Because I Have a Two-Inch Vertical Leap and a Ten-Pound Brain

It just occurred to me to ask. Is the Super Bowl this weekend?

Apparently not. Looks like it's going to be played on February 4. Thank goodness. That leaves me time to write a lot of expert opinion pieces explaining why either the...let me see...Bears or the Colts are going to win. I think my vast football knowledge is evident here; I don't have to brag about my creds.

When I was a kid, I played football all the time, but there were only three or four rules. The stuff they play on TV is way too complicated. You have to be Robert Bork to understand the legal issues. Was his foot down? Was the ball dead? Watching a modern football game is like watching really stupid, huge rabbis discuss the Talmud.

But football is a good game anyway, because it gives you an excuse to barbecue. Personally, I would be happier watching boxing or a good crap movie with a lot of explosions. But football will do.

I admit, I have a low opinion of football players. An awful lot of them are really dumb. A lot of folks make fools of themselves defending them, pointing to bizarre statistical flukes who did their own homework and got real degrees. But generally, a guy so dumb he stands out among morons can play football at just about any college in the country, as long as he can break 700 on the SAT. And you stand a good chance of breaking 700 simply by filling blanks at random. And many people fail.

Seriously, how can you be that stupid and breathe? Some "scholar-athletes" take the SAT several times--with expensive coaching--before they break 700 and prove they're marginally more intelligent than a housecat. Who ties their shoes for them? How do they find their way to practice?

I know not everyone is bright, and it's not their fault, but I can't help picking on dumb jocks, because it's hilarious that they get admitted to college. It cracks me up, reading about the struggles people at universities go through, trying to get the borderline-retarded admitted. And then they pretend they're actual students, and that they're not being paid the whole time they're in school. Somehow they end up driving Escalades as freshmen, while going to school full-time and maintaining passing averages in demanding majors like Applied Respiration. It's amazing how much money a work-study can make in two hours a week.

I can only guess what it's like for an intelligent person to play college sports. I mean real sports, like football and basketball. Not bizarre white-man-affirmative-action sports like lacrosse that no one takes seriously. Probability dictates that a certain percentage of jocks will be in the smart-to-brilliant range. They must be as lonely as waxing salon owners in Tehran.

The world is a perverse place. We build colleges to improve our minds, right? Right. Some pathetic spin artists claim the physical side of education is just as important, but it's not. Its importance is negligible. There are truly excellent schools, like the University of Chicago*, that have no football teams. Name a school that has no classes.

Come on, athletic supporters. All you folks who have the balls to seriously proclaim, "Brains are only part of the equation." Let's have a list of those top-flight universities with no academic subjects.

Get back to me on that, okay?

I have a better question. Every college in America will accept a student who is completely paralyzed and can't use his body at all. How many will accept a student who has a mental disability and can't use his brain at all? I see a loophole here. Let me close it. How many will accept a student who can't use his brain at all and is no good at sports?

Anyway, we build colleges to improve our minds. I just won that argument. But who gets the best treatment on any campus? People who got admitted even though many of them didn't master potty-training until their mid-teens. At least one scholar-athlete, Najee Davenport, never did master potty-training. He got arrested for pooping in a woman's closet.

Meanwhile, guys with IQs of 180 have to borrow money and work crappy jobs in order to learn stuff they'll later use to win Nobel Prizes.

I still remember the assholes at the University of Texas, offering me seven dollars an hour to teach physics to football players. Why they were crazy enough to allow football players to enroll in physics courses is beyond me, but anyway, I pointed out that the pay for bag boys at the local grocery was higher. I should have said, "Buy me an Escalade and give me your three dumbest jocks, and I'll get them out of here with degrees in something, guaranteed." Kaplan MCAT prep was paying twelve bucks an hour, and I had absolutely no problem getting fifteen for private tutoring. Why the university thought I was stupid enough to accept seven is a mystery. Physics students are good at math, after all. Maybe after dealing with jocks they weren't equipped to haggle with people who knew twelve was bigger than seven.

People say the treatment jocks get is justified because of the money they bring in. Hmm...why doesn't that fly at the University of Chicago? And I guess money is the only thing that matters in life. Except of course, bitches. A school's integrity doesn't even enter the calculation. I guess if I paid a university a million dollars a year, they'd be obligated to enroll me even if all I did was sit in the back of classrooms lighting farts. No, wait. For a million a year, I should be able to send a baboon to class and demand that it be given a degree. That's pretty much what rich people with stupid children do.

Yeah, I can see how schools need that money. With tuition topping thirty grand at some universities, I can totally understand why they have to tongue-bathe a pack of illiterates.

I'm not anti-sports. I'm just anti-bullshit. If universities had any integrity, football would be considerably less important than chess. We would have scouts roaming the country looking for hot chess players and good mathematicians and promising musicians and so on, and football would be on a par with glee club. Because it has absolutely nothing to do with the purpose of a university, which is to impart skills and knowledge. "It teaches character and determination and teamwork." Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. You can learn those things playing intramural Frisbee. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

Whenever I write about jocks, I think about the story I heard from a former prosecutor who worked under the current State's Attorney, Katherine Fernandez-Rundle. He told me he once prosecuted a University of Miami football player who attacked a smaller student and beat him brutally, resulting in major injuries. The prosecutor said that his superior--it may have been Fernandez-Rundle herself; I'm not sure--took him into an office and informed him that he was going to do everything he could to persuade the victim to agree to reduced charges. That's how demented we are when it comes to sports. How can people not see it? Hell, the cops in LA knew for a long time that OJ beat his wife regularly, and they didn't arrest him until after he killed her. And even then, they kissed his ass while he was in jail, giving him special treatment and asking for autographs.

Crazy world we live in, isn't it? How would you like to sit in a prosecutor's office with your face held together by wires, having the prosecutor--a man sworn to protect your interest--badger you to go easy on the cowardly, vicious simian who put you in the hospital? Imagine how different it would have been had the defendant been an ordinary student. He'd still be in the penitentiary.

But like I said, a football game is a great excuse to barbecue. So I guess I won't form a nonprofit and spend my life protesting athletic scholarships.

*Looks like I was wrong about this. They had no team for twenty-three years, but they finally succumbed to insanity and reinstated the program. However, other schools with good reputations have no teams. Emory is an example. So is Boston University. And they cut football because it created a three-million-dollar annual deficit! Gee, isn't football supposed to make money for schools?

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Men like to watch football, and they'll make up any excuse to get it.