The latest chapter in the waning series of the football rivalry game of the Apple Cup between Washington State and Washington celebrating a gridiron war over the eons of the 20th and 21st century deftly, illustrated the unsettling metaphor for the modern nightmarish construct of college football through the aftermath of a brutal clash between rivals.
Between the desperate reshuffling of leagues and athletic departments, as well as the implementation of the Names, Images and Likeness protocol (NIL), that permits student-athletes to receive compensation for legally permitting use of their image, the first date experience between amateurism and the free market is a tragic example of a texting thread of empty conversation of wasted moments culminating in an expensive dinner and dessert cocktails diverting wildly from the romantic to the frustrations of mundanity concluding the passionless evening.
This is a circuitous script that is being repeated nationwide on the field and in the gym, as the superlatives of amateurism painfully dissolve into limbo, a fate reserved for any right-leaning politicians attending an off-Broadway production of battery identifying as donut, and human being savagely bartering heritage for the addictive turmoil of evocative masochism.
The football team that is the Cougars of Washington State University (WSU) endured a tumultuous offseason along with the University of Oregon State Beavers (OSU), as both programs were cast aside as the Pac-12 conference abruptly disbanded, sparking a degrative trend nationally as the reconfiguration from being gifted an education has been replaced by pay-to-play and as the Information Age prefers fiscally, the influencer over the achiever. The similar and disappointing fate plagues many major and minor college football programs and athletic departments in the wake of reshuffling and conglomeration resulting in the baffling formation of super conferences and the obliviousness to proximity. Hundreds of college teams (sarcasm font) are now crammed into nonsensical groupings is not the foreseeable endgame in embracing and promoting the future of high-level competiti0n.
Experts surmise that the NCAA and conference presidents employed the alleged knowledge of linguists and biology department taxonomists to create the 12 to 18 team leagues based on the species and cultural archetype the of mascots alone. Quite possibly, this blind and stopgap formula of bizarre configuration has been modeled from decades of NCAA Men’s basketball tournament office pools and bracketology, where non-sports fans regularly win the pot by choosing their picks through school colors, or their favorite animals.
Board of trustees at the WSU institution, in response to the instability, similar to the plight faced by other athletic departments, protested the seismic shift of conglomeration by defeating their arch nemesis, the Washington Huskies (UW) earlier in the college football season. UW along with Oregon, UCLA, and USC joined the Big-Ten, California and Stanford are now members of the Atlantic Coastal Conference, and Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah defected to the Big-12, leaving WSU and Oregon State as the odd women and men out. This scenario is being played out at institutions on a national scale.
The battle and accents of volatility illustrating the strife of a sport embodied in chaos, has effectively bombed amateur status with a salvo of nuclear ICBMS into the higher reaches of the atmosphere and oblivion. Innocence is no longer an excuse for purity and intrigue, while college athletes vehemently compete for business opportunities based on their marketability, and not performance or a viable skill set.
While the Pac-12 conference was thoroughly gouged by the mass exodus, the WSU athletic department sent a stern statement to the nation in the resounding victory that tolerability will not be enabled in the face of exploitation and the pyramid scam of television dollars, the transfer portal, and the intricacies of the NIL quotient engineering the branding of a sport on the brink of intellectual dishonesty. Semi-pros are now part of campus culture.
A hypothetical student-athlete at a small college, where there exists a plethora of campuses and a wealth of choices, can engage in a cash or cashless agreement with a theoretical pizza parlor to feed teammates, as scholarship athletics have effectively become the minor leagues for all facets of the pros, including the major sporting leagues, corporations, and small businesses.
Western society has become one step closer to the plot of Max Barry’s novel Jennifer Government, a narrative that involves critiquing the detriment of pure consumerism as characters share various surnames of McDonalds, Nike, or Microsoft. Though the checks and balances of the US government, state and civic entities are configured to at least adhere to the “checks and balances” of the Republic, ominous forces are present which assault fundamental liberties through gradual attrition in demanding the most efficient response to convenience and a pathway to the least resistance. In human terms, this condition is referred to as “instant gratification”, an unsustainable reaction to contemporary stimulus. For major college football, the pliable clay mold of a fleeting solution, does not equate to stability, as displayed by the formulation of super conferences and the formation of the NIL. Theoretically, a college athlete, on scholarship or not, can now earn money or gifts, regardless of what happens on gameday, a vile chain reaction will forever alter the complexion of sports in the US.
Television and streaming revenue are the primary culprits for the conglomeration of teams in leagues that make no sense geographically, historically, and socio-politically. The illogical storyline is a sad bi-product of the present tense of culture not leaning to the right or the left ideologically, but aligned with the aforementioned idea of the reactionary. For now, the tedious dominates, as the systems awaits a correction through the temporary infusion of commonsense.
While stability segues to the evolution of Moore’s law, a generation of once student-athletes will exit institutions of higher education lacking suitable life-skills, as personal branding through social media improbably equating to a lucrative career, transcends traditional disciplines as science, technology, engineering, leaving the idea of achievement to suffer and endures the rigors of the Stockholm syndrome located in a remote North Korean internment camp. Why earn a degree when one is paid based on digital reputation? This applies to every student, however, athletes in the major sports have the advantage of being bolstered by television and streaming platforms.
Between the unregulated experiment of athletic gerrymandering and innocence lost to forceful professionalism in college athletics, competition cowers as the future is bleak.