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Friday night fight Coaches' objections are just a bunch of hogwash
I smell apple pie. I smell Mom. (No offense, Mom. It's a literary device.) I smell the hot breath of a politician pushing a hot-button issue. Most of all, I smell a rat. Put me in with the NCAA on the Friday-night-college-football issue. Yes, line me up against bunny rabbits, sunny days and feeding the poor. Ask me if I've beaten my wife lately. Give me a club and find me a baby seal. Given the "rhetoric" -- a polite substitute for the appropriate, eight-letter, compound, barnyard epithet that has been spewed forth in defending the honor of high school football -- let's take a step back into reality, shall we? The NCAA simply removed its prohibition on games kicking off after 7 p.m. on Fridays. The NCAA did not decide that college football games must be played on Friday nights. The NCAA did not compel a single university to occupy a single stadium on a single Friday night. But you wouldn't know that from the reactions of college coaches, who grabbed the big guns to declare their outrage at this intrusion upon the sacred fields of Friday Night Football. You could all but feel the mist of the sea as the defenders of college football manned the ramparts. Turns out the mist was more likely the saliva spraying from the mouths of coaches and other collegiate officials as they condemned the NCAA. Their actions remind me of the great line about Senator Chuck Schumer of New York -- that the most dangerous place in Washington, D.C., is between Schumer and a minicam. Speaking of which, American Football Coaches Association executive director Grant Teaff, a man recently voted into the College Football Hall of Fame for his efforts on behalf of the game, all but asked for a Congressional investigation into how the NCAA could promote such a travesty of justice. The problems of high school football are well known, chiefly because my colleagues at Sports Illustrated have written about them. Kids don't want to play football anymore. Security can be an issue. So can parents with visions of scholarships dancing in their heads. Where this NCAA action is concerned, those problems are irrelevant. Here's the deal: We mock the NCAA Manual as the unabridged dictionary of athletic bureaucracy. We shake our heads at the Ahab -like quest to make a rule for everything intercollegiate. We gnash our teeth in worry over the financial arms race that has increasingly turned Division I-A into the gated community of NCAA football. The decision to allow schools to play on Friday nights attacks both those problems. Yet everyone who has reported this story has buried the lead: NCAA REMOVES RULE FROM MANUAL! FILM AT 11! Let's hear it for the trees that won't be sacrificed for the new, thinner rule book. Let's hear it for Adam Smith and the marketplace. The residents of the I-A gated community -- the Big Ten and SEC, the Big 12 and Notre Dame, etc., etc. -- don't want to intrude on Friday night. The mid-major conferences such as the Mid-American and the Mountain West want television exposure and television revenue. Let them make their decision and reap the benefits -- or deal with the consequences. It's just a hunch, but I think high school football in Pennsylvania will survive Colorado State's visit to UNLV on Sept. 14. If Pittsburgh and Penn State don't want to play on a Friday night, that's fine, too. The SEC is already considering a ban of its own. It may be in place before the month is out. Bully for the SEC. You can bet that the announcement of the ban also will sing the praises of high school football as loudly as possible. The word patriotism will appear at least three times. Just step carefully in all that rhetoric. Sports Illustrated senior writer Ivan Maisel covers the college football beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.
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