BY MARTIN KICH
Here are the lead paragraphs in a photo-essay published by Business Insider:
“College football met NASCAR in Tennessee on Saturday night when Tennessee played Virginia Tech in the “Battle at Bristol,” played at Bristol Motor Speedway.
“The game set a college football attendance record with 156,990 fans in attendance. That shattered the old record of 115,109 for a game at the University of Michigan’s Michigan Stadium against Notre Dame in 2013.
As a stunt, the scheduling of this game was undeniably a success.
But if we start to see more games move off-campus from “home” stadiums to these kinds of more massive venues, it will be further evidence that intercollegiate athletics has become something increasingly difficult to justify as something connected to, never mind central to, our conception of—our enduring notions about–post-secondary education and the student-athlete.
The photo essay by Cork Gaines is available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/battle-at-bristol-motor-speedway-tennessee-virginia-tech-2016-9?utm.
Reblogged this on Ohio Higher Ed.
Good point, Marty. In fact, I’ve often wondered why savy entrepreneurs haven’t seen seen the same opportunity in the sports arena as they’ve seen in the classroom. If MOOCS are supposedly the answer to the high costs of a college education, perhaps sports programs could be outsourced as well. Maybe we should consider sports program consolidation, or sports program collaboration between universities. Why does every university need its own football team? In Ohio, we could designate one university as the football university, one as the basketball university, one as the tennis university….