Over on Salon,
there is an interesting rebuttal to Murray Sperber's new book, Beer
and Circuses
The author, who went to Syracuse, makes the very interesting point that the
basketball audiences were highly multicultural. This leads to two quick
observations, the first being a follow-up of SI's recent cover about how people
are being priced out of professional sports (and as you know college trends
often follow professional trends), and the second being that while diversity is
a goal to be encouraged, self-organized diversity will always work better than
the opposite.
Anyway, it's easy to bash college athletics, and sometimes big time sports
need to be bashed, but there are good things in the mix too, which is a big part
of why people actually care.