it s clearly football. if baseball wants to be the pastime, they can say because of the nature of it. day in and day out nature and the pace, which is moving toward the lethargic. but you could say that it s a pastime whereas football is a spectacle. but by every measure of popularity, football runs away. so what is it, just the pace? it may very well be that it s in tune with american tastes right now. video games for example. all the back and forth games are much easier to follow, too, whether it s soccer, hockey, basketball being whatever. baseball requires hand/eye coordination as opposed to typical athleticism. so i think just the violence in america, too, has to be taken into account, steve. you can t ignore that fact.
and football is tremendously brutal. and i think the violence of football does give it an example that should only be played once a week. and maybe not even that much. whereas baseball is pastoral and rolls over you. but i think basketball and hockey are played too often. they re not special. football become as conversation for an entire week. i go further than saying it s the most popular sport. think it s the most cultural force as everything else is breaking apart in america and we have no shared culture, football is one thing that everyone can have a conversation about. look at the list of the top rated programs on television in a given year. no sooner do i say it, there it is. is it possible the academy awards would crack the list? but if you extend it out to 20, 18 would be football games.
receiving would be of great value and they would have to set up real farm systemslike hockey and baseball have and then a kid would decide no one says the poor college hockey player or poor college baseball play are because they have an option. but they haven t got an option right now. i go the other way. let them play college sports for four years with no academic standards whatsoever. you want to get a degree, fine. if you just want to play football or basketball, that s okay with me. because there are no options. bob says there are no minor leagues. and who will play for a plomino league with 500 people watching you when you have an opportunity to play with 80,000 people wooching. the care carry tolina tar he actually doing that experiment. but the reason northwestern
and i think you could make a case, it may be a bit overly dramatic, but could you make the case that this is american popular culture. there are cracks in the found days. you can play hockey without fights if you don t like fights. witness college hockey, most of the playoffs. you can play baseball without steroids. and the risk of injury in baseball is sdipts incidental. you could play college sports and have student athletes. they re theoretically reformable. whereas i don t know that you can play football at the highest levels and take the essential violence out of it. you can mitigate the risk? yes. can you improve the protocols? yes. but more and more reasonable people including people who are season ticket holders and love the game will say i enjoy much with a, but i won t let my kid play it. i don t know how that will affect the popularity beforemuc
what if the player can sign their own contracts. i agree they should have a cut of any commercial sales. but for me, the reason why we re saying that players are getting nothing is because we ve removed all pretext that they truly are student-athletes. if you recruited only people who could meet the minimum standards of your institution, ohio state s minimum standards would not be the same as stanford, but could not meet the minimum standards if they didn t have a football or basketball team, but still good enough to play, they re getting six figures worth of education that their family doesn t have to pay for. plus they re getting coaching and room and board. that is poo-pooed as having no value because this is a charade. in they re true student athletes, what they were