Thursday, March 5, 2015

College and football

In a 2012 post I said that I thought that “medical not academic issues will doom college football.” In a 2011 comment I gave it twenty-five years. An idle prediction, of course. But reading about the life of University of North Carolina offensive lineman Ryan Hoffman in today’s New York Times offers further reason to think that college football is doomed. A sport that leads, too often, to brain damage has no place in an institution of learning. At some point the cognitive dissonance of college and football together will be too great to ignore. (Lawsuits will help.)

comments: 3

Anonymous said...

I really hope that you are right. One could also reach the more pessimistic conclusion that this “offers further reason to think that brains in college are doomed. Organs that, too often, can be easily damaged playing football have no place in college. At some point the cognitive dissonance of college and brains together will be too great to ignore.”

Michael Leddy said...

Well, my brain got an awful lot of help in college. I remain an idealist about college.

Slywy said...

I've always thought college and football were separate things, with football a revenue-generating mechanism and "student-athlete" an oxymoron at the big schools. And that UofC (before it was UChicago) was right to relegate sport to a tertiary interest.