Dipshit Dr. Detroit at it again…
That smug turd Mitch Assbalm took a break from writing sappy books for old women and broken-souled, emasculated men this week, and decided to gently gripe about Notre Dame’s wasteful spending and misplaced priorities in one of his standard “Let me provide my insightful (inciteful?), critiquing wisdom to a popular subject” hatchet jobs commentaries.
Selected last in Kickball for a still-standing middle school record of 367 times between 1969 and 1971, Mitch has apparently had just about enough of the glamour and bright lights that now consume the arena of college sports recruiting and decries the “the theatricality of it all.”
High school athletes now take over an auditorium or a cafeteria — often during school hours — and play a coy little game with a bunch of hats while reporters record every pathetic minute. Will he pick the LSU hat? The USC hat? The Michigan hat?
You can just see him having flashbacks to 1976, as an unpopular, 5’4” social pariah with no friends outside of the Physics Club – fresh off the morning’s usual round of swirlies and getting stuffed into a locker by the Women’s Lacrosse team – angrily eating his pudding while some bastard athlete classmate walks around campus free of such burdens.
This vicious cycle apparently did a second number on Mitch’s flailing psyche decades later, when he inexplicably attended another of these damnable events as an adult.
It was for Robert (Tractor) Traylor, a prep basketball star in Detroit who did the TV/entourage thing, chose the University of Michigan, and later became part of a recruiting scandal that led to his coach’s firing and the school’s NCAA probation.
I lasted five minutes at his event, left, went to the school library, and found a kid going to the same university on an academic scholarship, all alone, doing homework.
Heh. Did you offer him some of your pudding, Mitch?
Of course, any Mitchie Albom column wouldn’t be worth its weight in corn-packed shit without a thinly veiled swipe at the Imperial Elitists in South Bend.
A linebacker from Hawaii named Manti Te’o made his announcement to much fanfare. He chose Notre Dame. The reason?
‘Their recruiting coordinator, Brian Polian, flew here every week from South Bend,’ T’eo told the Honolulu Advertiser, ‘and that just shows me his determination and dedication.’
Really? It shows me Notre Dame has enough money to send a man commuting to Hawaii week after week at a time when many families can’t afford to pay tuition. How about taking that airfare and giving it instead to a need-based scholarship?
Oooooohhhhhh, very slick, Mitchell……….mind you, the article finds no room to discuss the fiscal policy of a school much closer in proximity to his Detroit ivory tower office – the one just outside Ann Arbor’s finest trailer parks – and their planned Big House renovation.
Indeed, the several thousand dollars in airfare spent to recruit a highly qualified student athlete to study and play at the University of Notre Dame was a shameless, wasteful use of capital that should have been spent on soup kitchens. By contrast, the University of Michigan’s planned $226 million expansion of college football’s already-largest stadium is an economic model of progressiveness and dedication to improving the welfare of the Wolverine student.
Paraphrasing Bacchus, this anomaly is known as the ESPN Mathematical Wormhole.
And the fact that Mitch’s first profitable career foray into sports non-fiction just happened to be two books extolling the virtues of Bo Schembechler and later, The Fab Five?
Well, that’s just one happy-ass, fucking coincidence.
Mitch, I’ll presume that you’re a reasonably smart guy. Hell, you managed to dream up an utterly crap-filled, made-for-television storyline that garnered employment for Michael Imperioli and Ellen Burstyn (apparently Lindsay Wagner was booked that week). Twice!!! So I’m going to offer you a few simple facts that may help you make sense of the Greek Tragedy that you seem to feel college recruiting has become…
As has been discussed ad nauseam, major college sports are huge business. B.C.S. programs earn anywhere from $20 million on the low end (Vandy, Mississippi State) to nearly $70 million on the high end (Texas, Notre Dame) each year in aggregate revenues. That money is then used by the school to train and pay for top professors, quality educational facilities, improving the academic and research infrastructure, women’s sports (that oughta perk up the P.C. dolt in you, Mitch) and – ready for this? – need-based scholarships to deserving students all over the world.
Spending a fractional percentage of those revenues to recruit aspiring student-athletes is necessary to maintain that funding each year. It’s called a return on one’s investment. I’m confident most college grads are familiar with this concept – even those who majored in journalism.
And if that phenomenon happens to bring along with it an admittedly silly amount of fanfare – fanfare which creates thousands of jobs, millions of dollars in consumer spending, and gives national attention to the occasional small public high school that happens to have a big-time student-athlete prospect that year, well……..I guess we’re just going to have to find a way to survive in this brave new world.
Even if it means we have to bitch about it.
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Hey, it worked this time. Fuckin’ sweet.
Now if I could just remember what I posted this morning….something Mitch Albom in a three-way with John Saunders and Mike Lupica. Anyway, nice entry. Kudos to whoever came up with “The Can.” It’s a nice tribute to the Pepsi Center.