Sports fanatics, death threats..The monster entertainment created.
Ohio State and Illinois players E.J. Lilldell and Kofi Cockburn are the recent victims of social media death threats. Athletic directors for the schools will play P.R. and tell you how it’s not tolerated. Various media will tell you that death threats are hate speech. Everyone will deflect blame from the true source of the blame. Sports fans are easy to scapegoat targets. But who created the sports fanatics? Let’s find out why Sports fanatics and death threats. The monster entertainment created.
Controversy sells tickets and views and after recent death threats expect viewership of the NCAA march madness to increase. The NCAA lost almost 1 billion dollars last year for not having the tourney due to covid. Our article last week told viewers that it was risky for the tourney to take place this year. The narrative that the NCAA wanted to create is that their playing for the love of the game. Somehow the love of a basketball game is supposed to rationalize playing during a pandemic?
This silly notion creates a bond with fanatics of the sport. Many already feel that the tourney is where the players truly leave it on the floor. The national spotlight is a showcase opportunity for players without multi-million dollar contracts. In fact, it’s for free, despite NCAA basketball being a billion-dollar industry, but I digress.
Clemson is one of 22 FBS programs whose football stadium has a larger seating capacity than the city (or other census-designation place) the institution resides in.
College Sports fans may be the most hardcore of any group of fans. Their the youngest, are outgoing and more prone to drinking and partying with less responsibility. Furthermore a lot of college towns lack the entertainment of professional sports teams. This void leaves college teams as the major provider of entertainment for cities of hundreds of thousands of people. All of this must be accounted for in the engineering of the sports fanatic. The very towns these sports fanatics live in have very few sources of acceptable pop culture entertainment.
Professional sport is a drug that fills a void in our lives. Deep inside we feel emptiness and rather than embrace it we fill it with superficial things such as sports. Yet it only feels empty because we’re taught to fill it with sports. Sports players on campus are celebrities and worshipped by fans, alumni, and teachers. While the majority of students are going to college to learn, the athlete goes to play sports. The purpose of college is to learn remember?
So we’ve established the Frankenstein sports fanatic genesis is socially engineered by filling the void of entertainment and social status. The key is to realize that the athletic directors and schools that are defending their players from death threats, created the mind state for death threats. College depends on sports fanatics to fill their huge stadiums and t.v. contracts to generate profit. However, this isn’t the case all of the time.
In fact, you’d be surprised to find out that a number of colleges lose money from sports. Perhaps sports is just a way to create uniformity amongst students and keep up enrollment then. If college sports isn’t profitable 100% what would be the point? What other method does a college have to sell prospective students even non-athletic to their schools? If sports isn’t the first selling point it’s definitely the 2nd or 3rd behind academics.
Regardless if sports are profitable for colleges, the fact remains is that sports fanatics represent a paradox. Colleges create sports fanatic then chastise them in public for being too fanatical. There isn’t a fine line for a fanatic. These aren’t casual fans, casual fans don’t buy season tickets. And casual fans more than likely don’t purchase merch. A lot of college life revolves around the scheduling of sports. Rituals such as jumping in mirror lake the week before Michigan games by Ohio state fans is one of them. Which is usually around thanksgiving where is 40 degrees or so.Unless you live in these environments in can be hard to understand the depth of the college fantic.