Pressdog.com

A Football-Sized Wad o' Cash

By Bill Zahren
(Posted 09/11/03)

So are you ready for The Big Game?

You know, The Game? The Only Game This Weekend that Matters?

Iowa State vs. Iowa.

Oh, it’s got everyone here in Iowa’s capital city in a tizzy. A froth. In its fifth day of fawning coverage, The Des Moines Register signaled it’s finally running out of stuff to write by doing a feature today on the trophy Iowa and Iowa State play this game for every year. A story on the TROPHY. On the front page of the sports section. With a photo.

And I’m sure all the frothing Iowa and Iowa State fans read every word. Me? I glimpsed the photo while turning to the opinion page to read about G.W.’s $87 billion for Iraq. Security, infrastructure repair, streets, training police, hunting down punks -- striking.

Maybe if our schools were taken over by terrorists who claimed to have weapons of mass destruction they could get a few extra billion as well. A bit of a cheap shot, sure, but that’s what the opinion pages are all about, baby.

As for big-time college football, I’m boycotting. My position, I know, puts me in the tiny minority among fellow Des Moinesians, where half the city went to either Iowa or Iowa State, or both.

OK, to confess my small-school graduate evil dream, I’m hoping the game ends in a scoreless tie. I further hope the stadium is only half full Saturday as people show their displeasure with the enormous ticket prices.

But I won’t get my wish. It’ll be a sell out and the Register will devote upwards of 10 pages to the game on Sunday. And that’s fine. I don’t begrudge Iowa and ISU fans their fun. I don’t even mind the colleges charging $35 to sit on a grass embankment inside the stadium. (It’s $50 if you actually want a seat -- but they're all sold out.)

If they can get it (and they can), more power to them. Heck, I say raise ticket prices. The more cash the athletic teams harvest, the fewer of my tax dollars the universities spend entertaining the state.

When it comes to big-time sports, I’m in a major "fight the power" mood. When it comes to big-time college sports, I’m in a "fight the hypocrisy" mood. The hypocrisy comes from calling a lot of these guys "student athletes" and from claiming that education comes first, when, clearly, big-time college sports are entirely about stroking alumni and generating glory and cash for the universities.

National Championships come first. Building "competitive programs" comes first. Because -- and it’s tough to argue with this -- that’s what brings in the fat alumni cash. And with the states sending fewer tax dollars to the universities, they gotta make money somehow. So the universities have turned to the lucrative entertainment industry and now make millions off the backs of the players.

It’s the sweetest labor deal you’ll ever find anywhere. The A-list players generate tens of millions of dollars for the school and, in return, about half of them get free tuition valued at a whoppin’ $7,000 per. Oh yeah, and they also get a 1-in-5000 shot at a job in the National Football League.

But college is all about education. Yeah, the universities are fully prepared to suspend the Heisman Trophy Candidate running back for having someone else write his term paper. And they’re right there backing up the English professor who gives the star QB an "F" for thinking King Lear is a kind of private plane. Riiiiiiiight. And Division I monkeys are flying out of my butt, too.

And I’ll admit a good portion of this anti-big-time sports angst comes from jealousy. While the University of Iowa and Iowa State University get 14-inch newspaper stories on their trophies, a bus carrying the entire team from my alma mater, tiny Morningside College in tony Sioux City, Iowa, could disappear into a sinkhole in rural South Dakota and it would get three to five inches of mention. The burning question of that article would be: will this cause the Iowa or Iowa State games to be canceled or otherwise inconvenienced?

But, I don’t want to sound too harsh. Don’t want to be too much of a wet blanket here. If you enjoy watching big-league professional college sports, by all means watch them with my complete blessing and support. Just don’t tell me Division 1 sports aren’t 80% about the cash and 20% about the sport.

Because I’d hate to see those Division 1 monkeys flying out of your butt.

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