I think the even bigger problem is how these dudes get surrounded completely by sycophants and are encouraged to let their brain atrophy completely starting in high school, if not earlier. Nobody is allowed to criticise the sportsballmen, they're often not required to actually do any schoolwork, and the entire social structure of the US education system exists to deify them. They just become the most credulous, egotistical idiots on the planet with nobody willing or able to call them out.
The traumatic brain injuries don't help, but athlete brainrot is a more insidious structural problem as well. That's why you see it in lower contact sports as well.
This is the more accurate read on situations like this. Add in that you need to be a little bit different in your view of the world to even make it as a professional athlete, and you're going to get stuff like this. Like, as far as they're concerned, hard work and believing in themselves to an unhealthy level HAS paid off. If you're working out at the combine, you are in the top percentage of a percentage of college football athletes, which they themselves are already a sliver of top football players in the world.
Harris writes extensively about the eugenicist origins of the combine and Stanford and how college football was essentially used as a petri dish to try to build a better soldier.
The competition didn’t end once students were accepted. Starting in the 1920s, they had to contend with Terman’s new grading system, which ranked them on a curve of comparative rather than absolute achievement. But the bionomists also needed an athletic substitute for combat, and Jordan believed that he found one in football. “[H]e felt football’s combination of physicality and cooperation fit in with the spirit he wanted to see thrive at Stanford,” writes California historian Kevin Starr of Jordan.
Stanford was literally like the ivy league version of the hitler youth.
Of course this should come as no surprise given the history of Leland Stanford and the Stanford family.
More valuable than any single horse, any thousand horses, were the
insights into natural efficiency the farm developed. The “13 million horses
× $100” calculation is the kind of disruption math that twenty-first-century
start-ups use to persuade venture capitalists to sink millions into protean
projects, but Leland only had to convince himself it was worth his money,
which he seems to have had no problem doing. Bringing industrial
techniques, goals, and capital to the production of animals, Stanford’s farm
was the prototype for what the scholar Phillip Thurtle calls the laboratories
of speed, with their limitless resources, firm-style employment
bureaucracies, (pseudo)scientific breeding methods, and focus on a single
product.11 This was not an animal farm in any classic sense; it was an
experimental engine factory, churning out high-performance horse flesh by
the ton. Since they sold horses for their genetics—the blood more valuable
than the muscle—the Palo Alto Stock Farm was really in the business of
intellectual property
I was very grateful to go to a high school where our football team sucked so bad they were a punchline--I honestly couldn't even tell you who the quarterback was. I can only imagine the psychic damage I would have incurred had I attended one of those Texas schools where they spend more on the football stadium than the actual school
I think the even bigger problem is how these dudes get surrounded completely by sycophants and are encouraged to let their brain atrophy completely starting in high school, if not earlier. Nobody is allowed to criticise the sportsballmen, they're often not required to actually do any schoolwork, and the entire social structure of the US education system exists to deify them. They just become the most credulous, egotistical idiots on the planet with nobody willing or able to call them out.
The traumatic brain injuries don't help, but athlete brainrot is a more insidious structural problem as well. That's why you see it in lower contact sports as well.
This is the more accurate read on situations like this. Add in that you need to be a little bit different in your view of the world to even make it as a professional athlete, and you're going to get stuff like this. Like, as far as they're concerned, hard work and believing in themselves to an unhealthy level HAS paid off. If you're working out at the combine, you are in the top percentage of a percentage of college football athletes, which they themselves are already a sliver of top football players in the world.
Oh man you should definitely read Palo Alto, which is available in both PDF and Audiobook form in the Chunka Luta library
Harris writes extensively about the eugenicist origins of the combine and Stanford and how college football was essentially used as a petri dish to try to build a better soldier.
Very interesting!
Source
Stanford was literally like the ivy league version of the hitler youth.
Of course this should come as no surprise given the history of Leland Stanford and the Stanford family.
Note: Easier to be the top of the world when no other country plays that game
canada has gridiron football too but for all intents and purposes they're a vassal state
I was very grateful to go to a high school where our football team sucked so bad they were a punchline--I honestly couldn't even tell you who the quarterback was. I can only imagine the psychic damage I would have incurred had I attended one of those Texas schools where they spend more on the football stadium than the actual school
edit: I accidentally a word