By Rick Stanton
Upon reading today’s (Dec. 15) sports section in The Seattle Times, I had two laugh-out-loud moments.
In the article titled, “Huskies to miss Pac-12 title game,” Mike Vorel writes about the COVID-19 effect on the athletic department at the UW and specifically, the football program. They can’t field a team.
The first laugher came on page B3, where Coach Jimmy Lake is quoted as saying, “This has first always been about the health and safety of our players and staff.”
No Coach, it’s about money.
If safety was the issue, my alma mater would have stuck with the original plan and canceled the season.
The second big laugh came from an article about the Cleveland Indians changing its “human mascot” name. Team owner Paul Dolan says, “It’s time.” He also says the team will continue to be called the Indians until a new name is chosen and the Indian reference will be maintained throughout the 2021 season.
So, it’s time, but it’s not time?
If it’s racially unacceptable to begin with, why not have a new name ready to go and have that be the announcement—rather than—we’ll make the change when it suits us.
I’ve attached a link to a book written in 1982 called Megatrends, written by John Naisbitt. He makes several well-researched predictions about the changes he saw coming, and he was right more than he was wrong.
One of his predictions was that pro sports would be so broken, because of unsustainable financial models, it would force that world to tear the models down to the studs and start over. He predicted this would happen around the year 2000.
Think about it.
A Mariners franchise that barely has sniffed anything resembling success charging nearly $20 for a decent beer and a hot dog. If you’re a family of four, you barely can afford to go to a game, unless your company is a corporate sponsor with season tickets.
As for college sports, there are things to be considered, given the lessons learned from the pandemic. All of a sudden, that endless money stream generated by football, and in some cases basketball as well, had the spigot turned off.
There’s is one simple cure: no scholarships. If you want to go to college at the UW and play sports, see if your grades make you eligible. If so, apply, and if you’re accepted, turn out for football, or other sport. If you make the team, you’ll be fed, provided medical care and housed during the season—for free.
And colleges need to stop paying coaches millions of dollars.
And they need to stop asking me, and fans at every school, to pay exorbitant amounts of money for seating rights, before I even buy the tickets.
And they need to stop serving as a a free farm system for the next-level football and basketball leagues.
Fix it … or begin tearing it down to the studs.
https://www.amazon.com/Megatrends-Ten-Directions-Transforming-Lives/dp/0446356816
https://sherrilynnestarkie.com/2018/09/12/john-naisbitts-megatrends-for-2018/