Muddled priorities

[unixronin]

OK, so you want to become an officer in the Army.  You make it into West Point, you graduate ... and then you go to play pro football for the Detroit Lions?

Uh, no.  This is wrong, IMHO.  You volunteered, you got your way paid through West Point, you committed to serve; now it's time to serve.  You want to play pro football, you can do that after you get out.

Comments

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

When I worked in Admissions at Georgia Tech, we had a guy who put his application in at the absolute last minute before we started up the term, and I had to put his information in the computer, and had to help get him squared away. Didn't know him from Adam. Had to work with one of the central computing staff for some reason to deal with him--I forget why the data entry people couldn't have just handled it.

I say to the guy I'm working with, "It's [date]. I don't know why he thinks he's coming to Georgia Tech." The guy didn't have particularly special "numbers", either.

Pause as coworker absorbs that I are a chick who is truly clueless about sports.

"He thinks he's coming because his name is Stephon Marbury (sp?) and he is one hell of a basketball player."

Later on, I did ask my boss why we worked so closely with the athletic association. I wasn't bitching, just curious. There was a damned good reason: we had hard statistics linking how many applicants we got to a winning season. Special treatment for top athletes meant a much better freshman class, overall. Better freshman classes means better national rankings. Better national rankings means you can attract better professors and more top quality students, and so forth. So it's a multiplier far beyond what you would think.

Also, the jocks got lots of tutoring support, a lot of which was mandatory. They had a consistently higher 5 year graduation rate than the general student body. 60% vs. 57%, iirc. A lot of them were management majors or similar and so didn't need to take calculus, but management is arguably a much better major choice for the kinds of things top athletes do when they retire from active play if they're really successful, and is useful as hell if they get injured, or don't make the cut, or whatever for high-flying careers in the majors.

The athletes who are good enough to go pro are serving, it's just that--like with Marbury--it can be hard to see the benefits to the organization if you don't know the behind the scenes numbers.

We had hard numbers for exactly what those athletes were doing for us. I'm sure the Navy does, too.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

Oh. Now I remember why they handed Marbury straight to me instead of the data entry staff. As the Admissions computer geek, I was damned sure to get it right the first time--they wanted no chance of mistakes.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I guess, lacking any interest whatsoever in team athletic sports, I have a tendency to think of them as being completely irrelevant in the real world. It makes it easy to overlook the fact that there are a lot of people out there to whom things like baseball, football, NASCAR racing etc are not only relevant, but actually important to their lives. I've always tended to consider the idea that "pro sports are important" more as a delusion than anything else, and I have to honestly admit I'd never really considered that kind of trickle-down effect. I've always thought of the massive pro-sports "industry" as a distraction that consumes time, resources and effort that could better be used elsewhere, rather than as anything that actually produces anything but overpaid celebrity athletes.

It's an alien perspective to me, but a thought-provoking one.

[laurarey.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I find what Julie said - about the football team having a good season being directly linked to the quantity of applications and resulting other stuff - to be scary and foreign.

I mean, you basically have people going "I am not a football player. I am nevertheless going to apply to a school that has recently been successful in football, when I would not have applied otherwise."

To me, that's incomprehensible and totally illogical.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

You *seem* to draw distinctions between individual and team sports, and between amateur and pro sports. Why? I think there are good arguments why pro sports and team sports are valuable, if any sport is valuable.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I have rather more interest in individual-performance sports than in big-field team sports, yes. Team field sports, honestly, have never interested me (and in many cases, oddly, for similar reasons to why I could hardly care less about NASCAR). Seeing Colin Edwards make up 14 places and almost 30 seconds in 12 laps on the Moto-GP circuit, or Max Biaggi successfully recover from a power wheelie that actually put his bike beyond vertical, fires my interest and admiration at his skill far more than any two-million-dollars-per-advertising-minute major league final ever could. This may be partly because I know first-hand what's involved, and perhaps partly because in an individual sport, you can't swap out players at the coach's whim according to the needs of the upcoming play; the individual athlete has to be good across the board. (And, honestly, my schools managed to completely turn me off team field sports very early.)

As for amateur vs. pro, it just seems to me the extravagantly-paid pro athletes, together with the teams' constant demand for bigger, newer and more extravagant stadiums, are a bigger waste of time and money than the amateurs who play more or less for the love of it and more or less wherever they can.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Proponents of team sport can counter that synergy between individuals is a beautiful thing, and that there is something intrinsically rewarding in working together towards a common objective.

As for paying athletes, I don't think it's avoidable as long as we have a market-oriented economy. Athletes (or their agenst/promoters) understand their wide importance, and so internalize the resulting profit and attract more top talent to their sport.