Donald Downs offers a highly intriguing analysis of why college sports has the hold on us that it does--especially when it is so widely recognized that college athletics has increasingly little to do with educating students:

... sports provide an outlet for legitimate feelings and beliefs about virtue that the contemporary campus tends to downplay or thwart. This provision is both positive and negative. It is positive because of the virtues sports embody, but it is negative to the extent that the obsession with sports serves as a compensation for other campus failings. Let me explain.

In Culture of Narcissism (1976), the late, astute social critic Christopher Lasch praised athletic endeavors for the way that they preserved virtues that were starting to come under assault in the political and educational realms when he wrote. To be successful in competitive sports, an athlete must work hard, subject himself or herself to appropriate discipline, and be prepared to accept that playing time is based on merit. Results matter a lot more than excuses. Personal responsibility and a measure of courage are important to athletic success; excuses based on victimhood do not avail. And individuals are ultimately judged by their efforts and acts, not their backgrounds. (In the latter respect, Lasch echoed Martin Luther King's famous maxim about being judged for the content of one's character, not one's race.) In Lasch's view, athletics embody virtues that not only built America, but also make meaningful citizenship and progress possible. But he portrayed these virtues as threatened by the values of the emerging therapeutic society, in which self-esteem, self-indulgence, and a debased notion of equality hold sway over the rigors of responsibility and achievement.

Academic standards for most of the twentieth-century were essentially consistent with the virtues Lasch praised. Standards grew progressively tougher, and universities defined excellence largely in terms of intellectual merit and achievement. Advocates of the therapeutic ethic were rare, and had little official recognition or power on campus. As is now well-known, this changed with the rise of the post-liberal university in recent decades. Today, the concept of merit is challenged in many quarters, and excellence is now prominently associated with "diversity," not intellectual power per se. Administrative positions and offices dedicated to inculcating and servicing the therapeutic ethic have proliferated throughout higher education. Deans of students are often more concerned with making students comfortable and esteemed than with ensuring that their intellectual horizons are challenged and truly stretched. Policies cater to identity politics rather than to individuals who transcend group ideology; and individual courage is devalued compared to sensitivity and victimhood. We have witnessed what Nietzsche called a "transvaluation of values," only in a direction that Nietzsche - who taught the difference between what is noble and what is not - would have disdained.

To a significant extent, this transformation of values has been imposed on campuses by special interest groups. Meanwhile, the majority of students and campus citizens probably still value such traditional virtues as intellectual merit, achievement, competition, and courage. Sports provide one publicly prominent vehicle for expressing and sharing these values. Perhaps most importantly, spectator sports might be the only realm in which a sense of community persists on today's campus. Torn by ideological disagreements over the very meaning of the university and the poisonous differences promoted by identity politics, sports is the one arena that gives us the possibility of a common cause that is also consistent with traditional conceptions of virtue. I have personally witnessed this unifying effect of spectator sports many times. According to this interpretation, the growing fetish of Big Time Sports on campus is -among other things - a manifestation of the attempt to maintain traditional notions of community and virtue on campus.

Thinkers from Marx to Freud to Lasch have taught that fetishes are both useful and detrimental. They are useful because they give us a provisional sense of meaning and commitment in the face of mental and social conflict and incompletion. But they are detrimental, in turn, because they are but compensations (substitute objects) for the more meaningful commitments that characterize more mature personalities and cultures. Fetishes help us to deal with the ravages of life, but they are second rate, not the best that we can do. What if universities were to someday attain a true sense of academic community? Would Big Time Sports then return to its proper place on campus? Or is the cat now irretrievably out of the bag?

Thoughts are welcome.