Category: sports

With our own Georgia Bulldogs getting ready for the SEC Championship game this week against Alabama, it's worthwhile to mention one of the issues related to the excitement and the game. In an essay describing a plan to let college athletes major in sports, FSU psychology professor emeritus David Pargman brings up an interesting analogy in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Why do we impose upon young, talented, and serious-minded high-school seniors the imperative of selecting an academic major that is, more often than not, completely irrelevant to, or at least inconsistent with, their heartfelt desires and true career objectives: to be professional athletes?
Acquisition of athletic skills is what significant numbers of NCAA Division I student athletes want to pursue. And this is undeniably why they’ve gone to their campus of choice. Their confessions about their primary interest are readily proclaimed and by no means denied or repressed. These athletes are as honest in recognizing and divulging their aspiration as is the student who declares a goal of performing some day at the Metropolitan Opera or on the Broadway stage. Student athletes wish to be professional entertainers. This is their heart’s desire.

Agree or not, this is a compelling argument. And one with which our friends, colleagues and students in the arts are very familiar. The improbable comparison seems all the more on the mark in the context of what our student musicians, actors and painters are up against in their quest to 'make it'. They might have much more in common with our elite athletes than we had imagined.

via Think Progress.

Very interesting finding out of the department of geography, a discipline that truly has no bounds:

Heat-related deaths among football players across the country tripled to nearly three per year between 1994 and 2009 after averaging about one per year the previous 15 years, according to an analysis of weather conditions and high school and college sports data conducted by University of Georgia researchers.

The scientists built a detailed database that included the temperature, humidity and time of day, as well as the height, weight and position for 58 football players who died during practice sessions from overheating, or hyperthermia. The study, published recently in the International Journal of Biometeorology, found that for the eastern U.S., where most deaths occurred, morning heat index values were consistently higher in the latter half of the 30-year study period. Overall, Georgia led the nation in deaths with six fatalities.

"In general, on days the deaths occurred, the temperature was hotter and the air more humid than normal local conditions," said climatologist Andrew Grundstein, senior author of the study and associate professor of geography in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

As the NCAA meets in Indianapolis this week to discuss some of the most pressing issues facing collegiate athletics, it's a good time to contemplate the role of sports of in society. Not suprisingly, it's a question that goes back to Plato:

Sports are many things, and one of those things is an imitation of heroic culture. They mimic the martial world; they fabricate the condition of war. (Boxing doesn't fabricate war; it is war, and, to my mind, not a sport. As Joyce Carol Oates says, you play football, baseball, and basketball, but no one "plays" boxing.)