Will you believe U of M football Coach Harbaugh?

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From time to time, we discuss the value of college, and high school, athletics, vs the hype layered on them.

In the last discussion, I recalled the narrative in my high school “Portage Northern is our big rival, we gotta beat them Friday”. To which my response was “who says? why? who cares?”

Coach Harbaugh, who was also a player at U of M, has been inside the NCAA circus for a long time. What does he think?

# Jim Harbaugh Calls Hatred Between Michigan, Ohio State ‘Very Manufactured’

“I’m not going to go as far as to say contrived, but it is hyped up to no ends,” Harbaugh said Monday, "And these are student-athletes that are young kids, young adults, that are playing this game. And all we ask them to do is go out there and play the very best. I think that it’s very manufactured for the TV show that people want to watch and see."

“It’s not healthy. It’s not healthy for the student-athletes on either side when you’re trying to put that much [pressure],” Harbaugh said. “That somebody’s practically thinking it’s life or death … I would say it’s not healthy for the young people.”

There you have it. The players are seen as the same as the rest of we working Proles: expendable meat whose only function is to make the rich people richer, while providing the circuses to keep the Proles diverted.

Jim Harbaugh Calls Hatred Between Michigan, Ohio State ‘Very Manufactured’ | News, Scores, Highlights, Stats, and Rumors | Bleacher Report

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If the proles are that gullible, whose fault is that? Football causes serious brain damage at high frequency. If working class parents allow their kids to play football, whose fault is that?

Individual freedom means being personally accountable. One can always blame the rich, or corporations, or some hidden oligarchy (socialists, industrialists, Jews, atheists, reptile-people, name your favorite boogieman) for all things one doesn’t like. Not particularly productive, mainly because it is generally not accurate.

If we really want to end big-time sports all we have to do is eliminate high school football for health reasons and ban organized gambling on sporting events. But if we do that, the folks who will be yelling the most will be what you call the proles.

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Understood. But that line of reasoning gets dangerously close to victim blaming. I could turn it around easily: if the only way to get rich is to take advantage of people who are gullible, maybe one needs to find a different way to get rich.

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Touche. It’s like I can do anything, take advantage of people in any way I want to make a buck off of them and it’s “freedom” “property rights” “marketplace”, “job creating”. But if they actually fall for it as a way to get themselves ahead in this world, well, they’re stupid if they do. Let 'em die.

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I agree 100% with Coach Harbaugh on this. I understand teenagers and early-mid 20’s folks being hyper partisan in their fandom, I admit to it myself. But it has been a long, long time since any sporting event has been that important to me. And it’s bewildering to hear people my age openly state their hatred for the opposition, it actually makes me laugh inside it’s so silly. I’ve been telling my M football fans/friends for a decade that Ohio State is a powerhouse, and very worthy of their respect, but they just can’t get past their bias and admit it.

I also agree that these players deserve to be paid. They are risking life-long injury, and even death. The Zack Zinter injury in the M-OSU game was so gruesome that TV announcers let the audience know that there would not be a replay of it.

Harbaugh is showing some courage with his statements, they are sure to be unpopular with TPTB. But I’m sure he is set for life financially, as big time college coaches make huge bank.

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When we as a society glorify child athletes; give them passing grades and overlook poor behavior and put them on a course where their self worth and future hopes are inextricably tied into their athletic prowess, it is we who have failed them. On so many levels.

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Extremes of sport fandom are ancient and utterly crazy. Check out one of the oldest recorded rivalries, one that almost ended the Byzantine Empire centuries earlier than its conquest by the Ottomans:

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I figure his willingness to tell the truth about college athletics is probably due to his being sanctioned by the NCAA in the “sign stealing scandal”. Telling the truth is his way of saying “the entire system is corrupt anyway”

Steve

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It has been offered before, on this board, that the USian school system is as much about enforcing conformity on the Proles, as it is educating them. One of the conformation narratives is everyone must be obsessed with sports, the circuses that will be used to keep them diverted through their lives.

There was a piece on the national news recently. Brain injury can only be confirmed by brain analysis after death. A study was done of people who played football in high school and college, and died before they were 30. Many of the brains studied showed damage from repeated impacts. Some parents were interviewed and they noted how the kid’s personality changed over the years. And yet, when confronted with the evidence their spawn had been grievously injured by playing football, many parents said that, if they had it to do over again, they absolutely would have their kid playing. Such is the power of the football brainwashing the parents were subjected to when they were in school, that they are willing to sacrifice their own spawn to feed the circus.

Found a CNN report on the same study.

“The fact that over 40% of young contact and collision sport athletes in the UNITE brain bank have CTE is remarkable,” adding that community brain bank studies show that fewer than 1% of the general population has CTE.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/28/health/cte-younger-athletes/index.html

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yeah, that could be. I think Harbaugh will be in the NFL next season, he’s already been suspended twice this year, he’s got options and is probably getting tired of the beee esss.

( just finished digging out from the overnight snow, got about 16 inches yesterday/overnight in nw lower. )

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Yes, the Proles would yell the loudest, because they have been brainwashed the most about sports.

Shut down sports gambling, give up all the revenue from putting on the circuses? Not a chance.

A year ago, New Zealand banned selling cigarettes to anyone born after 2008, to try and phase out smoking in the country, to improve public health and reduce costs for the heath care system.

A new government was just sworn in in that country. Their first move was to repeal the cigarette ban. They want to use the revenue from cigarette sales to cover the cost of a tax cut. Any bets that the “JCs” will most benefit from the tax cuts paid for by selling smokes to the Proles?

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/28/asia/new-zealand-smoking-ban-reversal-intl-hnk/index.html

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You really believe that the great majority of the working class believes that playing football is the way the average guy with the average physique can get rich? How dumb do you believe workers are?

Like I said, try protecting people by making gambling illegal or banning high school football. Remember prohibition? Your average American doesn’t want to be protected by folks who think they know better. They want the freedom to choose. The working class chooses to worship big time college sports. The assumption that they are being misled by the “rich” is just pretentiousness.

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I wasn’t talking about that. But I’ll leave it lay.

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Seems like if the “Proles” make choices you disagree with, you call it brainwashing. The alternative is that the majority simply disagree with you.

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Such is life in the lake effect belt. The noon news reported GR got 12". Maybe an inch at casa del Steve.

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Are they really making a “choice”? As noted earlier, school is as much about indoctrination as education. I remember the sports indoctrination starting in Jr High. In elementary school, it was games, for fun. Once into Jr High, it became organized combat with whoever TPTB said were the “rivals”. If the people who are forming your young mind, parents and teachers, tell you you are supposed to believe the sports narrative, just like you are told you are supposed to be religious, and you are supposed to get married, and you are supposed to have children, and you are supposed to hate Communists, most people will go with it, rather than asking “who says?”, “why?”, “so what?”.

Steve

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A key part of the discussion about having a social system that makes the middle middle class and below highly malleable is the collapse of the protections most of them once received from organized religion. People do not like having the gubermint nanny them, but a key job of old time religion was fighting vices and vain stupidities.

Nowadays the Southern Baptists have kissed most of that goodbye. The RC’s have an ancient alliance with the state, bought into USA college warriordom when Notre Dame was opened, and etc…

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Did the mainstream religions ever promote anything other than bigotry? Probably everyone here remembers Mitt Romney’s televised speech a few years ago, to address people’s concern about his Mormon faith. Jack Kennedy had to do the same thing in 60. iirc, Catholics rank third in the Klan’s hate list. A couple people have attacked me personally, for not making a big deal about Lent. Lent did not exist in the Baptist lodge I went to, when people were still trying to indoctrinate me.

Steve

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Do you consider “Proles” to be rational? That’s really the fundamental issue, how much do you respect the ability of the working class to make decisions. To be honest, I think the biggest political problem progressives have is that they don’t respect the working class. They certainly want to help working people, but they don’t ultimately respect them. Hence the tendency to create a nanny state.

The great majority of students at all levels of education are not playing organized sports. The jocks are a minority. And the notion that school is about indoctrination is just right-wing BS. What indoctrinates is culture, driven primarily by parents and friends. School/education challenges that indoctrination by exposing students to different cultures and POVs.

Good Lord, haven’t you ever watched the Breakfast Club or Glee?!?

You can’t have personal freedom without accountability. The corollary of that is the less accountable you hold people, the less freedom you are willing to give them. The nature of the free market is to give consumers what they want. The system works as long as the consumer is capable of making rational economic decisions. For the most part this is the case, as seen by America’s historically rising GDP. Sometimes rational decisions aren’t made and then you have manias and bubbles.

The American consumer wants college sports. That’s a choice. They want football a lot more than they want badminton. That’s another choice. But the notion that they are under the thrall of some higher power seems ridiculous to me. The majority of Americans could care less about the supposed rivalry between Michigan and Ohio State. Most were doing something else than watching that game.

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You don’t grasp the “1984” reference?

So, am I a progressive, or a right-winger?

Steve

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