Sports, the New Religion?

Sports are our nation's national pastime.  We sign our kids up for organized sports to teach them important things like sportsmanship, respect, hard work, being part of a team, and winning and losing gracefully.  For the most part, the kids get it.  The adults, well, not so much.  I've begun to think that too many people view sports, on all levels - high school, college, and professional, as a religion.  As I've mentioned before, I live on the border of two states.  Each one has a major state university with a massive sports program.  The rivalry between the two schools is unbelievable.  I've lived in several different states and even in a different country, but I've never seen a rivalry like this.  Grown adults make some very nasty comments in all seriousness.  One school is derided for being attended by mentally deficient hicks who have incestuous relationships with their siblings while the other is looked down on for being populated by drug cartel gangsters.  I've seen countless discussion groups seriously debating these "facts."  Ironically, both schools have named their teams after guerrilla terrorist groups from the Civil War.  Nice huh?  During the various seasons, you would think the fate of the world lay in the balance depending on which team was going to win by the way some of those adults behave.  Most of them didn't even attend either school!  One of my sisters in law is a professor at a small college.  She has a masters degree in theater and teaches drama.  Several years ago, she had a couple of boys with athletic scholarships take her class.  One showed up for class on the first day and on the day of the final where he signed his name to the test and turned it in blank. The other came to class, sat in the back and slept the entire period.  Both of them failed the class. (Duh!)  This caused a major ruckus on campus.  The boys' coach stormed into her office and demanded to know "just what in the hell she thought she was doing" since a failing grade benched those players.  She explained what they had done in her class to earn their grades and the coach informed her she couldn't fail his players because of how much money the sports program brought into the school.  It came out that the boys took her class because they thought it would be an easy class where they wouldn't have to do any work.  When my sister in law refused to change their grades, the college changed their records to indicate the boys had never been in her class.  This is a small college.  I can only imagine what it's like in bigger universities.  Then there is the whole "football is war" philosophy.  Bear Bryant, Kellen Winslow II, Sam Huff, Vince Lombardi and many, many others have used that analogy over the years.  Really?  Football is war?!  How does getting paid exorbitant sums of money to PLAY A GAME in front of thousands of fans dressed in team colors with pretty girls waving pom poms and cheering them on compare to a unit of infantry soldiers wearing body armor, carrying assault weapons, patrolling a combat zone where people are actively trying to kill them?  All while they're far away from home and family.  There is no comparison and it is incredibly arrogant to suggest it.  The incident that makes me the angriest is the Penn State scandal.  A grown man was caught in the act of having sex with a little boy in the locker room shower.  The 28 year old witness asked his daddy for advice instead of contacting the authorities.  Daddy told him to tell Joe Paterno.  Instead of contacting the authorities, Joe told the athletic director.  Same thing happened all the way up the chain of command to the University President.  Not one of them stepped up and did the right thing by reporting Jerry Sandusky to the authorities.  Instead, they took away his keys. Why?  Because the football program at Penn State, like many other universities, is a huge business, generating a massive amount of revenue for the school.  Protecting the bottom line became the focus instead of protecting children.  When the scandal broke and Joe Paterno was fired, the students rioted and Penn State fans were outraged.  How dare they fire Joe-Pa?  No one seemed to give a damn about Sandusky's victims.  They were too busy worshiping at the alter of the football program.  And that's what created the environment that allowed Jerry Sandusky to molest little boys in the first place.  A pseudo religion is what these sports have become.  Pseudo means false, fake, phony, mock, contrived.  Be careful that you don't worship false gods.  People behaving badly.