Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Ban Buzz Bissinger

image No one who calls himself “Buzz” (with a straight face) should ever be taken seriously. But when Buzz forcefully argues that college football should be banned, I’m convinced that the man is either ideologically out of his skull or trolling us like a bloody champ.

Either way, a better idea is to simply ban Buzz.

Buzz says college football should be banned because it has no place in academics, costs too much and provides nothing for students. It’s all too cutthroat, in his humble estimation.

Harry Gerard “Buzz” Bissinger III is the author of the mega-hit semi-fiction novel Friday Night Lights, a 367 page indictment of high school football and the fanaticism of a small Texas town for its ultra-competitive prep gridiron teams. Sound familiar?

Pointy-headed liberals like Bissinger hate things that are competitive. Their heads explode when they realize that amateur sports like football at the high school and college levels are not only intensely competitive, they’re also extraordinarily successful financially, socially and culturally.

In the leftist utopia, these things are not beneficial. Competition? Individual achievement? The promise of using one’s physical and mental abilities to succeed? It’s just not in their plan. In their world, there are no winners when competition takes place. Only losers.

Don’t believe me about Bissinger’s underlying ideology? It’s right there in his closing paragraph:


“I would much prefer students going to college to learn and be prepared for the rigors of the new economic order.”


To a leftist like Bissinger, “learn and be prepared” means to attend university classes to be brainwashed and indoctrinated. The “new economic order?” Well, that sounds a lot like the whole fundamental transformation thing, doesn’t it?

Another aspect of college football that Bissinger and his ilk find ideologically unacceptable is how it completely levels the playing field of a free society and unites people rather than dividing them. The Capstone Report elegantly explains that college football erases racial and political divides.

Erasing those divides make slicing, dicing and pandering extraordinarily difficult.

Buzz writes that in more than 20 years of studying it, he’s heard no convincing argument that college football has anything to do with what he regards as the purpose of higher education, academics. It’s a nice strawman, but the primary purpose of higher education is growth and tranformation. For most college students, that four to six (sometimes seven) year period is about coming of age and making the transition from the carelessness of adolescence to productive adulthood. Yes, academics are important but along the way, other aspects of college life that have nothing to do with academics provide important social, cultural, political and economic benefits for students.

In more than 30 years of studying it, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that the Greek System has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education. Ban it.

Get rid of the Dance Club, the Billiards Club, the Poker Club and the Warcraft Club while you’re at it.

Oh, and don’t forget the Penn Democrats, Buzz. Any organization that produces such a ridiculous ideology has absolutely no place on college campuses.

See you in Miami, Buzz. Football is going nowhere.

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1 comments :

bo51 said...

Tell buzz and his ilk that with the banishment of college football, they'll also be banning most Title IX sports because those sports are paid for by College Football. Let the women know that buzzy and his buddies are going to do away with their sports and you'll really see the fur fly!

Bo Scott - Huntsville, Alabama

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