I don’t understand why people get pissed off by it-mainly in the local media. The cost of tickets for some schools is more than professional teams’ and when you are at (basketball) Duke, UNC, Kansas, UCLA, Arizona, etc. or USC, Ohio St, Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan, Florida, Bama, Tennessee, Georgia, Miami, FSU (football) you are basically SEMI-PRO to me. You aren’t a pro, but whenever your team is bringing in millions and millions in revenue and your coach is making millions, you are not truly a collegiate team. To me, lower D-1, D-2, Jucos, and NAIA schools are the only real collegiate teams.
Yours is a valid point for many of the programs you mention. At big-name Div. 1-A schools, the football teams are staffed by highly-paid coaches and scholarship athletes and their output pays for a lot of the "non-revenue" sports (e.g. everything except men’s and *maybe* women’s basketball). For the most part, the only time I hear complaints are for people booing players on programs that don’t have the same level of professional resources.
Other than that, for major programs that are pipelines to the pro level, I guess we’re supposed to acknowledge that their players are just ‘in training’ for becoming highly paid professional athletes and hence are on the learning curve. Can’t say as though I agree with that philosophy, but I guess that’s what people think. As long as you’re talking about the high-end, heavily financially endowed athletic programs, few people will complain if you boo a bad performance. It’s the other 90% of teams that deserve a little slack.
17.October, 2009 um 5:14 pm
Booing is not always viewed as a very sportsmanlike thing to do but I don’t really have a problem with it. I just don’t understand why anyone that calls themself a fan would ever boo their own team. It defeats the point. Fans are supposed to cheer the team on. Sometimes teams don’t give fans a great deal to cheer about but if that makes you so bitter that you want to turn on them why not just stay home and boo from the couch.
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17.October, 2009 um 5:45 pm
Booing’s fine… on the court/field/whatever. But the issue with college sports like that is that verrrry quickly, things can go from dislike on the field to off the field incidents. If we’re talking about colleges, that means that 20,000 fans have the opportunity to boo, cuss and wish death upon a player in a game on Saturday… then go to class with him Monday and Wednesday. That ol’ "slippery slope" comes into play.
I’ve never really seen the point of booing at all (is it really that hard to just groan at their mistake and then wait for the next good thing to happen so you can cheer again?), but I don’t think college players deserve any different treatment than pro players as a rule. Now as an ethical and moral issue, you have to wonder why you as a fan are deciding to boo at some acne-ridden 20 year old kid and make him/her feel bad, but that’s not my call to make.
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17.October, 2009 um 6:21 pm
Yours is a valid point for many of the programs you mention. At big-name Div. 1-A schools, the football teams are staffed by highly-paid coaches and scholarship athletes and their output pays for a lot of the "non-revenue" sports (e.g. everything except men’s and *maybe* women’s basketball). For the most part, the only time I hear complaints are for people booing players on programs that don’t have the same level of professional resources.
Other than that, for major programs that are pipelines to the pro level, I guess we’re supposed to acknowledge that their players are just ‘in training’ for becoming highly paid professional athletes and hence are on the learning curve. Can’t say as though I agree with that philosophy, but I guess that’s what people think. As long as you’re talking about the high-end, heavily financially endowed athletic programs, few people will complain if you boo a bad performance. It’s the other 90% of teams that deserve a little slack.
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