a union of none

I’ll come clean to start: I think all colleges and universities should do away with scholarships for athletes. I also despise the NCAA. 

The recent talk about the Northwestern football players unionizing is interesting on a number of levels. First, it appears that the adjudicating NLRB court for the Chicago area determined that since the players are paid (read: scholarships) they are considered employees and now have the right to unionize. That unionization leads to negotiating contracts, pay, and working conditions for players. Assuming this idea carries forward, where do both the players and universities end up? Well, if I’m a university I can simply withdraw all athletic scholarships – and the included training facilities, supplied food, provided housing, etc., and then enter into negotiations with the union. As a university overlord I can come to some pay structure and then the athletes can pay for each piece of football pie: training, food, housing, physio, travel, money to eat on the road, hotels, uniform rental, etc. As a player, what are you getting in the deal right now? You are getting the training required in order for you move forward in what is most likely your chosen profession (even if you are dreaming way too big…). In order to do that training the university is providing you with at least three years (football) of tuition (whether or not you attend), room, board (at BCS schools probably a private dining facility), travel expenses, per diem when travelling, private physio facilities and trainers, uniforms, etc. Excluding private BCS schools, my back-of-the-envelope calculations say that you’re getting (being paid) somewhere around 60k per year to be trained; over three years we’ll call it about $200,000. (This number assumes a BCS-level, state school, with players coming from outside the state.) Not bad, right? Go to the first half of this paragraph – I’ll pay you $65,000 per year to play here – and you then pay for the training, just like every other student at the university (barring academic studs).

Second, and I call this the “Reggie Bush” syndrome, is the idea that somehow a player is more than the university. Until very recently I couldn’t come up with an example of a player that made or created a big money NCAA football program – lately, Johnny Manziel made me think he may the one, but honestly, Texas A&M was a Big 12 program and had already moved to the SEC by the time he showed up, so even he doesn’t count. Reggie Bush felt that USC was making oodles of money from his likeness, or his jersey. This is a hollow argument – USC was a massive program before Bush showed up, it is a massive program after his departure. The horse is USC; Bush is a wagon. Nobody was knocking down the door for Reggie Bush jerseys prior to his star turn at USC.  Even for superstars, they aren’t making the university money, the university is the already created monster that they simply ride.

Last, and most importantly, athletic departments don’t make money. There are loads of sites that cover reported expenses and incomes, but beyond a small percentage of universities, athletics is a financial loser. Here’s a link to a shortish report from economists at Holy Cross that addresses the issue – even big-time football and basketball programs lose money. Sure, this is three years old, but the ideas haven’t changed.  

I don’t know where this will end up. The NCAA can go away for all I care. Universities can drop athletic scholarships. The can drop athletics for all I care. It’ll be fun to watch.

my cupp runneth...

I watched last Friday’s Real Time last night on the DVR, and listening to SE Cupp was such a perfect moment of hearing the call of ignorance in its natural habitat. Her attempt to put forth a position on civil rights and gun ownership was so pathetic that I had to sit down and tap some keys. Even with someone (Michael Moore, in this case) sitting right next to her saying, “You can have all the guns you want, we just want background checks,” she was still too shallow in the thinking pool to realize her diatribe on her second amendment rights was pathetic. Her position, and I’ll paraphrase here, is that “us law-abiding citizens who want to buy guns should not have to wait – even a second – for a background check to be completed. We are law-abiding citizens. That is violating my rights.” (They like to repeat that law-abiding bullshit quite often.)

Let’s breakdown the gun owner talking points that Cupp parrots so wonderfully. First, it’s clear she supports the idea the guns aren’t the problem; our mental health system is the problem. Second, if we could only have a list of those “mentally ill” people, and the rights that we will suspend, then we could fix the problem. (We don’t need to get into the issue of mental health right now; nor do the sudden mental health supporters ever offer any answers to myriad issues with this pipe dream.)

Hopefully Ms. Cupp can follow along – I’ll go very slowly. Imagine we have shaken fairy dust over all Americans and now have lists of those we don’t want to have guns – or as Ms. Cupp might put forth in private: blacks and swarthy fuckers, but not mental problems because she can’t identify them with her eyes. We have a list of felons who can’t own guns (she’d agree with this), another list of those on the terrorist watchlist (she’d wrinkle her nose and say “that’s great!”), and the mentally ill. So, Ms. Cupp walks into Joe’s Guns and Crepes, strolls over to the counter and says, “I need a .38 immediately.” Her position, funny enough, is that in her head, and correctly I’m guessing, she’s a “law abiding citizen,” so therefore everyone must also know what is in SE’s head. I’m the gunshop owner and I’m supposed to do what? In her world what I’d do is this: look at this pretty white woman wrinkling her nose. Clearly she’s not a criminal, crazy, or a terrorist. That is how Cupp sees the world – do not interfere with the white folk. How about his: a 25 year-old black man walks into a gunshop, let’s say he’s a student at Howard U. here in D.C., and he wants to buy a gun because he lives in a neighborhood that leads him to believe a gun is necessary. He says to me “I need a .38 immediately.” In Cupp’s lonely mind it would be perfectly fine for me to run a background check on him because he’s black. How exactly does she think we can apply the fantasy mental health list to gun purchasers if we can’t actually use the list…for everyone. Does she think there is special training we will provide to gun shop owners? Does she think that by saying, “I need a gun,” we’ve passed along information that is the universal signal for “I’m a law-abiding citizen”? Her position is so untenable there’s no way she could even see through the bullshit she’s spouting.

And, one last thing Ms. Cupp: your declaration that you’ve been “living this” with guns for a decade is comical. Living it? What exactly is living it? Owning a gun?

Well, at least she’s pretty.

light-and-fluffy action

“…in which the zeal to render a verdict was only matched by the zeal to ignore all evidence.”

That’s a line pulled from a TNCoates entry today. It can apply to virtually anything in today’s America – it applies to race for him today – and is a phrase to keep in mind through every discussion we engage in on a daily basis.

He closes with this….

“Talk is overrated. There can be no talk with people who've conditioned themselves out of listening. This is the country we've made. This is the country we deserve.

On a lighter note, we are doing enriched yeast breads and laminated breads in Baking and Pastry this week and I want to sincerely pass this along to whoever invented handmade croissants: piss off. Seriously. As with anything in the baking realm I know it’ll take time and practice to master the technique but this process is just a colossal pain. I plan on doing some baking at home on Sunday (and a batch of croissants are on the agenda) so I’ll give everyone a photo documentary of the process. In Garde Manger this week we’ll be doing open and closed sandwiches and for now I’m working on a homemade aubergine pickle and cheddar grilled sandwich, a somehow doctored Rueben (a call out to my home state’s invention), a Ploughman’s (consider it a deconstructed sandwich), and an altered lobster roll. Between the team we’ll sort out the final choices and present them during Saturday afternoon’s class. If you have any groovy ideas, pass them along…

If you must know, we did a Stallone v. Schwarzenegger action actor showdown at work over the last days. Using ten pictures/series for each, Arnold won 5-4 with the last point being vacated due to both of the movies being so bad by the time we got to the tenth faceoff. The difference was the True Lies v. Tango & Cash tilt.

play, acting

This is an application I like. I like it like I like iTunes.

I was listening to some Cokie Roberts commentary on NPR yesterday and I suddenly realized just how much I don’t care for Cokie Roberts commentary. She used to seem like a benign voice in the news world but the fact is that she’s quite poor at analyzing or reporting anything. Of course, it certainly doesn’t help that I don’t much care for her views. What triggered it was her “reporting” of Obama’s naming of Eric Shinseki as the Secretary of Veteran Affairs. Her “analysis” was that this move seemed like a poke in the eye of the Bush Administration. (If you don’t recognize the name, Gen (ret.) Shinseki was the Army Chief of Staff who testified before Congress – before the war – that we would need hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Iraq after the war. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld ran him out for speaking truth to power.) Anyhow, Shinseki served in the Army for 38 years, obviously served at the highest level, was wounded in Vietnam, and may well be the perfect choice for a very high profile and amazingly important position. Imagine someone choosing a qualified person for a job…dang, pinch me. I don’t think the future President is much for sticking things in people’s eyes; I’m pretty sure that the future President cares very little about anything that is thought of the current Administration. Of course, Roberts is too shallow to even imagine it possible – she is effectively belittling Shinseki’s qualifications and service in order to make a high school point. This being only the most current of her Monday morning blah-fests that amount to nothing of import and zero insight.

I won’t dawdle too much on the car bailout. Suffice it to say that I’m against it unless there are very, very stringent rules. Very stringent.

X invited me to spend about 90 minutes in a Benetton store the other night. I, of course, accepted.

I hit the Keegan Theatre for last Sunday’s matinee of Glengarry Glen Ross. I was quite a fan of the movie and I think the performance was just as good. There were a few reviews that didn’t much care for Mark Rhea’s performance as Ricky Roma but I thought it was excellent. The problem with that role is that Al Pacino played it in the movie and Al Pacino overacts (or over- Pacinos everything). Pacino is a caricature of himself (much like Sean Connery and Charleton Heston). I would think that if you’re reprising the role you’d find yourself doing a Pacino imitation…it’s too easy. Rhea, who is the founder (?) and board member (?) of the theatre, seemed to wander into Pacinoland for a few seconds at a time before pulling himself back from the brink. Everyone else gets straight As. One thing I also realized toward the end of the show was just how much I think David Mamet and Neil LaBute have in common. Maybe on another day we can talk more.

T