The rat-ship mentality of college athletics
Jen Cohen's departure to USC fits right in with the ruthless self-interest of contemporary college football, which has become a vessel for sea-going snakes.
Eventually, I came to see the humor Monday’s announcement that Jennifer Cohen is leaving Washington to become USC’s athletic director.
It was the Trojans, after all, whose departure from the Pac-12 created the existential crisis the Huskies have been wrestling with for the past year along with everyone else in the conference. And now that Cohen has steered Washington through to the Big Ten beginning next season, she’s leaving for a better job at a school that will be getting roughly twice as much media-rights money as the Huskies will at least to start.
It’s objectively funny, though I’ll admit it took me some time realize that. First, I had to get over my initial reaction, which was abject disgust. Not at Cohen. At the system.
This is how college athletics works now. If you see something you think is better, you grab it. Right now. Then later, after you’ve secured the bag, you can make noises to express your affection for those you leave behind.
It’s enough to make me think about Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, Al Pacino’s Oscar-winning role from the 1992 film “Scent of a Woman.”
“You’re building a rat ship,” he says in the climactic scene.
He is seated on stage at what is a disciplinary hearing in an oak-paneled room at fussy East Coast prep school, railing against a headmaster who is recommending discipline against Charlie – a scholarship student from Oregon – who won’t snitch on three classmates.
“I think you’re killing the very spirit this institution claims it instills,” Slade says.
That’s exactly how I feel about the business of college athletics right now.