Still wanting to stab bitches in the face.

The fact that I am a grump actually plays only a minimal role in this post.

I would write the rest of this post in pretty much the same fashion whether or not I was working and not grumpy.

The fact is that I no longer work in a university athletic department, so I can criticize a lot of things without fear of any kind of repercussions.

The fact is, that in my four years at Loyola, and in all my considerable number of hours spent in the athletic department, I did enjoy myself... for the most part. I met some wonderful people, and had some great experiences that I doubt would have come to pass had it not been for my job in the athletic department.

But, I also saw some of the uglier parts of the whole picture.

Without naming names, I will say that there are some people in the Loyola Athletic department who genuinely care about the welfare of the student athletes, and want to see them succeed in life outside of athletics. But there are most definitely those who treat it all as a business. This is a tragedy.

Understanding that Loyola is a VERY SMALL program, despite its NCAA division I status, it is easy to understand this same mentality on a much grander scale at very large, very dominant athletic programs. Knowing that this is how certain people feel about the athletes in the programs it's quite easy to see why there are so many problems with rule violations, (among other problems... because ALL of these programs have problems that nobody is talking about!) in these big programs.

I'm not going to be a whistle-blower, because snitching has never been my style, but let's just say that even to a student worker, the problems were very apparent.

So why do I bring all this up now?

Well, as you all know, I don't work in the athletic department anymore. So that's one reason. Another reason is that the NCAA is upsetting me lately.

They upset me with their sudden overtures toward being PC. (Read here.)

They upset me for trying to monopolize the tournament business.... Which they have effectively done, despite the fact that they were not the first tourney out there! (Read here)

==========================================

In unrelated sports news, my Cubbies continue to suck. No shocker there... as you should all recall, I said going into this season that this was definitely not going to be our year.

==========================================

Thanks for sticking around and acting like my opinion matters!