Showing posts with label rugby. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rugby. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Lex Anteinternet: The Axe: UW''s elimination list. Considering Football

 
 Women rugby players of the University of Wyoming and the University of Colorado.  Actual student athletes.

This is probably starting to read like "let's pick on UW day" here on this forum, although as the forum doesn't have high readership, I don't expect to receive complaints from the Alumni Association here soon.

Anyhow, this started off today with my questioning the purpose of the Law School in the era of the Uniform Bar Exam and then went on to address the specific cuts being made, which I did here:
Lex Anteinternet: The Axe: UW''s elimination list.: Aeronautical engineering building. . . oops engineering building, at UW.  We've been through this before. Clearly, UW is in econ...
That item closed by questioning football.  I'm going to pick that up here in greater detail in a second.

I guess I should note that I do indeed have sort of a love/hate, I guess, relationship with UW.  I'm a two time UW graduate. Given that, I should fall in the category of individuals who have an unquestioned devotion to UW, but I don't.  I probably ought to ponder why that is.

In part, I think, it's because I grew up in the era of the struggle between Casper College and the University of Wyoming.  Back in the boom of the 1970s there was a serious local effort to make Casper College a four year university.  Pretty much everyone here was in favor of that, but UW, seeing its rice bowl being depleted, was adamantly against it.  So it didn't happen.  Having said that, UW's strategy in the face of this was brilliant, effective, and a good thing.  It went out and partnered with the community colleges to insert some of its programs into them and over time its even been possible to obtain some four year degrees, but not all, at the community colleges.  Over time, I think that its probably a good thing that this occurred and the community colleges stayed two year institutions and UW our only public four year one (a second four year institution exist in the form of Wyoming Catholic College, which frankly I also have problems with for academic reasons, but I'll bother everyone about that in some other post).  But, even while I concede that things turned out right, like a lot of locals I was left with some heartburn about UW.

Beyond that, my four year exposure to the school amplified this, selectively, a little.  It wasn't really the academics of it, which I think were excellent.  My undergraduate geology department was excellent and my law school experience good, in spite of my questioning the remaining viability of that school.  But I never got into the rah rah aspect of the university that so many people do about any university.  That probably says a lot more about me than the university.

Indeed, while a law student I recall receiving a telephone call from a study that was seeking to boost football game attendance. I warned the caller that she was wasting her time with me, but she went through the entire list of things they could do, from free tickets to prizes to bands to hoards of dancing girls, or whatever it was, to which I universally answered that, no, that wouldn't make me attend.  But on game weekends a lot of people with the opposite view, from my prospective, would flood the town and be annoying.  Again, that says more about me, than the university.

Having said all of that, I have never been able to grasp the manic level of devotion to UW football.  Lots of people who live here who never went here are manic devotees of the football program.  It seems weird to me, but then the nationwide devotion to college football baffles me.  

Yale football team of the 1920s.  These student athletes were likely actual students.

I'm not a football fan but that's only part of it.  I don't grasp how it is that university football went from being a game played by students to the farm teams for the NFL.  Indeed, one of the things I admire about baseball is that its farm teams are farm teams.  It doesn't pretend to be recruiting students athletes.  It recruits baseball players.  College football has gone from being a game played by students, on the other hand, to a massively funded farm program for the NFL which the NFL doesn't even have to pay for.

That's stupid.

Anyhow, as part of that stupidity I'd note that after I posted the items below on UW, I saw an item where a Democratic candidate for the state house has gone after the UW football program in the context of the budget cuts and noted that the coach is paid over $800,000 per year.

I don't know if that's correct, but if it is, that's obscene.

But if he is, what that means is that the going rate for Division 1 is that high or higher.  And that's obscene.

But what does it mean, in real terms?  

I don't know that.

What I mean is that I don't know the total cost of UW football, and I don't know if it returns more to the university than it spends.  It might.  

I don't think that any real student cares a whit about their college's football program, unless they want to play football.  There are always a few locals on the UW team.  But the real question is how much is spent on UW  football and how much does the football team bring in?  I have no idea.

I guess if alumni, and others, who are devoted to UW football spend more and bring more in to the university than the program costs, its' economically justified, in the environment in which universities actually exist.  I think that environment, in regards to football, is debased as the idea that a university coach would make that sort of money is insane, but it's a widely spread insanity.  Likewise, the enter system surrounding college football is crazy, but its a nationwide crazy, not a Wyoming one.

So the question is, does it cost us more than it brings in?

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Cuts in higher education? Is this a good time? And a comment on UW football

 http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JukLVw4UGGI/T09-Fg5KEWI/AAAAAAAAC58/n1hmI6WctqQ/s1600/2-28-2012_017.JPG

Earlier this week Wyomingites were reading about new UW President Laurie Nichols declaring a "financial crisis" in existence that will allow her to act with greater freedmon in making the $41,000,000 in cuts that she has to make due to budget shortfalls, brougth about by the decline in energy revenues.  This followed the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees declaring an emergency to be in existence.

And an emergency it surely is.

And its an emergency for the University of Wyoming because the funding isn't there, but that  is, in part, a man made emergency.

It makes me sound  like a follower of John Maynard Keynes, which I am not, but this is a very poor time for the state to be cutting our colleges and university in terms of funding. The worst possible time, in fact.  Young men and women who were working in the energy sector will not be enrolling in college and university in droves, hoping that education will give them a second chance.  And for many of them it will.  Law school gave me a second chance when the energy industry collapsed in the early 1980s.  And I'm not the only one who was in that situation, and law wasn't the only route taken.  But the educational opportunities were there.


This state makes a lot of noise about "learning" from our past mistakes. But we don't.  We don't diversify our economy. We don't seem to learn that limiting education means exporting our young population.  And we don't grasp that trying to grab the Federal domain, which we attempted in an earlier Sagebrush Rebellion that we're trying again, comes back to haunt us.  

Cutting education now is a terrible idea.  If we are really going to diversify our local economy, the generation entering college now is the generation that's going to do it.  This guts their chances, and ours by extension.

Before I leave U.W., I'll additionally comment, although I probably shouldn't, on the pablum in today's paper about UW football.

There's a column in the paper today just gushing about how "we" all love "our" football team.  It's just flowing with gushing admiration and praise about how this institution pulls the state together.

Well, bull.

I've lived in Wyoming my entire life and I haven't ever seen a UW football game.  Never.  I attended UW twice, starting off in 1983 and finishing up in 1990, and not once did I go to a game while I lived there.  When I lived there I mostly noted the home games by the influx of alumni and football attendees flooding Laramie, which after all isn't that big.

And I'm not a lone in that.  Yes, while I attended UW students went to the games, but I don't recall there being a fanatic devotion to the team while I was there.  Indeed, the basketball team seemed to have a bigger following, perhaps because it was really good in that time period.

Now, I'm fine with people having a fanatic level of devotion to UW football, but how is it that that the same week I'm reading about education, which is the real, and only, purpose of a university, being cut, while still reading about a program, football, that's entirely surplus to that purpose?  Something is amiss in that.

 

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

University of Wyoming Women's Rugby: Wyoming v. U...

University of Wyoming Women's Rugby: Wyoming v. U...: ...

After seemingly picking on (but not intending to) American football the past few days, I offer these recent photos I took of women's rugby at the University of Wyoming.

I don't have a clue what the rules are, but rugby is really fun to watch, and I've always liked it. This is the first time, however, I've seen the women's team at UW in action.

It's a fast moving game, which is part of what I like.   It shares a common ancestor with American football, but to those of us who are big fans of it, American football seems slow.  Rugby is a much faster paced game.

Played without padding or helmets, it's also one which features a lot of injuries, but it doesn't seem to share the same percentage of really severe injuries, perhaps because of the lack of armor in the game.