Bob Barr – Is paying athletes killing college sports?
Since my days as a student at USC (the real USC – the University of Southern California), I have been a die-hard fan of college football. I love to watch the competition, skill, and heart that players, teams, and coaches put into this truly all-American sport. But the sport I love is changing, and not for the better.
In this, I agree with Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, who recently levelled a modest criticism of those changes, saying, “I’m not against NIL at all, what I am against is anything that devalues education — that’s what I’m against.” For this and similar comments, the coach was pilloried as regressive, racist, and hypocritical, and attacked personally for his strong Christian faith and trademark Southern drawl.
In fact, his recent statement merely clarified remarks made a month before, in which he warned against “tampering . . . and manipulating young people” as a part of the NCAA’s “name/image/likeness” (NIL) endorsement program, which allows collegiate athletes to make money from their on-field talents. Once again, it was a modest critique, and in hindsight, Swinney’s comments were clearly prescient.
Thus is the vindication of Dabo Swinney, and all the collegiate sports fans who are witnessing their beloved sports crumble away.
To say college athletics have gone off the rails is an understatement. Even supporters of the NIL system would be hard-pressed to disagree with the “Wild West” scenario predicted by coaches like Swinney.
Education? Only in-between meetings with the agent, and only if the athlete cannot go pro in three years. Some schools do better than others with graduating players, but education, at least in the cash-cow sports of football and basketball, is only an afterthought – if that.
We are on the playing field created by a governing body that ignored the writing on the wall for years until June 2021, when the Supreme Court ruled in a 9-0 decision that the NCAA’s long-standing prohibition on athletes receiving benefits violated anti-trust laws. Overnight, college athletics stepped into a new world, which the NCAA was predictably unprepared to handle.
The debate about paying players should have hardly caught the NCAA by surprise, especially as an explosion of media coverage money over the last few decades has raised the stakes to new and obscene levels. In 2020, for example, the Southeastern Conference signed a 10-year, $3 billion deal with ESPN. New facilities at schools, designed to attract the best recruits, cost well over $100 million to build. Alabama football coach Nick Saban made nearly $10 million – just last year.
Clearly, there was a “money” problem in need of fixing, but the NCAA’s dithering until activists were calling them “slavers,” while state legislatures began stepping-in and anti-trust lawsuits worked their way up to the highest court in the land, did not leave it in any position for implementing clear and correct solutions.
The interim NIL guidelines issued by the NCAA days after the ruling were vague, and punted legal guidance to state or institutional bodies to decide. “The current environment – both legal and legislative – prevents us from providing a more permanent solution and the level of detail student-athletes deserve,” went the cop-out. Just this month, a year later, the NCAA has done little more, issuing a weak update to its interim rules, that tries and fails to put the genie back into the bottle.
In today’s ultra-sensitive “woke” world, it is no wonder why activists might think the disparity of riches (and the racial composition of the groups to which those riches were, or were not, shared) was, perhaps, a bad look. For fans too, it became increasingly difficult to stomach millionaire coaches getting multi-million-dollar payouts for poor performance, when players suffered far worse punishments for incidents completely unrelated to on-field play.
Is today’s new paradigm where the “best interests” of players is measured only in the value of an NIL deal, any better? It is doubtful, but that is where the NCAA’s somnambulance has left us.
Like the NBA and the NFL before it, another once beloved American sport is now fading. When fall football seasons starts again, I still will be watching, but no longer with the excitement and pride of years past, and with so many commercial announcements inserted into each televised game, it has become increasingly difficult to follow the flow of the game itself.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
The New York Court of Appeals soon may decide whether “Happy,” a 50-something-year-old elephant in the Bronx Zoo, possesses human rights.
While this may appear on its face to be a preposterous proposition, it is one being considered seriously by the highest court in the state of New York.
The case in favor of granting human rights to non-human animals is being pressed by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) via a habeas corpus petition, the ancient and constitutionally enshrined principle that an individual has a fundamental right to force the government to prove it has a legal right to detain that person.
The question as to whether animals possess or should be granted “rights,” has been a topic of debate going back at least to the mid-18th century in England. Only recently, with the 2007 establishment of NhRP (originally called the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights), has the issue gained legal traction in the United States.
Not surprisingly, these earlier lawsuits filed by NhRP were docketed in New York state courts on behalf of chimpanzees Tommy, Kiko, Hercules and Leo. While these habeas corpus petitions were not granted by the New York court at the time, as with many fringe legal theories, if advocates press their theories consistently and patiently, the odds for a favorable result increases. Hence, the current case on behalf of Happy the elephant.
It is easy to dismiss the legal theory that non-human animals should be recognized as having human legal rights. The consequences of permitting such a principle to advance and take hold even to a limited extent in our judicial system, however, are profound. The Maryland-based, animal-rights non-profit The Humane League, for example, lists the following among the animal “rights” it hopes one day to be legally recognized: the right not to be used for human food, the right not to be hunted by humans and the right not to be bred by humans.
Perhaps one of the most important consequences of granting non-human animals human rights, would be the very real possibility of stopping the use of laboratory animals in research to cure and prevent diseases in humans.
As with many liberal ideas that take hold in our country, they come to us from our erstwhile parent, the United Kingdom, and animal rights legislation would be no exception. An “Animal Welfare (Sentience)” bill recently passed in the British Parliament. The legislation covers not only farm animals and other vertebrae as “sentient” beings possessing rights, but also crabs, lobsters, prawns and octopuses. It also would establish the “Animal Sentience Committee” — a bureaucracy charged with enforcing the new-found rights; a familiar and time-honored process here in the United States as well.
These legal and — in the U.K. and a number of other countries — legislative moves go dramatically further than existing U.S. laws protecting animals against mistreatment.
Animal cruelty laws already protect nonhuman animals by making mistreatment of animals a criminal offense in every one of our 50 states. A number of well-known and respected non-profit groups, most notably the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), founded in 1866, provide significant private sector muscle in aid of those laws.
Still, the drive to enlist the judicial branch to recognize that animals have and should be accorded human rights continues apace, gaining the support of far-left politicians such as Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.
Where all this will end up remains a mystery, but considering the “progress” attained thus far by animal rights organizations led by NhRP, and with the obvious willingness (if not preference) by the Biden administration to defer many policy decisions to international forums (such as the WHO), there is cause for real concern.
One of the criteria the NhRP cites in its case supporting human rights for its “client,” Happy the elephant, is that she “passed” a “self-awareness” test by “repeatedly touching a white ‘X’ on her forehead in a mirror.”
In the minds of these animal rights extremists, it would easily follow that the next step would be to declare Happy the elephant capable of placing an “X” on a voting machine touch screen.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
MAKE CERTAIN FINGERPRINTS ARE ON ANY LEAKED DOCUMENT, JUST NOT YOURS
Leaking information has become a standard practice in Washington, but this week we are reminded of the 24th Law of the Universe.
It used to be a lot easier to keep your fingerprints off of something in this new digital age, but times have changed, and the leaker will be found out.
Watch as Bob Barr discusses the 24th Law of the Universe and who could have possibly leaked the draft decision.
Why would an 18-year-old, with a full life ahead of him, feel so broken and jaded by the world that he feels his only option is to pick up a gun and kill people? This is a question few Democrats, including President Joe Biden, will ask.
After all, issuing statements denouncing “weapons of war” (which has nothing to do with anything) and calling for yet more “gun control,” are far easier than seriously probing why so many young men are turning to internet-fueled hate mongers as a way to fill the emptiness in their lives.
Still the Left stubbornly clings to the notion that gun-control and other federal legislative efforts will solve the deep-rooted cultural problems giving rise to the rash of mass shootings in recent years. Their willful blindness will force all of us to likely endure repeats of last Saturday’s tragic event at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
It is not as if there are no clues in plain sight to help us unravel the factors predicating many of these mass murders.
One common theme, for example, at least as among recent mass shootings, including that in Buffalo, and in Charleston (2015), San Diego (2019), and Christchurch (2019), is that the killers were denizens of the dark corners of the online world. This begs the question, “why?” Why does the hateful violence in online commentary fill a void left empty by social institutions that in years past provided moral anchors to young people?
Probing a bit deeper reveals more clues.
In today’s risk-averse culture, children and their parents are warned, in some cases actually punished, for allowing their children to engage in unsupervised outdoor play. Fretting, often to the point of paranoia, about “pedophiles” and “sex trafficking” has reached the point where even stopping to watch children at play has come to be viewed with suspicion.
In public schools, children are cautioned constantly to be careful, fearful, and suspicious of everything and everyone (even to the point of facing discipline for using a “wrong” pronoun about a fellow student). Gone are the days when public education was considered part of a comprehensive and positive socialization process directed toward a productive and hope-filled future. Constant “active shooter” drills reinforce those fears.
Many public schools fill white students’ minds with debilitating self-loathing because they are “inherently racists.”
“Climate change” teaches them they likely will grow to adulthood in a doomed world.
Being taught concepts of “gender fluidity” and “not knowing who you are” can render this fear-filled world virtually unintelligible to youngsters.
Then we are surprised when some turn to the internet and lash out in violence.
Outside of the classroom, there are few if any group activities that teach and reinforce communal social skills. Religious attendance is on the decline and continues to wither under constant attack from the Left. Boy Scouts and other traditional social groups are similarly attacked by liberals as “toxic.”
Youth sports increasingly are being ruined by parents, whose lack of self-control leads them to abuse coaches and officials verbally and physically; behavior that does not go unnoticed by the kids.
Home life as well feeds this increasingly unpleasant world in which young minds and bodies grow. The environment in many homes mirrors a political environment reflective of what goes on in the very halls of the U.S. Congress, where each side’s views and advocates are seen as completely destructive of the others. Civil and substantive discourse has been supplanted by name-calling and vulgarity.
In myriad ways, we have created a culture that celebrates doom, obsesses over literal and figurative “death,” and reinforces social isolation because it is “safer.” Yet, we throw our hands up in despair when a vulnerable young person, already predisposed by the world around him to violence, no longer values the lives of others, or his own.
Mass shootings have become a mirror to a deeply broken society, and no amount of blaming “guns” or “hate speech” can repair the fissures. Nonetheless, for Democrats repeatedly doing just that, spares them from accepting any complicity for the damage caused by their legal, political, and personal efforts to weaken the institutions that once helped shape children and young adults into happy, compassionate, and functional members of society.
The Left’s continued refusal to see anything of themselves and the policies they champion in that dark mirror, all but guarantees future tragedies.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
Liberals have been in full panic mode about the Supreme Court’s position on abortion.
When the draft decision leaked to the public, one member of the popular talk show “The View,” decided to let people know that the document is the first step towards Fascism. That’s right, Joy Behar claims the Supreme Court is turning America’s representative democracy into Fascism.
Only a true idiot would think that returning power to decide an important issue back to the states reflects a totalitarian government, when in fact such a move is literally the opposite of fascism.
Watch as Bob Barr tries to keep a straight face while calling out the star of this week’s episode of Bob Barr’s Idiot of the Week.
On two successive Saturdays in May, we were witness to the heights of heroic sportsmanship and the depths of human depravity. From the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 7 to the mass murder at the Tops Friendly Supermarket in Buffalo, New York, exactly one week later, we saw the best and the absolute worst that can happen in 21st century America.
At 80 to 1 — the longest of long shots — a horse named Rich Strike ridden with masterful precision by unheralded Jockey Sonny Leon won the Race for the Roses in a way that every underdog dreams of.
A mere seven days later, a heretofore unknown 18-year-old loner, Payton Gendron, allegedly walked into a nondescript supermarket intent on methodically murdering as many innocent victims as he could manage before the police stopped him. The alleged shooter was festooned in black tactical gear – a favorite of many white supremacists eager to display their false bravado to those around them – along with a video camera mounted on his head so those on the streaming service Twitch could watch his cowardly actions.
It took jockey Sonny Leon just two minutes to enthrall the sporting world with what a determined rider astride an eager three-year old colt can do when they set their minds to it.
It took the alleged Buffalo murderer four minutes longer – about six minutes – to shoot 13 innocent shoppers and one brave security guard. Ten of those people died as a result of merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sonny Leon was born in Venezuela in 1990, making him 32 years old at the running of the 148th Kentucky Derby. Although a jockey for several years, his name had not graced the winner’s column for a major horse race until his shocking victory at Churchill Downs. He was, before May 7, merely one of hundreds of jockeys vying for those accolades. He achieved his fame the right way, by biding his time (and the horse’s energy) and weaving a course through the dense pack of 19 other horses until he could gain the inside rail advantage for the final burst.
In what has become disturbingly familiar to citizens of the United States and to those of other countries (New Zealand among them), young, single, white male loners go on shooting rampages as a way to display their sick personality to other, perhaps like-minded sociopaths.
Factors at play in Leon’s Kentucky Derby victory are straight forward and clear – a man trained in his chosen profession who engages that training in an appropriate time, place, and manner, and achieves well-earned kudos for succeeding. His is an example to be admired, nurtured and followed by others in whatever career path they might pursue.
The much darker path evidenced by the mass murder in a Buffalo supermarket appears far more complex, yet depressingly familiar to experts who study the ways in which hatred and narcissism can meld into a toxic maelstrom, fueled at least in part by use of the internet to study and spread such bile (in this case, apparent racial hatred), particularly among lonely young men unattached to family, religion or other positive societal anchors.
Americans in all walks of life grieve for the victims of last Saturday’s mass murder. However, if we are to engage in a serious quest for ways to prevent its replication, we must ask — and not be afraid to answer — the hard questions about why so many young men are alienated and prone to drastic violence in ways essentially unknown to earlier generations of Americans.
America is a land of unbounded success for those who seek it in the right way, as Sonny Leon did; and those achievements properly should be heralded and emulated. America also is a society with the freedom to engage in extreme criminal behavior for that small minority of individuals so inclined; and their nefarious deeds, and the environments which spawned and nurtured them, must be openly and uniformly condemned, and dismantled; if not, we will be forced to endure further heart-breaking episodes.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.