Byline: FREDRICK L. MC KISSACK JR.
Ardent sports fans, among whom I count myself, should ask why Dan Henning recently resigned as coach of the Boston College football team.
Was it his losing record? Well, 16-19-1 in three seasons is nothing to write home about. Or was it that 13 of his players were involved in a gambling scandal that rocked not just BC, but college football as a whole?
``It had nothing to do with the gambling situation,'' athletic director Chet Gladchuk said. ``It has to do with football.''
Gladchuk is right; it has to do with football. But the overcommercialization of college athletics had something to do with it as well. You can't sell the school name for all it's worth if your team isn't making the grade.
Walk through a shopping mall and you will see kids wearing warm-up jackets, shirts, sweats and hats sporting the names and logos of schools like Georgetown, North Carolina, Duke, UConn, Penn State and Michigan. Ever see anybody outside the town of Oxford sporting a Miami University of Ohio starter jacket?
Success on the playing field translates to real dollars. Persons who have never, and may never, set foot in Madison, much less the state of Wisconsin, dress themselves in Badger apparel. Find an affable coach and win a Rose Bowl, and this kind of thing happens. Everybody wants to be associated with a winner, especially when it comes with a good color scheme.
Henning may have lost more than he won, but he is also a victim of a society gone crazy over sports.
Supporting the ol' alma mater or your favorite team on the weekend is one thing. But we now have whole radio stations dedicated to sports talk. Twenty-four-hour analysis of football and basketball is available at the turn of the dial, the press of a television remote, or a touch of the computer keypad.
It's particularly irksome that some of the ``analysis'' amounts to nothing more than notes for those who want to place bets: the point-spread, the over-under and the normal lingua franca associated with the gambling industry.
The sports pages in daily newspapers place the latest line from Las Vegas next to the box scores, and advertisements appear on those pages for gurus who promise to give you the best picks of the week. Does anyone really believe all this information is out there to help you win the $10 office pool?
The notion that college sports is an extracurricular activity went out with wearing coonskin coats and waving pennants. Sports have become a money-making venture for schools, and an absurd source of personal pride for college alums who really do need to grow up and get a life.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association can legislate the affairs of the universities that belong to the organization. But the NCAA can't legislate America's obsession with major college athletics. And even if they could, it would really be against their best interests to do so.
It's up to us ordinary citizens to stand up to the power of corporate sports. Under pressure from concerned faculty, the University of Wisconsin-Madison refused to let Reebok buy the Badgers.
While the athletic department never heard of the First Amendment, at least some professors vaguely recalled it. They made a stink, and Reebok backed down.
Even in college sports there is such as thing as going too far. Fredrick L. McKissack Jr., is the editor of the Progressive Media Project in Madison, Wis.
