As avant garde comedy, this University of Texas 2011 football video narrated by Matthew McConaughey is pretty good.
On the other hand, if not avant garde comedy, this video is seriously delusional and reflects much of why the UT is not a particularly attractive member for conference affiliation purposes right now.
Regular readers of this blog know that I have regularly commented on the corrupt nature (see also here) of big-time college football and basketball.
Although corrupt, big-time college football and basketball resist comprehensive reform because – let’s face it – they are a very entertaining form of corruption.
But as this masterful (and quite long) Taylor Branch/Atlantic article explains, that resistance to reform is being challenged:
A litany of scandals in recent years have made the corruption of college sports constant front-page news. We profess outrage each time we learn that yet another student-athlete has been taking money under the table. But the real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein student-athletes generate billions of dollars for universities and private companies while earning nothing for themselves.
Here, a leading civil-rights historian makes the case for paying college athletes–and reveals how a spate of lawsuits working their way through the courts could destroy the NCAA.
And one of those lawsuits is by a former Rice student-athlete!
For anyone interested in the future of big-time college football and basketball, this is a must read. A series of short interviews of Branch are associated with the article and provided below:
In Bloodlands (Basic 2010), Timothy Snyder provides an extraordinary analysis of the human cost of the tyrannical regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Sarah Kaminsky’s father lived during those times and understood that cost. Ms. Kaminsky in the video below explains how her father figured out a way to reduce it.
