Abolish NCAA sports. It has no "business" at universities

Shahab earned his masters degree in Nebraska before he settled down in Southern California for good.  He once remarked that the entire state turns red when the University of Nebraska's football team played at home. (Red is their jersey color.)

In the Midwest and the South, and even here in Eugene, college football rules the lives of many.  I was a fan, once, before I was woke, as we say now. 

The coronavirus threatens the football season, and people are already losing it.  Like this coach at Oklahoma State, who went on a rant:

“In my opinion, we need to bring our players back,” said Gundy (via Sports Illustrated), who has posted a 129-64 record over 15 seasons with the Cowboys. “They are 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 years old, and they are healthy and they have the ability to fight this virus off. If that is true, then we sequester them and continue, because we need to run money through the state of Oklahoma. ...
Everybody needs to see football. Even if you just watch it on TV, it’s going to make people feel better.”

This is at a time when colleges and universities--including his own--are all closed down.

There are plenty of nutcases like him, and addicted fans in millions, who are already panicking about no-football-Saturdays.  tRump knows well that his base are "yuge" football fans, and not having football in the months leading up to the election will doom him even in the red states.  The toddler-in-chief has, therefore, thrown a tantrum about that too!

With the COVID-19 crisis, we now have an opportunity for a major reset.  Will we make use of this opportunity?

I have been blogging forever about the atrocity of the business of sports at universities.  The following is a quote from Katha Pollit, which I blogged about in November 2011:

In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system.

A much better system we too can have.

So, what should we do?  I need to only slightly alter Pollit's prescription:

Cancel the season. Fire everybody. Get real. Grow up.