Author:
An Observer
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Date Posted: 11:40:50 12/26/25 Fri
This is really the existential question which faces intercollegiate sports:
Will alumni and fans continue to support their teams when players transfer in and out every year, when your star may have played for your rival the previous season, and when you know he picked your school because boosters offered more money than your rival did?
The early indications are that, at the top of the football and men's basketball food chain, fans will still support the product on the field or the court.
The most rabid fans don't support sports because they like watching great athletes perform amazing feats with a football or basketball.
No, the most rabid fans support sports because winning vicariously through young men makes the fans feel better about THEMSELVES. Fans are achieving vicariously by grabbing onto the reflected glory of people they don't know and will never meet.
I guess that doesn't change as we transition from a time when a young man chose, say, Michigan because he wanted to play in the Big House and join the tradition of the maize and blue to a new era when the CEO of Oracle Larry Ellison gets into a bidding war with LSU boosters and wins the auction for star quarterback Bryce Underwood.
In the infamous words of Michael Corleone, "It's just business."
I find this new era less compelling, but I think I'm in the minority, as you seem to be as well, Michael.
Here's a hypothetical question: Suppose that we were all wealthy software entrepreneurs like Ellison. If a booster club came to you and said, "For $10 million, we can get the next star quarterback to come to Columbia/Cornell/Dartmouth instead of going to Brown/Harvard/Princeton where he's currently leaning. Can we count on you for $5 million of that?"
I'd say "no." As much as I want my team to win, I have no interest in joining the rat race. I'd rather fund a professorship or a financial aid scholarship, even as I drive to the games and root for my alma mater.
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