Yesterday kicked off, as the great Elvis Costello sang, “the other side of summer.” That’s because Tuesday July 5th initiated the evil scourge that is College Football Award Watch List Season. These pointless press releases are sent out as breaking “news.”
Not only does the journalist receive the email blasts from the award and college football organization themselves, every single school sends out their own individual email blast themselves. Now you cannot blame the SIDs for this. It’s not their fault and don’t shoot the messenger.
The SID is not the one responsible for the excruciating waste of time that is college football award watch list season. It’s the Football Writers Association of America, they command the schools to send out these exemplars of “the everyone gets a trophy” generation. CC Tom Izzo (who perfectly described this every kid is a winner no matter what mentality)
Most preseason watch lists are usually 50-60 names long, with the first two lists released yesterday, the Maxwell and Bednarik, reaching 88 names!! Good God, there are only 128 teams in FBS (formerly Division 1-A) It’s basically the college football version of how every other freshmen student that you know at every college is either “pre-med” or “pre-law.”
These lists grow both in number and longer each year. There will be at least one released each weekday up until the end of next week. They are staggered in order to come up with a reason for journalists to talk about college football this time of year. Not that there’s anything wrong with attempting to generate publicity, as that is after all these people’s jobs. Though c’mon man! This is just weaksauce. You add more names from more schools so that even people who cover the bad teams and the bad players bring this stuff up on social media.
Sadly, many journalists do take the bait, and then publish low hanging fruit, copy and paste press release stories on this stuff.
Of course, Tuesday is the day of the week that most emails are sent, and hence the day most journalists receive the most worthless crapola in their inboxes. You can only imagine what a Tuesday following a long holiday weekend when no one was online Thursday-Monday was like. I do a weekly radio segment talking both the Illini and Northwestern on KOZN 1620 The Zone Omaha during college football season, and two years ago I did a segment that included some ripping of college football award watch list season.
Obviously, nothing got better since I made those remarks. Things only went in the opposite direction.
Click on the blue highlighted text to listen to the audio.
Now about that essay on Social Darwinism, it relates to Iron Mike Ditka, and here’s the post on it. You can read the whole essay at Bold at this link, and as you can see I believe that social darwinism is like wasabi- you need some in order to have any flavor, but too much will destroy you.
College football is supposed to be intertwined with social darwinism, and that’s ironic, given how college football award watch list season is polar opposite to the ideals of the social darwinist.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, partnered with FOX Sports Engage Network. and News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, currently contributes regularly to the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye publication.
He also consistently appears on numerous talk shows all across the country. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram
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