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America’s Struggle Session Comes to College Football


Muda69

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https://spectator.org/americas-struggle-session-comes-to-college-football/

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Which leaves college football, a product with perhaps the most loyal fans in all of sports.

And while only a few teams opened the season over the weekend, on Saturday when ESPN opened its GameDay broadcast with a panel discussion focused on anything but football, and specifically with a discussion of the George Floyd/Jacob Blake “mostly peaceful” protests and how America is such an awful country, the struggle session wasn’t just part of diversity or sensitivity training or the public flogging of wayward figures for impure comments.

It was on for all of us.

Kirk Herbstreit, the network’s prime college football analyst, delivered the indictment — a weepy, juvenile homily aimed at shaming college football fans, most of whom tune in to ESPN in a vain attempt to escape politics for just a little while, into jumping aboard the Black Lives Matter bandwagon…

“I was talking to David Shaw, the head coach of Stanford…he shared a quote to me and it reminded me, from Benjamin Franklin: ‘Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as to those who are.’

“The black community is hurting. If you’ve listened, (you’ve heard) the word empathy and compassion over the last four months. How do you listen to these stories and not feel pain and not want to help? You know what I mean? It’s like…wearing a hoodie and putting your hands at 10-2… Oh god, I better look out. I’m wearing Nike gear, like what? What are we talking about?

“You can’t relate to that if you’re white but you can listen and you can try to help because this is not OK. It’s just not.

“We gotta do better, man. We gotta, like, lock arm and arm and be together. In a football locker room, that stuff is gone. Those barriers are gone…We gotta do better.”

How embarrassing.

Herbstreit could have defended college sports as a means for underprivileged young adults, disproportionately black of course, to escape those disadvantageous circumstances in crime-riddled neighborhoods and acquire the skills, athletic or otherwise, to turn professional in high-paying occupations. College sports is one of the best vehicles for bringing Americans of all colors and creeds together behind common purposes.

He could have said that. He could have said if America was a little more like the example its college sports programs set on their best days, there wouldn’t be the need for riots in the streets.

But he didn’t. Instead he made millions of Americans miserable with his emotionalist micturation all over our TV screens and turned an attempt at entertainment and escape into an involuntary pīpàn dòuzhēng for one of the last bastions of traditional America.

Those millions will turn into hundreds of thousands. College football fans will head for fishing holes and hunting leases. College sports is, as Ben Domenech noted, a luxury item. Not a necessity.

And the social-justice Left, which ruins everything it touches, has its hands on pro and college sports like Joe Biden on a twelve-year-old. All that’s left is to watch the stadiums empty and the advertisers drop out.

Herbstreit killed college football on Saturday. Americans have no patience for struggle sessions. The Cultural Revolution is one thing Americans simply won’t buy from China.

Yep. I watched that homily by Mr. Herbstreit and just shook my head.    If this is the crap ESPN and the other broadcasters of college football are going to shove down their viewers throats then I'll have something better to do on a Saturday in Autumn.    The woods are calling and I must go........................

 

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The Problem Of Woke College Football: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/lsu-tigers-orgeron-saban-problem-of-woke-college-football/

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I am not a big sports fan, but you can’t live in the South and not understand that SEC (Southeastern Conference) football is a tribal religion. My sense is that if college football teams go woke, it could cause real disruption, in ways that might have a political effect. This is just speculation, mind you; I invite you readers who are more knowledgeable about sports to weigh in.

It’s also true about professional football. Today we’re learning that the Dallas Cowboys organization has given the green light to players to kneel during the National Anthem. Me, personally, I am not offended by the kneeling. But I don’t think that’s going to go over well in Texas.

Here in Louisiana, people care about the New Orleans Saints, but they don’t care nearly as much as they do about the LSU Tigers. If the Tigers go woke, Ed Orgeron has a big problem on his hands. Orgeron is from down the bayou. He surely knows in his bones how unwelcome the racial politicization of Tiger football will be among white fans. I wouldn’t presume to guess what Coach O’s true feelings are about Black Lives Matter, but one has to appreciate the dilemma’s he’s in. Orgeron, Nick Saban, and other coaches lead teams that are predominantly black. If the black players (and their white teammates) feel strongly about this issue, then their coach failing to support them is going to make the coach’s job untenable. That’s just a fact of life.

Yet figures like Orgeron and Saban have to know that these protests are not going to be popular with the large white fan bases of their teams. It is impossible to overstate how much good will the LSU Tigers have here in Louisiana after their National Championship win last season. But they could burn through it very quickly.

There will be people who flat out hate Black Lives Matter. But there will also be people who hate that something as beloved and unifying as college football is being politicized. The fact that the LSU Tigers are marching for Black Lives Matter is not going to make more Tiger fans support BLM; it’s going to make more Tiger fans turn on the Tigers.

Again, you might say it’s racism, and you might be right for some people. But my gut tells me it’s mostly going to be about resentment at the politicization of college football, which, again, in the South really is a tribal religion. A few weeks back, I was talking to a friend who is a pastor in Baton Rouge. We were talking about how the diminishment of this fall’s football season is going to be psychologically painful for a lot of people in this city. Laugh at it if you want, but football season is the happiest part of the year for a hell of a lot of people. The fact that the Tigers are going to be playing only a limited schedule, and that there will be only half-full stadiums (by governor’s orders), and some of the players are opting out for their safety — all of this is going to hit people very hard, especially after suffering depression from six months of Covid measures.

Folks are going to be angry. The Tigers (and, I presume, other football teams) can’t afford to have the people angry at them. 

I mean that literally. All college programs are under a lot of pressure this year because of Covid. The financial losses to universities and businesses who profit from football season are going to be massive. The projected losses are going to be so great at LSU that the university is asking fans to donate to the athletic program. You think the small business owner in Lafourche Parish is going to open his wallet to the Tigers when they’ve gotten woke? This is exactly the wrong time for football teams to alienate fans. But it’s going to happen, and when it does, we can count on sports journalists to chastise fans for being a bunch of slack-jawed bigots.

I see that one of Trump’s sons has picked up on the Cowboys thing, tweeting the following to his four million followers:

Football is officially dead — so much for “America’s sport.” Goodbye NFL… I’m gone. https://t.co/FSJeyvsql3

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) September 8, 2020

 

Remember, the Cowboys market themselves as “America’s team.”

Think about how popular college football teams introducing racial politics into college football in the middle of this presidential campaign is likely to play. If you’re mad at your favorite team for getting woke, and regard it as yet another example of the left politicizing everything, might that not affect your vote, and/or your political intensity?

It just seems to me that if you are a football player trying to build interest in and sympathy for Black Lives Matter, this is not the way to do it. In fact, it’s the way to energize opponents of BLM. And I have a sense that this is going to have some effect, perhaps not measurable, on the fall election — and beyond. The cumulative effect of politicizing sports to the cultural left could be to help radicalize the conservative base.

What do you think?

 

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