A few months ago there was a show on HBO,forgot the name,that followed 4 former college football players.

One guy was a former RU player who got invited to a mini camp.

He was doing O.K.,till he got "dinged' at the end of the camp.

Never heard another word from that or any other NFL team.

It really showed just how tenuous your chances of even getting to camp are
for marginal players.

In the case of this kid,he put all his eggs into the pro football basket,so
he really doesn't have any other marketable job skills.

That's what I get, posting at 1:27 AM. ;)

Thanks for the correction.

I would argue that success in life is often related to luck, ambition, talent, and who you know. In some realms, this includes having the foresight to be born into the right socioeconomic class of people. In terms of sports, I would argue that we are talking about natural endowment, strength, speed, endurance, luck, intelligence, the extent of positive exposure, and having access to the best training, coaching, and nutrition/supplements imaginable. When talking about participating in a team sport, I would argue that you are also talking about being lucky or shrewd enough to insert yourself in a unique system that allows one to make the absolute most of their natural ability. That's a lot of factors that need to line up just right. Even more complicated, as was pointed out recently in a sports article that I read (the writer of which escapes my memory right now), is that there seems to be very few degrees of difference between one athlete and another at the highest level of each sports. This means that anyone of the above factors mentioned can derail the train, so to speak.

At the same time, everyone has a choice of what they do with the proverbial cards that are dealt them. Since we are born with nothing, and will leave this life with nothing, who can truly judge the unique path that each man and woman takes through out their lives. I remember someone telling me that they play the lottery every day not because they really believe that they can win it, but because the possibility that they can is what keeps them going from day to day.

If the actor living in a van for twenty-five years with a cell phone and the dream of still making it big were an athlete. I would suspect that he parks the van near the beach (a view many of us could not afford), spends his days working out and in good health, and having a dream that keeps him inspired and facing each day with the belief that something special is about to happen. As the famed journalist/writer Studs Terkel once said, "the last thing that should go is hope." As I recall, he said this shortly before his death in his nineties.

As I learned from my late mentor, the brilliant psychologist, James Hillman, one should fully activate the five senses on a daily basis, and thus push beyond that. If the smell of cut grass, the feeling of pumped muscles, the sound of cracking pads, and the sight of toned and finely tuned athletes going head to head is your thing, I would say grab the fruit, and keep living your NFL dream until you find something else that captivates you as much.

When you are 18 you are a man. If you play a sport that is televised and millions, no billions, are being made off the sweat of your brow, there is a grave injustice.

This is just silly and gross over-generalization. It's made with the assumption that all football programs are like alabama and all basketball programs are like Kentucky. There are 130 division 1a teams. Who's making billions? Who's making any profits? Hardly anyone. Do people really give any thought to the costs of running a D1 football program, even on the cheap? Scholarships for 85 players (about 1.7 million per year per public school, more for private) Coaches, doctors, field maintenance/replacement, stadium upkeep, giant mother freaking scoreboards, equipment, travel/lodging, utilities, security, practice fields, insurance? You can talk paying players all you want, but in most cases, it's the old blood from a turnip situation. A mid-major's ability to support D1 football is quite precarious.

You're absolutely right.

The problem is people get REALLY MAD when you use this exact same set of facts to tell them why publicly-funded colleges shouldn't have athletics at all.

You can't argue college athletics is a horrible financial proposition and then argue we need to keep funding them at the expense of the financial viability of a college. As if it were as important as the actual mission of the university.

Well, you can. It's just a logic pretzel.

"This whole system is a terrible financial sinkhole! We can't pay the players! There's no money! But we definitely should keep using taxpayer and student fee dollars to keep funding it!"