Tuesday July 21 Links and Banter

Morning, all. We're officially in the Sports Dead Zone*. No consequential daytime soccer matches during work hours. No college baseball tournaments. No A10 workday tips or arbitrary bowl games at 11:00 am local. Sigh. It's dark days.

*acknowledging that the Tour de France is on right now and baseball is always a thing and the WNBA is currently riding quite highly and I guess golf happens on occasion?

Although, maybe it's better to think of late July as our fan offseason too. It's time to rest, to recuperate, and to begin slowly getting back into fall sports shape. Now is the time to start flexing our muscles and learning where the fuck the CBSSN channel is on our TV lineup. It's time to dive into the esoteric Australian steaming sites that Perpetually Aggrieved Wildcat slings at us for things like Elderly Italian Man Bocce Ball Championships or Southern Vermont Polo Playoffs, But Only Horses Allowed. It's time to do a proper check-in with your wives, husbands, children, pets, jobs (?) and get ready for the fall that is to come. It's the calm before the storm.

And look, I get it. Collegiate sports, sports overall, what's left of the dominant monoculture even more generally: it kind of fucking sucks. I can't argue in good faith otherwise, although god knows I've tried.

I do wonder how the original fans of these sports of ours felt as the early, early, early shades of commercialism bled into the sport. Did they feel in the 1920s as we do now? Did they also bemoan the advertising creeping into their sport, the incessant gambling references? Did they feel uncomfortable about the ostensible free agents and semi-amateurism in the sport? From my time in the B1G newspaper archives, it seems like they did! It'd be easier to know the definitive answer if they had shitposting blogs back in the day, but I suspect that the 1920s version of OTR also had reservations about the future of the sport.

It's the way things go. It's not necessarily reassuring to know that in all times, Things Tend to Get Worse. But we aren't the first to be here and we're not the first to feel as we do. And that's something to take into account.

Anyways, that was depressing. To the links!