Give it back to the kids

The head coach of the Texas Longhorns was on the tube last night, a few hours after his team's humiliating loss to Iowa State. His men showed a disgraceful lack of intensity on the field, he admitted angrily, shaking his head. He'd noticed their slackness all week during practice. He did everything he could to put some backbone into them, but it obviously had not been enough.

The game had been all about him, in other words, and the damn kids hadn't allowed him to win.

This coach's performance -- suggestive of an NFL coach's post-game show -- illustrates, to me, at least, what's wrong with college football. Long ago, football stopped being a sport for students and became semi-professional entertainment only loosely associated with the academic goals of sponsoring colleges. I've written at least one diatribe giving my opinion about college athletics, and won't repeat it here.

I hate the ritual at the end of the game where the winning and losing coaches hug and congratulate/commiserate with each other before the TV cameras. In the South, especially, each coach ventures onto the field surrounded by his own complement of uniformed state police; they look like two Central American generalissimos attending a conference. Are they anticipating assassination attempts?

In my ideal world, the student captains of each team would meet at midfield and exchange appropriate post-game respects. The student captain -- if anyone -- would appear on TV to be interviewed about the team's performance. The teams would be turned back to the students. The coach would certainly be honored for his coaching abilities, but in the same way that a fine professor is honored.

When a student wins academic honors, the focus is on the student. His professor or professors don't receive six or seven figure bonuses as the result of the kid's success, and they aren't fired if he fails.

We can't go back and start from scratch. We're stuck with the semi-professional teams that history has bequeathed us. Schools have learned to depend on the wealth that media exposure provides. Most schools, short of funding, can't afford the course taken by the Ivy League -- abolition of athletic scholarships and withdrawal to less competitive Division I-AA play.

Today, television is king. Historic conferences are being torn apart and reassembled for no reason other than maximization of profits -- profits for TV and thence for the schools. The absurd BCS process has been foisted upon us, because of the media's obsession with identifying a national champion. Now, already, the media have turned on the BCS, and are demanding a national playoff system. We have been conditioned to accept this media-created "need" as real and legitimate. The championship of a conference -- once a team's highest goal -- now appears a paltry prize, desirable only as a stepping stone to a national championship, whether mythical or somehow legitimized by postseason play.

But if we can't reverse this transformation, we could at least step back and ask where we're going. We could remember that college athletics are primarily for the benefit of students, not for entertainment of the public. We could make future decisions regarding the future of college football based on that understanding.

But who am I kidding?