As the world of sports heads to another calendar year, it is time for old curmudgeons to stand up and take stock of recent trends. Free speech doesn’t just apply to millennials.
Sports is headed down several rabbit holes. The people who control things, plus those in the media who enable them, are greedy, gutless or brain dead. Lots of people in positions to do something know better but refuse to stand up. Even worse, lots of them don’t know better.
A recent shocking moment triggered these thoughts. On Nov. 26 in the USC-Notre Dame game, a player scored a touchdown and turned around to hand the ball to the official. That’s all he did. It was stunning, mind-blowing. There was no dancing, no group hugging that goes on and on, no slam dunking over the goal-post crossbar, no line dancing. Not even a bowling ball routine in which the scorer rolls the football and half a dozen teammates become bowling pins and fall down. (You have to admit, that one is clever.)
In the same Irish-Trojans game, USC quarterback Caleb Williams scored a touchdown and ended up striking the Heisman Trophy pose. He said there was peer pressure to do it, and he gets kudos for wanting to resist. He certainly had done enough against the Irish, and also during his injury-hampered night Saturday against Utah, to impress Heisman voters. No posing needed or wanted.
In 1967, after Travis Williams scored a touchdown for the Packers, he danced in the end zone. When he got to the sideline, Vince Lombardi told him to “act like you’ve been there before.”
Now, we have a generation of college and pros acting like they will never get there again.
No. 2 on the curmudgeon list:
It’s now bowl season in college football. To be clear, this isn’t really bowl season. For everything but the final four, it is ESPN “Look At Us” season. How, after all, could we live without the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl? But ESPN’s bowl glut is no longer disgusting in its excess, just unsettling — its gluttonous marketing has been criticized for years. ESPN has won. The colleges saw dollar signs and caved. Common sense and moderation be damned. All Hail ESPN.
But the new twist in this is that many players are now telling their college coaches that “they might not play” because they don’t want to hurt themselves for the NFL combine camps and their…