Sumbitch deserved to die

[supergee]

John Scalzi says college football is doomed. *Cue Tard the Cat saying “Good”* It’ll probably kill pro football too, but I guess I can live with that.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*gets pompoms and celebrates*

[dewline]

*shrugs indifferently*

[arlie]

It is amusing that he attributes "liking to watch football" and "refusing to wear masks and/or to make them mandatory, particularly for reasons of freedom" as being associated with the same people. That makes emotional sense to me, as a nerd.

But I wonder whether it's actually true, or whether Scalzi's just having the same nerdish knee jerk I do, only writ larger.

My observation is that a lot of people are into watching spectator sports, including college sports, and rooting for their favourite teams, and I've never noticed a political divide in this hobby. There was a traffic-jam-causing stadium/arena built inconveniently close to me with tax payer money sometime in the past decade, and I live in a state so blue that they've decided to have a single primary for all parties, and run two Democrats in the eventual election if (when) those are the two top vote collectors in the primary.

I had to Google to find out which sports are comonly played in that stadium - I'm as far from a sports fan as you can get (!) - but while the stadium is in fact used for multiple purposes, not all of them being sports, it turns out to have been built for football (according to wikipedia).

I repeat - this is a very blue state, and our local area appears to be much much better than the US average for people paying attention to covid-19 risks. But we built a football stadium which opened in 2014 with subsidies from our tax payers. (I've boycotted the brand that bought its naming rights ever since; to me, they now stand first and foremost for traffic tieups, secondarily for broken glass, urine, and other leftovers in any parking area in a too large radius.)

I'm happy not to have either the traffic tie-ups or the disgusting leftovers, and if they don't come back post-covid I'll be happy to celebrate. But I just don't think this is about major US politcal divisions.

[mrissa]

Pro football is inextricably intertwined with the abuses of college football. If you object to how people are treated in college football, you also object to pro football, because college is pro's unpaid minor league/development system.

[sturgeonslawyer]

I casually detest American "football", so I won't weep if Scalzi is right. But I don't think he is; pro and college "football" are as deeply rooted in American culture as real football is in, say, European culture.