Home Game, Schmome Game
It's painfully clear that modern-day major collegiate sports is little more than a mask for a select few entities to make boatloads of cash from a system which in essence encourages cheating and illogical decisions, under the guise of athletic competition and fairness. That said, our thoughts after reading this headline went something like this:
What in the world is Indiana University doing moving a home game from its campus in Bloomington to the concrete bowl and parking lot known as FedEx Field?
Here's a hint: it involves $3 million.
The Hoosiers will move their 2010 home date with Penn State -- scheduled for November 20 -- from their on-campus Memorial Stadium to FedEx, in an attempt to provide a "bowl-like experience" (read: earn sacks of cash), reach out to "alumni that live along the eastern seaboard" (read: get wads of bills) and, ostensibly, to provide experience for the players and open up recruiting pipelines in the area (read: oops, I forgot, here's the keys to the armored truck). Hey, at least Indiana athletic director Fred Glass isn't sugarcoating things:
"Obviously, it's very positive for us financially," Glass told the newspaper. "When you rank second to the bottom in the conference in money spent per sport, you have to color outside the lines and be open to new ways to generate revenue."C'mon people, Indiana University is struggling to make a million dollars in revenue per game! Won't someone please think of this massive research institution's poor, poverty-stricken football team?
One figures that Glass looked at his schedule and figured that they had no chance in hell of beating Penn State anyway -- after all, Indiana has never beaten Penn State in 12 tries, including a 34-7 shellacking last season -- so why not make some cash while he can? The Hoosiers will only be forced to sell 7,000 seats for the game at the 90,000 seat stadium, a laughable goal for a school that plays in a conference which has two stadiums that seat over 100,000 people and treats Saturday football as but one notch under God in the pecking order.
If Indiana really wanted to give their kids a chance to play in an NFL stadium, I hear they have this team in Indianapolis. From the perspective of a neutral person in the D.C. area, this isn't really a big deal -- except for all the folks from State College who will be clogging the Beltway that day.
But doesn't this set a dangerous precedent? It is plainly obvious that despite the fact that this is a "home game" for Indiana, Penn State fans will be running wild on FedEx Field. Frankly, it would be surprising if the game saw more than 5,000 Indiana fans in attendance. Both teams will be traveling, but anyone who doesn't think that this is now a home date for Penn State is kidding themselves. How would you feel if you were Ohio State, Michigan, or Iowa? On the same weekend, you might have to travel to a real road game, while Penn State gets to go to a party in the nation's capital. What's next? Will Maryland decide to decamp for Charlotte when they can't fill up Byrd Stadium for a game against Duke? Why stop there? Let's just have the really important teams schedule 12 home games a year -- Notre Dame isn't very far off from doing so at this point, anyway.
Then again, this is a sport where champions are decided by computers and popularity contests. A sport which is utterly dependent on unbalanced schedules to maintain its hegemonic class structure. No one should be surprised by this -- although that's not to say that we can't be disappointed: a cash grab at the price of balance, utterly exploding the already-on-life-support ideal of fair scheduling, and no one in a position of authority seems to care. This is the current state of college football.