Words from WW Blog

I still have boxes of baseball cards in my closet that I collected back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The picture of the player would be on the front of the card, a different pictorial display each season. On the backside of the card, I could track the player’s career: biographical information, minor league teams, yearly stats, and usually one brief interesting piece of information. I was always intrigued by seeing how a player progressed from Single-A, to Double-A, to Triple-A, and then the majors.

It would be interesting to see sports cards come out for college athletes, especially in football and basketball, and to see how their college careers have resulted them changing from College-A, to College-B, to College-C. Instead of Daytona, to Dayton, to Chattanooga, to Louisville, to Cincinnati it might read Florida Atlantic, to Boston College, to LSU.

The transfer portal could be a new brand of sports trading cards. As I watched some of the CSU-Colorado football game Saturday night, the commentators, more often than not, would say the name of the tackler or receiver followed by the name of the school he transferred from. It seems that being a player who graduates from the same school he/she started at as a freshman (with the exception of junior college players), is no longer the norm.

During a recent game, the announcers mentioned two things that hit me. One was how the transfer portal was now the quickest way to turn a program around. New Colorado University football coach Deion Sanders had 51 transfers come to CU with him. He also informed a large number of CU players from the previous season’s team that their services were no longer needed. The Buffs have won their first three games and the fan base is happy; and that’s all that matters to most CU followers.

The second thing the announcers mentioned was how many FCS (Football Championship Series) players have transferred into BCS (Bowl Championship Series) schools. In other words, the FCS schools, which are either smaller in size or don’t have massive budgets, have become the minor leagues for the larger, TV-saturated, BCS colleges. Someone does well at North Dakota State, he can look to transfer to CU.

It’s not that there was ever a purity in college athletics, but it does seem that its place in the university environment has become distorted. Receiving an education doesn’t seem to be as high a priority as learning pass-rush techniques on defense and reading zone coverage.

Of course, I’m a dinosaur, still able to remember when freshmen weren’t even eligible to play on the college’s team and an Air Force Academy basketball season ticket-holder, a military academy that never gets transfers in, unless you regard the Air Force Academy Prep School as being a place to transfer in from…down the road.

Maybe it’s why I feel I’m in my place, coaching middle school kids for the past two-and-a-half decades, although there are hints that sometimes even it isn’t a place where the priorities are in proper order.

Maybe I should simply sort through my baseball cards and be fascinated by the journeys of some of the legends, like Johnny Bench. Did you know that he played for Peninsula of the Carolina League back in 1966?

This entry was posted on September 17, 2023 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.