I stopped following college football decades ago. Cynics
suggested it was right after I started attending Rutgers University who used to
play Princeton, Delaware, Lehigh and Villanova but who now play, and lose to
the likes of TOSU (The Ohio State University) and just about any Big Ten
football team with a pulse. Imagine my
surprise to learn my desertion didn’t start a trend.
Division I college football is a multi-multi-billion
dollar business that, if the stories are true, is traceable to the Rutgers-Princeton football game in 1869 (PPV
available for only $29.99 on Channel 1104); I told Matthew Brady that motion
pictures not stills were the wave of the future but he scoffed as he drove off
in his Edsel.
College sports began as a game, but as I just mentioned,
it didn’t stay there. But while money fixes everything, to include player
recruitment and other aspects, sometimes the money breaks and the sport alone
finds itself on life support until some college or university pulls the plug.
That’s what happened in Alabama where the phrase that
pays Is Roll, Tide, but, down the street,
Blaze the Dragon will be riding off into the
sunset. I’m sure the students and alumni
also turned out en masse to protest the defunding of the new Chem Lab, but due
to technical difficulties we don’t have footage of that.
Meanwhile, in a throwback to a simpler America when
“service academy” rivalries mattered and people like Joe
Bellino and Roger Staubach played for the Blue and Gold, I
discovered the United States Military Academy at Annapolis (still) has an A/V
club-at least I am assuming they do based on this ‘spirit’
video released (escaped might be a better word) prior to next
Saturday’s clash with the men of West Point.
I have the feeling John Paul Jones might have something
to say about all of this and that it probably doesn't have anything to do with
those reissues of the Led Zeppelin catalog.
-bill kenny
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