The Irish And Bigtime College Sports

George Will takes time away from using big words to fluff Tea Party morons and say Democrats do dumb things to write a rambling column using big words and name dropping to say Notre Dame can care about athletics and excel on the field.  But this half of the column seems like useless filler to get to 600 words:

Before the late Myles Brand was president of Indiana University, he was a philosophy professor, and when he left Indiana to become head of the NCAA, he waxed philosophical about entangling a huge entertainment business with higher education. It is, he said, “essentially malfeasance” for university administrators not to make the most of the money-making opportunities that sports present: “Athletics, like the university as a whole, seeks to maximize revenues.” In doing so, college football teams have abandoned old conferences and embraced new ones with more lucrative television and other payouts.
College football has proved Karl Marx right about how capitalism dissolves old social arrangements: “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation . . . all fixed, fast-frozen relations . . . are swept away . . . all that is solid melts into air.” Blame college football’s turmoil on male beer-drinking truck drivers, and technology.
Young men are, in television-speak, a coveted demographic. Why? They buy beer and pickup trucks. But like everyone else nowadays, they tape TV programs and watch them later, fast-forwarding through commercials. The technology that makes this possible has caused the explosive growth of lucrative TV contracts for sports broadcasting rights: Men cannot fast-forward through live sports telecasts.

What?  Karl Marx and beer-drinking rednecks who drive pickup trucks?  Men may not be able to fast-forward through commercials during live sports telecasts, but they can get up and take a piss and get another beer during those commercials.  Will goes on to give the history of Notre Dame during the Hesburgh era, when he tried for a while to de-emphasize football.  Regardless, Will doesn't give any indication of how likely it will be for ND to upset Alabama, or what the likelihood of the Irish reverting to the struggles of the past 18 years on the gridiron. 

Anyway, it is a better column than usual for old George, but if I were the owners of the Washington Post, I'd wonder what I was paying those big bucks for when he's just mailing columns like this in.