In five decades, the punchline will not seem so irreverently amusing, “What is ignorance,” to which the quip includes some sort of vernacular highlighting 15-second attentions spans, an epidemic of selfies, and a carnal undertone in every TickTok post harvested by the intelligence arm of China’s People’s Liberation Army.
While tradition is hanging on by a nano-thin thread of hope and adherence to the robust pageantry of unique experience that unite, the hangover from the peace movement afflicting the critical thinking skills of the current reign of decision makers addled by THC resin, chaos is trending in a brilliant and degrative fashion. With the University of Colorado , followed by Oregon and Washington defecting from the charred remnants of the Pac-12 athletic conference of remaining apologists, the floodgates replenishing California reservoirs have been jarred open by irony and blessed by the hand kissing ceremonies of individuals warping the future with antiquated social graces that defy any sort of analytics that portray common sense.
As the landscape of major college football has been mislabeled as a professional league for a quarter of the century by cynics, the rumor is finally being substantiated through the blunder of the various CEOs. While Watergate is a pun for malfeasance and loose ethics, the alphabet crimes of the NCAA’s and NIL’s of the world make for a deleterious environment, where competition is shunned and enablement is embraced.
Pac-12 conference commissioner George Kliavkoff (pictured above) is forcefully complicit in the impending disintegration of the league as well as his predecessor Larry Scott, with both leaders demonstratively failing to architect a viable media contract and wasting the prodigious markets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Seattle. The board of regents at both UCLA and USA originally saw the glaring writing on the wall of ineptitude and voted unanimously to bolt for the Big-10, where institutions embrace the revenue generating sports.
Scott set the precedent for incompetence in managing the revenue stream of major university athletics, as the former bureaucrat of the tennis world was inexplicably hired by the conference to change the trajectory of a league in dire need of rebranding efforts and effective marketing campaigns in showcasing athletes on a regional and national scale. His innate approach to generating cash resulted in the current saga of volatility, a plight only height by Kliavkoff’s aversion to inking a deal with DirectTV, contributing to irrelevance by not offering a large chunk of fans access to football and men’s basketball. While both oligarchs cannot be solely blamed for the changing college football landscape, and with Oklahoma and Texas defecting to the SEC, superconferences are on the horizon, along with chaos in the backwash of innocence lost.
While any semblance of culture is swiftly dissipating into that good night with the generic branding and commercialization of NCAA football, Kliavkoff’s disaster of a disaster of handling a contrived crises illustrates that tradition is unimportant and long-standing rivalries are no longer a priority. The spirit of competition has been reengineered by mass media and influenced by Disney, and the North Koreans are eagerly awaiting the conclusion to the experiment in basing innovative military strategy and flanking techniques to profit monetarily through prestige and commercialized hero worship.
With the top of the amateur sports universe in disarray, the game becomes just that much more political, as the ideology of the Pacific region collides head-on with middle America. The only intriguing facet to this pending dynamic is that evolving rivalries could be that much more vividly violent- Conservatives and Liberals clashing against the ocean breakers and sinuous waves of corn. It is only a matter of time before the Left coast hippy-dog mom lobby riots over the existence Iowa Hawkeye mascot, and the fun begins.
