Andrew Luck is too Ugly to Win the Heisman

There, I said it. Go Ducks!

…a brief word on the apparent invulnerability of my interest in NCAA athletics. The events of the last few months have, if anything, hardened my conviction that NCAA athletics are hopelessly corrupt and fatally unsustainable. The Penn State rape scandal is the icing on the cake, as it were; not directly necessary to the case against the NCAA, but an outgrowth of a system that wasn’t neither quite predictable nor particularly surprising. And yet, I’m am as emotionally committed to Oregon football as I am to just about any aesthetic preference I have; Oregon victories are more uplifting and defeat more devastating than most anything I experience on a daily basis, with the allowance that I get to enjoy my wife and daughters every day, not just on Saturdays. This is a commitment that is neither wholly voluntary nor completely beyond my control; I could stop caring about the Ducks if I really wanted to, but it would be very difficult. I’m also, tragically enough, developing almost against my will a commitment to Kentucky Wildcats basketball. Go figure. To an extent, this commitment also demands that I point out that not all programs within the corrupt system are equally as bad. The Ducks are currently having some problems with recruiting regulations, but Chip Kelly also kicked his starting senior quarterback off the team prior to a national championship run for rules violations that were far less egregious than anything that happened at Penn State. John Calipari’s saga is well known, but I really do believe that the athletes he works with benefit from the experience; the best thing John Wall could have done, under the system that currently prevails, was come to Kentucky for a year before going to the NBA.

Rationalizations? To an extent, yes, but then as I suggested, our emotional commitments are only partially of our own volition…