Ed Kilgore highlights some comments from Pete Buttigieg that will likely be dismissed in all the usual quarters.
Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg said he had moral qualms about being a college football fan and found it “problematic” on Monday.
In response to a question from Jewish Insider about the issues with following a sport where unpaid athletes risk serious injury, Buttigieg said, “First, you need to look at what we owe students. Obviously the model says you get an education in exchange for contributing this way, plus the sport is supposed to be its own reward, but I don’t think that that’s really fair anymore….”
It’s not just the money he finds problematic, either.
Buttigieg also said that if he had a child, he “would hesitate to let them play football.”
With regard to that latter point, this is pretty damning stuff.
As you would expect, football leads the way there, but there are troubling statistics all throughout collegiate athletics, which support a conclusion like this one.
Ultimately, this is what’s going to doom college athletics as you and I know them presently. There are glaring issues which the NCAA and its member institutions choose to ignore. Doing so doesn’t make them go away. It only postpones the inevitable.
Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. It seems like every week there’s another politician doing everything from calmly stating qualms like Buttigieg here to suggesting support for legislation impacting current NCAA practices to actually passing such legislation. The NCAA ignores the political world at its peril.
Get The Picture 
“In summary, since 1970, traumatic deaths have under- gone a steep and steady decline; non-traumatic deaths, however, have remained steady since 1960. The current era, from 2000 to present, is notable for year-round training for football coupled with the highest incidence of non- traumatic sport-related training deaths in football in recorded history.”
Yikes. Not a good look.
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You can say that again.
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In response to a question from *Jewish Insider about the issues with following a sport….*
W.T.F?
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The Urban Rabbi Is another good one if you’re interested.
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Pigs fat, hogs slaughtered. The NCAA is too corrupt and too greedy to understand that they are their own worst enemy.
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Statistically speaking, nearly all of these issues (save maybe long-term CTE concerns) are fairly statistically insignificant. There is clearly an amount of risk that anyone assumes when they decide to participate in a college sport. Hell, I took my life in my own hands going for a run on the street in downtown Atlanta this morning and do it every time I go for a bike ride. Is it really the NCAA’s (or mayor Pete’s) job to eliminate every bit of risk when it comes to playing sports? For every Maryland out there, there are hundreds of programs that take perfectly acceptable care of their athletes. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Nail the offenders hard to the wall rather than trying to fix every little problem with nationwide sledgehammers.
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I get the impression that you’re just pulling this out of your butt. I think I’ll trust the opinion of peer-reviewed medical journals on the matter of significance.
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While not a death or paralysis, the injury to the Auburn women’s gymnast earlier this year when she injured both knees at the same time was worse visually than any football injury I have seen.
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I’ll be the one to say it….I stopped reading at “moral qualms”.
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Why?
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Thanks for letting us know.
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Ah just imagine the Thanksgivings of the future. Synthetic turkey for dinner ‘cause meat is murder. Two hand touch football on the TV because tackle isn’t safe and is toxically masculine and racist. No fire in the fire place ‘cause global warming. I can’t wait.
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When you put it that way, it makes the future as depicted in Mad Max appealing
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Break a social rule, face a mob of masked spoiled brats. It doesn’t have the same zip as break a deal, face the wheel but we can work on it.
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Tell a joke, face the woke?
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That’s assuming you survive Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo, or whatever violent social upheaval we seem to be hurtling toward…
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More likely solar minimum and food shortages.
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Yeah, if there are food shortages you can expect LOTS of violent upheaval.
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That Decory Bryant actually had to sue Georgia is surreal.
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Fame doesn’t equal knowledge or credibility, even though the Left seems to think it so. I could give a flying rat’s ass what Pete Buttigieg thinks about college football. Why you think anyone else that visits this site would is a mystery.
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“If all my readers shared your mindset, you’d have a point,” he said to the guy making the twentieth comment on this post.
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Not today, Satan, he muttered under his breath.
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