Several years ago, I wrote on attending the NCAA men’s basketball tournament aka March Madness for the American Sun. Experiencing it again in Milwaukee this year, there are notable changes. The magic is a little dimmer.
The games themselves are still fun to watch. An upset makes the day fun and gives an electric jolt to the crowd. Coeds, alumni and bands make the crowd unlike professional basketball’s audience. You are guaranteed fun. These are college students playing at a slightly lower level and on average slightly closer to regular human size.
One noticeable change in system though is the effect of NIL money in college sports. NIL money is name, image and likeness money that is collected and paid to players. Outside sponsorships have wormed their way into college athletics, removing the fig leaf that it was amateur competition. In defense of this, it was wrong for teams to sell merchandise obviously about a player and never give him a cut. It’s the execution of NIL that turns this into a small professional system. NIL money combined with another procedural change “transfer portal” makes experienced players who are good but not good enough for the NBA hired guns in a move similar to the NBA. Transfers used to have to sit out a year. No longer now due to the portal. Combined with NIL money, players can move for cash and change a team. Several teams I watched were staffed with players I recall a year or two earlier at other schools. This allows bigger programs to poach talented players from mid-majors and small schools. It bolsters established, major competitors. The free agency vibe poisons the mood a bit.
While that is on the court, the biggest change is in the stands. Phone use during the game is rampant, but it is not for communications. Gambling is now on the radar for discourse as more states legalize it, and seems like everyone in the crowd is wagering on games. I loved going to games to experience live competition but enjoyed talking to other fans. Now the conversations during breaks are fewer in number because someone is building a same game parlay on their phone app. Conversations center around bets won, lost or made. During games, fans constantly go to their phones due to in game push notifications about bets. It’s digital crack with the reward being a small dopamine hit and a $20 win. The weirdest jumbotron advertisement was for fans to not abuse players for lost bets.
It is a silly complaint but do we need to gamble on everything? It permeated our investment world, which shortened the average length of time a stock was held and created AirBNB real estate speculators. It is widespread and compulsive as the age of those tooling around on DraftKings and FanDuel were 18-81. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, it gives the poor the illusory something for nothing they desperately want. They want to make money for nothing.
March Madness is a moneymaker for all parties involved: host cities, the NCAA, schools and television networks. As our society must monetize, every single dollar is squeezed out of a three week event. The charm of the event is seeing a team staffed with future accountants, logistics managers and salesmen pull off a win versus a stacked team with future NBA players. Maybe an overlooked 22 year old goes off for three games and plays himself into the NBA. The transfer portal and NIL turns any talented but not NBA level player into a hired gun. It feels more professional and more like the NBA, which is a sport sliding into WWE territory for integrity. We do not need every sport to be about money.
The gambling thing is another forced money corruption of the game. Making bets with a bookie who might beat you up to collect is dirty. Losing money via an app sanitizes it, even as it is just as corrupting. We cleaned up a vice and made it an app. We also made it something that could be easily hidden until the account needs more and more top ups, leading to bankruptcy or suicide.
Just because we can does not mean we should. This is one of the problems of our technological world. It is a problem throughout society. We probably should not do gain of function research, but we can, and our bureaucrats make it so. We can do a lot of things and can provide vice on demand in private, hidden ways but should we? We can monetize the sport more and wring every last penny out of fans, but we do not need to do so. Money replaces loyalty. Money is up for grabs. The Supreme Court even declared it is legal. Just because it is legal does not make it right, and we have far too many people who do not know the difference nor do they care.
-Amerikaner Sportsfan
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Let’s be honest and candid for a moment, I remember when the SEC racially integrated their sports in 1972. One effect was that the 2 best coaches in the league- Johnny Vaught of Ole Miss(football) and Adolph Rupp of Kentucky(basketball) retired that same year. The reasons for both retirements were the same, but both coaches(at least publicly) discreetly kept their reasons to themselves- probably because they were pressured by their athletic departments to do so. I had a personal friend who was working at a local newspaper as an assistant for a beat sportswriter assigned to cover Ole Miss sports, and the sportswriter asked Vaught in candor if his retirement had anything to do with with the racial integration of the league. After swearing the sportswriter to secrecy, Vaught confessed it did, and said- “This will corrupt our sports.”Pressed as to why, Vaught said, “Negro players will insist on being paid- to hell with the rules- they don’t fallow any! This will put coaches in a predicament- they can either pay them secretly, win for a while, then when they’re caught they’ll be fired, and disgracefully driven out of coaching, or they can take the high road, refuse to pay them, and they’ll be fired for losing, I’d rather leave now.” Vaught foresaw what would inevitably happen, and so did Rupp.
Vaught and Rupp were prescient enough to see the gradual demise of amateurism in college sports, and it’s negative consequences on white society and civilization.. They also saw that this would be the inevitable result of the negrification of college sports, but possibly didn’t foresee the concurrent feminization of sports- just another group to displace white men from their rightful place in society. The one group that saw all of this coming, and had the cunning to make money from it were the Jews. Next to finance, their favorite way of making money was always vice- it was a twofer for them- first, easy money with no dirty fingernails, and secondly, you get to corrupt the morals of the Goy at the same time you impoverish them. Gambling is a vice, and is the source of all the money fueling the professionalization of college sports. With gambling we’re financing the destruction and replacement of our own young white men, and the debauching of our own young white women by overpaid black athletes. Women’s sports on the other hand, is just a grooming parlor for lesbians which we avidly encourage our daughters to join.