Moneyball

Matt Taibbi rightfully lambastes the hypocrisy inherent in the University of Miami football "scandal":

"Objectively speaking, there’s no logical reason why it should be wrong to pay a star football player who’s helping the University of Miami secure a multimillion-dollar TV deal. But the NCAA says it’s wrong, and its officials even wrote a complex series of rules to back themselves up – and, unbelievably, the entire sportswriting community buys the myth.

When stories like this Shapiro thing come out, about teenagers who are caught making the mistake of actually accepting pay for their labor, every pompous, finger-wagging dimwit asshole in the sportscasting world –- and there are a lot of those -- naturally has to sound the moral alarm."

I went to U.M., and even at the time, when the words "Hurricanes" and "football" were never uttered in the same sentence without the word "dynasty" -- and rarely without the word "assholes" -- I couldn't have really cared less about college football. Not saying I don't love football; I do, actually. NCAA football is just one of those things I've never really allowed myself to become a slave to fretting over one way or the other. That said, is the U.M. scandal honestly all that big a deal? Great, so some criminal gave a bunch of kids a leg-up in the grotesque lifestyle our entire culture has programmed them to strive for and which they were almost sure to become the next arbiters of anyway. Are we really gonna pretend that the greed that drives today's college sports is somehow of a higher moral caliber than the greed that drives professional sports? Jesus, that's a laughable conceit. Talk about misplaced righteous indignation.

Although, I really love Taibbi's take on ESPN blabber-putz Colin Cowherd:

"Cowherd, for whom a jewel-encrusted throne thirty feet high is undoubtedly already being constructed in raging sportscaster blowhard Valhalla, went one further – saying these kids should have been more like Jesus, who after all didn’t mind being poor."