was never going to qualify for the Tour De France, the part of the state I lived in had a bicycle race almost every weekend in late spring through early fall. On many occasions my wife and kids would go to bike races for family entertainment. I would race and my wife could find a way to entertain the kids while I was out racing, even if was just trying to feed them.
But now, the sport of cycling has been taken over by big corporations with an eye only to the bottom line by trying to sell plastic (carbon fiber) short lived bicycles in the $5,000 to $7,000 price range. Any you can EASILY spend up to the +$10,000 range for this wunderwaffen. Electric shifting and disk brakes are the new norm. I’m not sure who spends +$5K for a bicycle other than your typical status seeking New York investment banker. Most likely the thing turns into an overpriced clothes rack.
One other interesting aspect that occurred during the Covid scamdemic was riding indoors on over glorified stationary trainers. These things had I-Pads connected to them so you could ostensibly ride with (against) other cyclists. But with the collapse of the scamdemic the internet connected stationary bicycle model (with its monthly fee) collapsed as well.
As for me, I just go out and ride my bicycle.
I ran cross country in high school and that was my only involvement in sports. I have no interest in professional sports which is hilarious as I work for someone that owns both an NFL and NBA team.
Although I stopped watching professional sports after the overdose death of career criminal, drug addict and waste of DNA, chimp Floyd, for most of my life I was an avid fan of baseball, football and hockey.
Like you, I wrestled in high school but mostly to get in shape for baseball which I played through college which brings me to my main point in agreement with you- the NCAA and any other business oriented college athletic associations should be abolished. The pro leagues, mostly football and basketball, need to create, fund and administer, their own minor leagues the way baseball does and the way hockey has junior leagues. College has no business being the pipeline for pro sports leagues. It doesn’t really fulfill the mission of either. The “students” don’t really get an education and the leagues are not able to develop athletes geared toward the pro game. Some college programs “coach” the pro style game but it’s not the same. If those who had a true shot at making it to the pros went into a minor league system colleges wouldn’t have the same degree of corruption from D1 money and certainly not NIL. College kids could play at an amateur level and nothing more. It would be an all around benefit. As an additional plus there would be fewer on campus crimes since there would be fewer chimps.
I was always a fan of Jeff Cooper’s definition of a “real” sport (requires loud noises, supersonic projectiles, and recoil) so I never got attached to sportsball. Once I understood the function of “bread and circuses” I was glad that I didn’t.
The Colonel was a gentleman of the old school and a great teacher!
The watching of sports seems to attract people of the herd mentality.
You know, people that are easily led.
In my whole life I have not watched more than a total of maybe 15 mins of sports of any kind. I find all of it unbearably boring.
Whats the NFL disclaimer? For entertainment purposes only. First off, lets just call it nigger-ball, tennis, basketball, football and now european soccer, well maybe shitskinz ball. Sports, especially the NFL is and has bee rigged. Brian Tumi and an ex- FBI agent wrote a book on this. Hence the disclaimer. More bs. Yes, I played sports as a kid and teenager, they were fun, but are kids games. Im no longer a jock or an “athletic supporter”, this was a hung jumper in the door and now a cutaway. See ya later, hope ya packed a reserved chute but if you lawn dart in, the amusement value will be priceless, either way you wont be missed.