Famous Critics's Blog

The new bad guys November 29, 2009

Anybody remember how, after the Iron Curtain fell and the USSR dissolved, the bad guys in the movies suddenly shifted from Boris Badanov-style Russkis to Bid Laden jihadist Arabs? After seeing “The Blind Side” recently, I want to make a case for Hollywood to focus its malevolent gaze on some real domestic terrorists: the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The movie goes through 90 tearjerking minutes, passes up some opportunities to make the crack junkie mother or gangbanging neighbors into the bad guys, and finally sets up the NCAA for some much-deserved hatred. How dare the NCAA assume that the film’s hero and family values-loving heroine are conspiring to break NCAA rules? Imagine that someone would rescue a homeless child, pay for his education, buy him a car, and adopt him… just for the nefarious purpose of improving the football team at their alma mater?! Outrageous, but then that’s the NCAA.

These are the same people that refused to let a Colorado student play football because he had been a professional skier. Doesn’t matter that the NCAA doesn’t regulate collegiate skiing. If you take money for one sport, you’re ineligible for all others.

The same NCAA cracked down on Clemson University because the coach’s wives were giving an elementary school student rides home. His older brother  was a football player, and was raising him single-handedly after their parents died and/or went to jail, all while going to college, which made it impossible to hold a job. The little brother simply needed some parental supervision and rides to and from school, and his teammates and coaches and their families pitched in to help out. Nope, sorry, that’s a violation of NCAA rules. Gifts to players are verboten, and driving a kid to grammar school is a gift.

Let’s not even look at the debacle that is the BCS. Players at three schools — Boise State, Cincinnati, and TCU — did all that they were supposed to do — win every game — and they won’t be able to even be considered for the national championship, mostly because their schools aren’t traditional big-name football powerhouses like Florida, Alabama, and Texas.

The NCAA’s goal of keeping college athletics unpolluted by money and cheating is noble, and most of the time they do a decent job of accomplishing it. But when they turn into officious, narrow-minded bureaucrats who lack an iota of compassion and rely on strict interpretations of a policy manual, they deserve to be strung up and bludgeoned by a women’s college field hockey team.

Which, come to think of it, is a movie I’d pay to see.