Amazing how polarizing youth sports are. My job as dad is to create balance. It’s not to let them do what they want. I’m thankful we didn’t give up our summers. Thankful to have kids that still love sport bc we have provided boundaries. Sunday’s aren’t negotiable. Church
The Dusty May departure is just the latest event in what I have increasingly come to view as college sports’ spring/summer of disenchantment.
In the early days of portal/NIL/lawsuits against the NCAA, the on-field product wasn’t being threatened as much. In the last ~6 months we’ve had…
- The Sorsby situation underscoring a lack of rules/enforcement that can threaten the integrity of the games
- Numerous high profile cases of tampering that apparently can’t be punished
- Eligibility lawsuits going from involving older players like Trinidad Chambliss into involving players who have been drafted into pro sports
- Conferences filled with teams who spent decades engaging in horrible fiscal management trying to force a CFP expansion fans don’t want
- The current CFP selection committee’s inability to weigh schedule strength leading to the cancellation of marquee out of conference games
- Increasing apathy towards recruiting in all sports
- The broken promises of the House Settlement coming into full view, making both fans and coaches feel confused about what the rules actually are
- Coaches leaving during a playoff run because checks promising to fund their own accounts and their future rosters matter more than the opportunity to do something special in the moment
Some of these things speak to the amount of money at stake and the predictable outcome of everyone involved looking to get what they can while they can.
But some of these issues are now threatening the basic definition of a sport (everyone playing their hardest under the same set of rules with players of the same age/eligibility qualifications). If you don’t have baselines then the games don’t have the same meaning.
In the face of all of it, it’s understandable why a young national title winning coach like May is choosing to leave for the NBA instead of pursuing a potential dynasty.
May leaving now instead of gearing up for a run at a repeat while waiting to see if Congress passes a bill speaks to a) how good the opportunity is and b) how bad the situation is in college basketball at the moment
In the broader spectrum, it took college sports 130 years to capture enough interest that fans began to follow player acquisition like a second sport. People are losing interest in the who, how and why that shapes their programs. More and more they’re only interested in the games, and there are forces threatening the amount of passion around certain parts of the in-season schedule.
Everything we know about sports says that it takes a long time to create generational bonds around them.
College sports is well past the point of needing to pull the ripcord and take actions to restore public trust/interest in the who, how and why, and that’s before we even talk about the issues threatening the integrity of the games themselves.
Eventually, purgatory becomes permanent if the people in charge don’t pick a path that leads elsewhere
USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.
Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.
I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."
"They just come with the table, man."
They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.
This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.
I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.
"Did we…?"
"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."
Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.
My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."
Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.
I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.
Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.
I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.
Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.
This is reminiscent of when Georgia fans got to Indianapolis in January of 2022 and discovered there was a giant US Post Office processing center next to the stadium where Stetson “The Mailman” Bennett would take the field for the Bulldogs
We are on #OMENS watch again friends