On Religious Schools Having American Football Programs

I had an argument about American football last week and to find ammunition for future such arguments was curious to find out when that homicidal ritual invented in the American elite private schools entered into nominally Christian colleges.  I haven't found that yet but found a list of deaths of football players that, while it didn't tell me that, proves that nominally Christian universities knew of the homicidal nature of the game back into the 19th century.  

The elite Catholic institutions of the time, among others, both private and public universities, wanting to keep up with those institutions for the training of the ruling class, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, etc. seemed to have football as part of that aping of the depravity of the WASP elites.  

An interesting line in that list shows that in 1894 one George Behan, of Georgetown University, died of a broken vertebra during a game against Columbia A.C. It's not the only nominally Catholic school or Christian school which were part of the American gladiatorial contests which couldn't possibly have been more obviously in violation of the Christianity just about all of them, the secular of that time as well as the nominally religious, pretended to be in support of.  

The nascent football industry which has become so massive now proved itself incapable of internal reform as the fast death tolls during football season climbed to rates that led that most neurotically macho president,  Theodore Roosevelt, to get together the thugs who controlled it to come up with a way to lower the death rate of the games.  They may have somewhat lowered the numbers of players who were killed fast by the game, though deaths from it and its practices have been a constant and continued part of the depravity. For example, the list says that in 1913 Vernon Belyea of Norwich University died as a result of injury from a game played with Holy Cross.  You wonder if any of the Holy Cross students felt any sense of guilt they reported at confession.  I have my doubts that any of them took that level of moral responsibility because, it being called a game, the conventions exempt them from moral responsibility.  

The entire thing is ritualized homicide that starts in allegedly educational institutions many of them nominally Catholic and Christian institutions.  Which is an appalling moral scandal.  And it is the most hypocritical of sports.  Though I'm sure that the right-wing 300 lb. welfare queen Crossfit cult leader I came across would rage if he heard it said of his industry,  football is probably the most heavily subsidized industry in the country, in just about every way at just about every single institution it's fodder animals are produced, its coliseums constructed - the list of public subsidies to it would probably fill pages - a characteristic that you could well imagine coming with an industry originally invented at the training grounds of the American ruling class.  

And you will notice that I have only been talking about immediate or nearly immediate deaths and not the almost universal production of progressive brain damage and other physical damage that is inherent in the game and which, as long as it remains the same game, will be a guaranteed feature of it.  

It is incredible that allegedly educational institutions are so tied up in an industry that destroys the brains the educational institutions are supposed to be improving.  It is also notable that the general culture of football is profoundly anti-intellectual.  That is something that has gone out from its origins to lower levels of education along with the sex crimes that are guaranteed when you amass gangs of males who feel entitled and who are encouraged to feel entitled.  Male sense of entitlement will always, in every venue of it, include their believed  right to forced sex and violence.*  That is true no matter what the sport is. 

I can't think why anyone would want to have anything to do with allegedly Christian, allegedly Catholic institutions that not only maintain a football program but whose alumnae are so enamored of it that for them to practice the religious morality of doing only those things to others that you would have them do to you would endanger their endowments through the graduates they produce withholding their support.  American football corrupts everything.  Including nominally Christian institutions. 

* Though I have not followed it up, I was surprised to find that in the early years of the depraved thing Womens' colleges played football too and, apparently, women died playing it.  Though that mostly ended and I haven't had the time to research what is a far more obscure topic. 

Update Hate:  Oh, I could have been a lot meaner in ruining your Sunday football viewing fun, I could have gone on about  that universal heterosexual-macho-man detumesecing truth I've mentioned in comments, the obvious ritualized homoerotic exhibition that is American football.  I'm sure Trump would throw up if that truth about one of his great enthusiasms were to be put in his face. 

Update Hate 2:  Well, my guess is that the violence was a part of it as a way of denying the homoerotic nature of football,  only people in a deep state of emotional turmoil over their feelings would voluntarily participate in that kind of depravity - presumably often sober - and there is nothing that produces that in nominally straight males in such severity as feeling sexual attraction to other males.  I thought everyone with an alleged education knew that.