@Mr Janny
Most of the time, I appreciate your cynical and rational approach to things, but I think you're taking the Michael Corleone approach too far here: "It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business."
College sports are a business for universities, television and radio networks, coaches, staff, and increasingly for the players. Hunter made a business decision, and Texas has bags of money. I get it.
The problem is you've taken the cynicism and rationalism into a realm where the whole point is not to be cynical and rational -- fandom. For its audience, college sports are an entertainment product, which means it needs drama. Dramas have characters, they have plots, they have morals/themes, they have rising and falling actions that build tension, and they have protagonists and antagonists with competing aims building to a climax. We need to feel the joy of victory or the agony of defeat, otherwise we might as well be coding spreadsheets.
Despite a veneer of civilized respectability from a few generations of industrialism and a few thousand years of agricultural civilization, our species is still physiologically and psychological made up of hunter-gatherers. And hunter-gatherers believed in the absolute superiority of their tribe and the necessity of the individual to subsume themselves within the laws and customs of the tribe. Our hunter-gatherer grandparents lived by our standards extremely violent lives, killing in order to eat and killing other humans for resources.
I won't argue the modern world is
perfectly safe, but outside of a few exceptions (e.g., active warzones or natural disasters), most people in high-income countries live anodyne and predictable lives -- the opposite of what the caveman inside of them wants. The caveman wants anger, conflict, and violence because those are the way the tribe expands its power and resources and the way the caveman improves their status in the tribe. The blandness of modern life bores our ape brains, so we need to find ways to simulate these feelings.
Sports are the perfect "safe" way to channel these caveman instincts to love your tribe, hate the other tribes, and, above all else,
hate those the tribe loved and trusted that betray it like Mr. Hunter. Traitors have always received especially painful, merciless, and public punishments throughout history for a reason. The reason I say sports are "perfect" and "safe" for this is precisely because they are ultimately so meaningless. Nobody is going to go hungry, become homeless, or lose a war because of what happens when Iowa State and Texas take the hardwood on Tuesday night. But is going to be fun because **** THE HORNS and BOO HUNTER!
Turn off the computer of your enlightened brain and let those feelings flow through you. Our modern lives require calm rationalism 99% of the time... with family, in school, at work, and ideally within civil society and politics... and the reassertion of the thinking of tribal cavemen in our politics is a big reason for its present dysfunction, but I digress... but that 1% is sports. Enjoy the drama and feel through it.
If you were take the rational approach to its logical conclusion, then there is absolutely no reason to even watch these games. It doesn't make a lick of real difference to anything who wins a silly ballgame, so why waste your time on it when there are objectively so many better things to be doing with it?
