@benshawks08
That was the essence IMHO, also.
But it’s important to understand not to paint the organizations in a single black stroke.
This story really only describes the preconditions of the legacy of university accounting methods one needs to grasp in order to get on to the bigger picture of compromise facing the greatest game ever invented.
It establishes why the system is vulnerable to sharply greater compromise and abuse by those beyond the system–by those not just “downtown,” but by much bigger and more dangerous predators.
Because of a legacy of bending the accounting rules to make the university system satisfy via compromise the diverse agendas of education, entertainment, taxation, downtown business interests, donors, and state and local politics and economics, the D1 universities organized regionally (by conferences) and nationally by association (NCAA) are easy prey for political/financial coercion by private oligarchs, and national and transnational corporations and agencies of government, at a time when college sport is useful to such players in their pursuit of regional and global agendas.
Ultimately Sport is caught up in being an instrument of spreading culture and its economics and politics over new regions, and of redistributing control over existing ones.
Remember, the Romans did not just bring armies, roads and water infrastructure to the conquered lands, they brought stadia with sport and amphitheaters with drama.
It’s how the empire thing is done.
