College football putting the 'C' in crazy

A ticket to the Peach Bowl could be purchased for as little as $19 in the days leading up to the New Year’s Day game between Arizona State and Texas.

By losing the Big Ten championship game to Oregon, Penn State may have wound up with an easier path to the semifinals. The Nittany Lions had to play an extra game, hosting SMU in the opening round, before playing Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl. Meanwhile, Oregon got a Rose Bowl date with Ohio State, who may have the single most talented team in the country.

And the SEC — which fancies itself as only slightly less powerful than NATO — was left with exactly one team in the semifinals, and that team — Texas — played in the Big 12 last year.

Make of that what you will, but I’ll take it as being somewhat emblematic of a sport experiencing chaos of biblical proportions. And by biblical, I mean Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God-type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes. Volcanos. The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.

What, you forgot about “Ghostbusters”?

My perspective on Steve Sarkisian has changed dramatically not because of his issues with alcohol, but mine. In fact, it was in discussing Sarkisian’s coaching career that I started talking about my decision to get sober. The fact that I did this live and on the radio was entirely unplanned and frankly kind of frightening. It also was something that provided me with an important landmark in my recovery, and I wrote about the certainty I felt afterward in my column in The News Tribune.

When is it fair to expect a college-football player to participate in each of the games his team has to play?

My answer — for years — has been that it’s not, and this was based on my believe that the whole concept of amateurism — which serves as an ethical and financial foundation for modern college athletics — is a fairly total sham. Everyone is getting paid off their labor except for them, and if they decide — at any point — that they’d prefer to hold off on participating in a particularly violent sport to preserve their bodies for a time in which they can be paid, well, that’s entirely up to them.

Except college players are getting paid now. Not a salary, per se, and the colleges aren’t willing to consider them workers, but they are getting compensation in the form of marketing deals.

At what point is it fair to begin expecting players to participate in all of a team’s games without being labeled as an institutional bootlicker for Big College Football?

This question came up three-quarters of the way through the weekly Husky football podcast along with Christian Caple of OnMountlake.com. We were discussing the decision of Miami quarterback Cam Ward to sit out the second half of the Pop-Tarts Bowl, and I thought Christian had a particularly well-framed appraisal of the situation. This conversation starts just before the 45-mark of the podcast. I’ll also transcribe a portion below the link to the podcast so you can get the gist of what I thought was a really compelling point that Christian made, citing a story written by Matt Fortuna for the paid subscribers of his newsletter, “The Inside Zone.”

Caple: “I am all in favor of NIL. I think the NCAA is oppressive. I think that these guys absolutely deserve a cut, and a significant cut, of the revenue they generate, and if that means that other sports end up being underfunded or no longer funded, that’s too bad.

“As we’ve said before, there was nothing inherently virtuous about using the labor of college football players to fund a bunch of other sports. That’s just the way it always was forever.

“But also, I’d like to see these guys finish the season. I’d like to see these guys play in bowl, and the point that Matt Fortuna was that that viewpoint is shared by millions of casual fans and hardcore fans — the very people the universities are asking people more and more and more and more and it’s not going to stop, it’s only going to increase — to fund all of this: We need more money. Donors need to step up. NIL. Facilities. In Washington’s case, making up for a half-share of media rights money. All of these up-front, one-time costs for moving to the Big Ten.

“But we outright dismiss the feeling from a lot of those people that, ‘Well, you know, gosh it would be nice if the players played in every game,’ it’s dismissed as bootlicking … I just kind of think it’s unfortunate that this is a game that counts as part of the season, and these guys aren’t playing in it.”

I think it’s probably time for me to reconsider my position on this.

I had a typo in last week’s newsletter, one I’m particularly embarrassed about. I was discussing the first-round games of the college football playoff, pointing out the higher seed had one in each case. Except I didn’t say it that way.

Thankfully, an Apostrophian named Barry gently pointed out that I had made an error in usage. I have corrected it online, but it is another instance of a pronounced — and disturbing — trend: I am becoming dumber. Or at the very least, less grammatically correct, and this is bothersome because that has always been a somewhat pathetic point of pride for me.

Turns out what I’m experiencing is not altogether uncommon, though. I wrote about it in a recent column for Seattle Magazine: