Extracurriculars

Alabama had barely hoisted the BCS national championship trophy late Monday night when the long-winded explications of the entire college athletic landscape were being churned out.

Actually, those missives have been continuing for a good long while. But in the context of a remarkable and dispiriting college football season — fraught with realignment, record streams of television money and a jarring sex abuse scandal — these arguments will take on a new complexion.

The college basketball season is in midstream, but football has been driving the argument more than ever, prompting such non-sporting journalistic figures as Taylor Branch and, more recently, columnist Joe Nocera of The New York Times (here and here) to launch tirades against the NCAA.

And with the NCAA convention beginning Wednesday in Indianapolis, sportswriter Patrick Hruby piles on to that theme, exhorting college athletes in revenue sports — football is his only reference here — to go on strike:

“It would make the bad situation of big-time college sports better by making it more equitable, more honest. By exercising their dormant power, players would become partners, not serfs, free to make negotiable demands instead of unheeded requests. Maybe college athletes don’t want cash. Maybe they want four-year, irrevocable scholarships and lifetime health insurance for their injuries. Maybe they want the same right to profit from their image and endorsement deals that college-attending actors and musicians take for granted. Or maybe they really do want a salaried piece of the multibillion-dollar pie. Whatever the case, the important thing isn’t the particulars; it’s that athletes would have the ability to ask. And that matters. At their core — or at least at the for-show ersatz core that ensures ongoing tax-exempt educational status – college sports are supposed to be about more than wins and losses. They’re supposed to be about building and shaping character. Do we want a system that conditions our athletes to think like atomized short-timers, too cynical and defeated to care about anything but the scraps they can grift from a corrupt system? Or do we want sports to nurture independent thinkers, empowered individuals who also can work together for a common good?”

This thinking is running headlong into more traditional reformers, who continue their windmill-tilting about regaining some notion of the amateur ideal. But Douglas Lederman of Insider Higher Ed is skeptical these calls will be heeded, since they haven’t been before.

A few details of his reporting jump out — the possibility of something like class-action Title IX litigation that may prompt cutbacks in football that women’s sports advocates have wanted for years. One such veteran, former Women’s Sports Foundation head Donna Lopiano, tries making her long-standing claims about the “arms race” more startling than ever, believing this also might quell the cult of the coach that led to scandals at Penn State and Ohio State.

That’s unlikely, as are renewed desires to strip the NCAA of its tax exemption. But Lederman casts a very long-range scenario for possible change:

“And while it is often suggested that the most-visible and richest sports programs own all the power in the NCAA, the Ivy League, Division III and other nonscholarship programs have something on which the sports powerhouses arguably depend: the ability to cloak themselves in the ‘amateur’ mantle that the most competitive and commercialized football and basketball programs have increasing difficulty claiming.

“In a restructured college sports landscape in which the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ are much more clearly and formally separated, it is not too farfetched to envision a group of angry members of Congress looking very differently than they historically have at the question of whether big-time sports is truly an amateur enterprise that warrants tax exemption as an educational activity.”

Yes, it was a short pass that a speedy Demaryius Thomas turned into victory. Yes, the Pittsburgh secondary was curiously out of position, with no one deep to prevent an overtime touchdown.

But Tim Tebow got the ball to Thomas at the end of another classic Denver Broncos victory that he triggered with a strong start, and the National Football League’s most compelling story just got more compelling.

It’s a no-brainer for this blog’s Sports Moment of the Weekend.

And even Lady Gaga was impressed, Tweeting in such a way that would make the devout Tebow blush:

“Giants fan but wow. #Tebow Thats what the fuck a champion looks like.”

Rendering most of the volumes of words penned by others rather useless.

An exception, from a Canadian columnist: “Tim Tebow is the best thing to happen to sports fans in a long, long, time.”

Unless you’re a Steelers fan this morning.

The young man they call the Honey Badger plays with a ferocity that I’ve found a bit unsettling even for college football, and SEC football in particular.

Thayer Evans of foxsports.com has the deep background of Tyrann Mathieu’s painful upbringing in New Orleans, and how he’s trying to overcome it. The LSU Heisman Trophy finalist’s father is serving a life prison for murder, and his mother didn’t raise him. He says he doesn’t want to know why.

But it’s the comment from an uncle of the 19-year-old Mathieu that I hope never becomes a haunting one:

“He’s such a good kid and he’s got a good heart. But at some point when things are burning inside you so bad, a fire can be a fire to light up somebody and make good, and some of it can just turn into an out-of-control inferno. That’s the part that I’m scared of happening.”

This kid’s got a lot driving him when he takes the field — a lot more than football — and I can’t imagine what that will be like when he plays in his hometown Monday for the national championship. This story helps to understand him so much better.

Goalkeepers rarely score goals. But the way that Everton’s Tim Howard, the U.S. national team starter, did this Wednesday against Bolton Wanderers is something to marvel.

In addition to a whopper of a kick — not a goal kick, but on a short back pass, mind you — Howard also got the best-ever bounce in the history of English soccer, and maybe the world. On a cold, hard turf, it had just the right touch for him to beat his opposite number:

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/foxsoccer/video?vid=fac369d7-cda9-4662-a062-1b4b3af67df7" target="_new" title="" onclick="urchinTracker('/outgoing/msn.foxsports.com/foxsoccer/video?vid=fac369d7-cda9-4662-a062-1b4b3af67df7&amp;referer=');">GOTD: Howard scores amazing Goal</a>

If you were looking for some place to invest that extra $4 million you found between the sofa cushions, it’s too late to plunk it down for a Super Bowl commercial.

All the ad space is gone, and the above figure is for a precious 60-second message, according to Business Week.

Let’s hope for that kind of money, they’re a far lot better than the typical frat boy ads that addle the brains of sports viewers.

Here’s the best Super Bowl commercial that ever ran, and it ran only once, at a cost of $800,000 per minute:

For those who bemoan the militarism and regimentation of American football, this is the perfect illustration of why the beauty of the game is in the details, leading to this magnificent catch on Sunday by Julio Jones of the Falcons.

He may need to do more of the same against the Giants in the playoffs.

This is my sports moment of the weekend. But I’m biased. This is my team, and four consecutive post-season years is still something to get used to. Sometimes I think this is all an apparition. As are Jones’ highlight reel catches all season.

This is no attempt at objectivity. I know that others will point to the ugliness — in particular the Penn State tragedy — as the biggest sports story of 2011, at least in the United States.

In Canada, it well may be the deaths of professional hockey players and a long concussion-related layoff to Sidney Crosby, the game’s biggest star that triggered debate about the future of fighting in the sport.

Around the world, I can’t imagine anything topping Lionel Messi’s continued brilliance for Barcelona.

As for me, I can’t get enough of this, and probably never will:

I blogged about the significance of this moment earlier this week. A couple of weeks ago, there was plenty of debate here about the professional prospects for women’s soccer, and I do hope they get brighter eventually.

That marvelous day in Dresden resonates for me more than anything else that happened this year, because of what I write about on this blog most often.

This week I’m bringing back some of my favorite posts from the year, and especially those that generated some good conversation. Issue pieces in sports always seem to do the trick, and these were no different.

In June I posted a 10-part series I called “Women’s Sports Without Illusions,” a critical examination of the movement and where it stands as Title IX turned 39.

For years I have found much of the dogma coming out of the gender equity establishment to be indignant and tone deaf to the world that women athletes live in today. It’s as if activists refuse to leave the 1970s, which thankfully have ended. We might have gone from disco to hip-hop, but I’m more concerned about the cultural grievances that many of these so-called “experts” hold that are out of step with the reality on the ground.

Especially when the slow progress for women in sports over the decades can’t always be chalked up to men.

I offered some starting points for revising the Title IX sports regulations that are outdated, and not surprisingly they drew most of the reader comments.

Also not surprisingly, most of the readers were men, and not women who side with the Title IX diehards. This blog is part of the Women Talk Sports network that includes the Title IX Blog and two sex-and-gender standbys, After Atalanta and One Sport Voice. There was virtually no reaction. We’re talking about people who don’t like their ideas challenged, some to the extent that they don’t permit comments on their blogs at all.

What’s more troubling are the grudges that some hold against football and how they rail against portrayals of women athletes in magazines and elsewhere that the athletes themselves see very differently.

These cultural grievances form the spine of an expanded writing project, based on this series, that I will complete in early 2012. It’s less about Title IX and the controversies over compliance with the law and more about the future of women’s sports, and how such absolutist views disrespect the individual choices of girls and women and are out of step with the mainstream.

I’ll have more details about that project shortly. All I’ll say for now is that if you’ve got a problem with the Women’s Tennis Association’s “Strong is Beautiful” presentation, then take it up with Billie Jean.

This week I’m reposting some of my favorite posts from this year, and one of the subjects I’ve been focusing on is the dizzying, ever-changing world of sports media. The trick is not to do too much navel-gazing, one of the hazards of the profession.

Sports media is the subject of amazingly constant attention, and there are so many others who are truly on top of this. When I try to chime in, it usually brings out the worst in me.

For insightful, mature criticism of a field where juvenilia reigns far too often, Richard Deitsch of SI.com is the king. For great links and his fabulously-worded “quotage,” there’s Ken Fang. Jason Fry is all over digital media trends as it pertains to sports journalism.

There are others I am forgetting, so I apologize.

My focus on this blog has largely been about media coverage of women’s sports, and how the usual bromides and complaints get my blood boiling. I don’t always feel proud about this either even though I think I had some valuable points to make.

When I’m done venting, I just feel skunky and dissatisfied. It’s so easy to sound off, but more difficult to offer a better way of looking at something.

Most recently, I’ve been delving into the careers of legendary writers who’ve recently passed, such as George Kimball, and those who continue to remind us that this domain at times has been unfairly labeled the Toy Department.

In that same link, I wrote about John Schulian, now a Hollywood screenwriter, who collaborated with Kimball on a boxing collection and has recently published a new collection of his own writings.

When I came across this interview with New York writer Alex Belth, I mentioned that I was nearly in tears — tears of joy. And this isn’t about nostalgia for some time that never was. This is a treasure trove of what has drawn so many journalists to sports, and what keeps us there.

That book, “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand,” is on my list to read early in 2012, as I blogged about a couple weeks back. Not long after that, I received an e-mail from Schulian, which truly blew me away:

“What a wonderful surprise to come across your kind words about SOMETIMES THEY EVEN SHOOK YOUR HAND. I was trolling the Internet, just hoping no one was teeing off on my book, when I found it on your list of holiday recommendations. A million thanks for your praise, and a million more for putting SOMETIMES in such splendid company.

“I wish I could take you back in time to the era I talked about in my interview with Alex Belth. Life really was that good for sports writers — stylistic freedom, budgets that allowed for lots of travel, athletes who spoke in more than cliches. I’m not sure I realized how lucky I was then, but I do now.”

How kind, and how flattering this was. This is of the biggest rewards of blogging — to be discovered by someone totally unexpected.

Now he’s really going to make me cry. Tears of joy, for other reasons.

This week I’m reposting some of my entries from this year that not only are my favorites but that I thought really resonated as well.

The U.S. women’ s soccer team captivated the nation for a few days last summer with its run to the Women’s World Cup finals. But unlike the 1999 team, this one wasn’t touted for being role models for young girls, nor was it presented primarily for the benefit of the “ponytailed hooligans” from 12 years before.

(Nothing wrong with any of that, but the travails of women’s pro soccer since then have shown that it takes a lot more than a feel-good story to make a professional venture stick. As I wrote recently, too many of the wrong assumptions and sentiments are still being cited.)

This past summer, these American players were fully adult, edgy, even controversial women, some of whom were trying to rid themselves of a painful past. All they did was put on a hell of a good show. It was a quintessential example of great sports entertainment.

Red-blooded American men who normally wouldn’t pay much attention to women’s sports or soccer tuned in as if it were the Super Bowl.

From July 20: Free at last: letting women’s sports grow up.

Enjoy.