OMG. Barack Obama won. In Iowa. In. A. Blowout. I almost feel patriotic. Almost. I got one thing bothering me, still.

I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sit through the Sugar Bowl. It used to be great.
But now I muddle into the third quarter of unremarkable football —
hardcore mismatch that should have been out of the way by Christmas —
and think: I’ve got places to go, people to see.

It’s like, yo: A little bit, I’m a couch potato. But I’m not the ultimate couch potato.

Just can’t do it. On to LT and the playoffs;
I’m done with college football, where the best games never get played
and bowl season is an All-State wasteland now, a scandalous, low-brow
theater. And this isn’t just happenstance. The rich wastrels who commit
big-time college sports are running that thing into the ground.

In
case my ongoing rant about the criminal structure of big-time college
football strikes you as a marginal obsession, take a look a the Orange County Register’s Pulitzer-smelling special report "Money Bowl."
Don’t look for Joe and Kirk or Mark and Lee or whomever to cheerfully
discuss the matter on this or that “National Championship” pre-game
show, but bowl money is the biggest story in sports because it depicts
an active American leisure-class heist. And the network sports
reporting crews are too busy lining their pockets to really talk about
it. Look at the bottom line. It’s happening as certainly as Middle Passage.

The
imperial people who run college football only casually care about its
star “scholar- athletes.” This results in football’s unpaid workforce
leaving campus with the kind of decision-making capabilities
exemplified by Michael Vick and Sean Taylor. (Bless the dead, and I
know people get mad at the stuff I’ve written about Taylor. Fuck that.
Same as when Biggie died: You and a bullet at the same time and space,
you have to have done some shit to get there.) And part of Vick
and Taylor’s problem was having to run with an institution as
inherently corrupt as the NCAA.

Well, I don’t have to run with
them. I watch games, but I don’t watch the crappy ones. Fewer than a
third seem truly worth watching. Even less seem to be about anything.
Beyond limiting my intake, I forbid my older boy — a borderline sports
addict himself — from playing college football or basketball unless
he’s being reasonably compensated.

These people don’t run me. And they could never run some kid of mine. They should be stopped.

Donnell Alexander is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Sports & Fitness.