From time to time. I have a great idea and I think that this is one of those. Wait until you hear me thru before you make up your mind. Here it is.
Now professional football is dominated by kids who developed their football skills in one of our colleges or universities. You know how it works. Rather than study in high school, the kid puts his time in on football and gets into college on that basis. He then perfects his skill as a student in one of our great colleges or universities. Rather than graduate, they opt for the early draft and get on with one of the professional football teams. We watch them play in high school and then in college and then waste a whole Sunday watching them again playing for one of the professional teams. Do you agree that this the way it works? You know that I have traveled and lived around the world and I know that we are one of the only countries in the world who do it this way. We love it and we think that we are the only ones who really know anything about sports. Why else would we do so well in the Olympic Games? Wait, how could Argentina take the Gold Medal in basket ball? We invented basket ball didn't we? Wasn't the Argentine team all "white". This must have been some kind of mistake and I don't know what I am talking about. Wait, here is my idea.
What we should do is to have our hospitals sponsor and develop our football players rather than our colleges and universities. Look at it this way. All of the football players would be some kind of doctor. Many would be surgeons. If they got injured, they could take care of themselves. In many communities, there are more college graduates working in the hospitals than any other place in town. Hospitals would be the perfect place to develop football players for the pros. You have to agree. If I can just get the word out, I feel that I could swing this one. There would be a big extra benefit for our colleges and universities too. Now what do you think that would be?
Now our colleges and universities have watered down their classes and the entrance requirement so that they can get potential football players in and keep them eligible to play on Saturday. If we turned this whole thing over to the hospitals, we could turn our colleges and universities back to educating our kids. See, I told you that there would be big benefits for our colleges and universities with my plan. By having our colleges and universities put so much of their attention into football, we have diverted them from their real mission and it is time to fix that!
Now, how about our hospitals? For starters, the hospitals would have to figure out how to hire football players as doctors who could not qualify for teaching first grade. I know they could do it because our colleges and universities were able to do it. What they would need is a new kind of administrator, much like a college coach. I know that they could find this type of person because they could afford to pay them 10 times what the President of the United States makes. In most states now, the coach of their big time college football team is the highest paid public employee in the state. I just know that the money must be there if they just had the will. There would be a small down side to this when patients came to the hospital and had the wrong parts removed by football player doctors. If the hospital had good lawyers and good insurance, they could make this work. Now let's step back and see if this is better or worse?
From the stand point of our colleges and universities, it would be much better. They could focus on education and admissions could stop playing games with test scores and diversity quotas. The United States just might move up a notch or two on education compared to the rest of the world. That would be very good. Now how about our hospitals and medical care?
I am sorry to say that our hospitals just might go down the same drain as our colleges and universities have gone down. Can you imagine going to a hospital and being treated by a doctor with a football scholarship? He might have a good bed side manor, but you just might not check out. If you think about it, if we were to do this, it would have exactly the same affect that it has had on our quality of education in the United States during the past 50 years and I don't think you would want that. Is there a solution? Yes!!!
We need to get over organized sports out of our educational system just like you can see that we would need to get it out of our hospitals. If you don't think organized sports is a serious problem and a major part of the deterioration of the quality of education in the United States, you have been asleep for the past 50 years. We have a lot of serious social and economic problems here in the United States right now and watching profession football on TV every Sunday and Monday night is not contributing to the solution. Every minute that is devoted to playing or watching people play football is time taken away from solving our real problems. There is no free lunch and football in our schools and colleges is also not a free lunch. If we want to solve our problems, we are going to have to rethink how much time and resources we devote to football and if we are going to continue to allow it to degrade our school systems. That's a fact!
