Football Is a Sucker's Game

Universities and getting so much money from football games because the attendance is so high. Season tickets for football at UCLA are ridiculous, my friend has to pay extra for it because it's not included in the tuition! And now that I think about it, they get a ton of money off of merchandise too, everywhere I turn you can buy UCLA or USC merchandise. I heard in Japan UCLA has its own store to sell shirts and sweatshirts bearing its name. My own high school sells this crap at the grocery store. And yet, does tuition decline? No, the university is putting more and more of that money back into the sport to improve its stadium! And once they have a fancy new stadium but a bad team. What do they do? They bribe an even worse team to lose! I've always seen college football and professional sports full of corruption. Why should a professional football player get paid so much for getting beat up on the field? Verses a life saving doctor or the common teacher who spreads knowledge to all. Have you ever watched MTV Cribs? I find it appalling when a sports figure is featured on the show; they have so much money that they invest in some of the most ridiculous things. Sokolove mentions that some coaches make about 2 million a year for doing almost nothing. On page 127 Sokolove writes that a university president resigned after mentioning that he raised a basketball player's GPA. If the school suspends the team's star player, fans will get mad. People will stop coming to games and thus the school will lose money. The world of college sports is full of corruption, schools just want the money and the recognition that their school is the best. I believe that the universities have lost the notion that sports is about enjoying the moment. They see it as one huge marketing scam. And then you look at the die hard fans, they go because they love the sport and are suckered into dishing out the cash. Marketing doesn't just stop at selling items but has expanded to young children dreaming of going to that particular university just for the team. I asked my younger brother what school he dreams of going to and he answered, "USC." I asked him why he wants to go there, why not UCLA? And he replied, "Because USC has a better football team." I didn't agree with that answer. There are many different schools that aren't publicized at all and still are great schools! I think it's wrong that schools like U.S.F. to add a football team to get more publicity. This will just lead to more corruption in our society.
"Football is the S.U.V. of the college campus: aggressively big, resource-guzzling, lots and lots of fun and potentially destructive of everything around it." -page 145
This is so true from my personal experience in high school. Basically our football team sucked ass. We lost almost every single game and our team was filled with a bunch of morons. And yet they got all the luxuries from huge pep-rallies, new equipment every year, crowds at games, and now selling merchandise at local grocery stores. I find this ridiculous! I used to run on a number 1 ranked cross country team and we never got the royal treatment football had. I saw this as unfair, why should a team that sucks and is full of corruption get brand new equipment? And a team that actually wins gets the hand-me downs? I always saw the cross country team as the underdogs of the sporting world at my high school. We were a bunch of super hard working, decent people but we never got nice stuff like football did. It was always a dream of my friends and I to get an all-weather track. It took 4 years, but now my high school is getting one, after i graduated.