I draw a different message…

YouTube decided that I needed to see this trailer:

It’s yet another sportsball movie. Yawn. But the schtick here is that the sportsballers in question are college, not professional, and there is some movement afoot to get them paid and get them medical insurance. Because the sportsballers currently don’t get paid, while their coaches and other staff can have salaries measured in millions; and while the staff have careers lined up for potentially decades, most of the sportsballers *won’t* go on to become professionals.

Message: boo hoo poor college sportsballers who spend several years getting feted and fawned over and provided with enough cars and other gifts and whatnot that if they weren’t idiots they could fund a pretty decent post-college retirement even without moving on to professional sportsball.

However, my takeaway is this: stop funding college sportsball. Instead of giving the coach six million dollars a year, give that money to the nuclear engineering department. Give it to the college Chess Team or the RC Airplane team or the Liquid Propellant Rocket Racing To The Stratosphere team. Or the Medical department. Or the physics lab. Or the library, to keep actual books on actual stacks that the students can actually access. You know… what academics are *supposed* to be about.

If these people are worried about college sportsballers getting so injured that they’ll need medical insurance more than the average college student, then clearly sportsball is an unwarranted risk. Get rid of it, turn the stadiums into lab spaces (imagine what the Ag Science department could do with an average football field) and instead of football and basketball, focus Rah Rah Go Team instead onto the Chess team, the college Halo/Call of Duty/Donkey Kong team.

There. Problem solved.