There even is a UVA Football program because the University of Virginia, like every other college and university in America that plays football, has made a Faustian bargain.
We, like the others, let kids truck each other into head injuries and various other upper- and lower-body injuries and maladies involving broken bones and ligament and cartilage tears and bruised spleens and the like that will affect them the rest of their lives – the whole point to us doing that being, because it gets other kids to decide to apply for admission.
You thought I was going to write about the money that the schools make.
News flash: only a relative few schools actually “make money” on college football at the end of the day.
And even then, the operating surpluses that Power 4 schools get from football basically pay for the non-revenue sports, and at the Group of 5 level, most football programs operate in the red.
The bottom line for athletics departments as a whole: well, there’s a reason they’re always emailing you for donations, and it ain’t because they’re rolling in the dough.
It all only makes sense if you view it as a stealth marketing campaign – 12 three-hour TV and internet broadcasts a year getting a million or two people to tune in, plus all the headlines on sports websites, and people posting on social media and message boards, with their pregame and postgame chatter, and the endless speculation about high school recruiting and the transfer portal.
It’s all about getting the school’s name out there.
Which is to say, it’s not about money, it’s not about winning.
Now, I told you that story so that I could start to tell you another one, about the University of Virginia, and its oddball approach to playing big-boy football.
Photo: Mike Ingalls/AFP