I recently read an article on Forbes.com titled “Get Football Out of Our Universities.” Not surprisingly, it was an article about what football takes away from education. The writer went on to state football is not only unnecessary but also detrimental to education. It distracts us from our studies and will turn America into “little more than the big, dumb jocks on the world stage.”
Let’s begin with the facts: American football as we know it today is a little more than 100 years old. The first intercollegiate “football” game was played between Princeton and Rutgers on Nov. 6, 1869. Since then, the sport has become popular enough to justify the formation of the NCAA football league. Oh, and the SEC has won the past five national championships.
This I will concede to the Forbes writer: we come to college for an education, not to watch football. The priority of a major university, like Mississippi State, should be academics, not athletics. It is a sad, sad day when those priorities are lost. However, there is something almost indescribable football (or sports of any kind, for that matter) brings to an academic institution. To anyone who has been to a major football game in the SEC, it becomes apparent the moment of kickoff. For a few hours on a Saturday night in Davis Wade Stadium, the entire student body forgets the stresses of being a college student. All of the work, tests and studying that must be done will be done. But for the next few hours, we will yell as an amorphous solid, and we’ll love every minute of it. That’s a privilege many students at other universities do not have. Many of our nation’s top universities do not have serious football programs, and it truly takes away from the atmosphere of the college. The saddest part of this, however, is they may never know what they’re missing. To want to take football out of our universities is to never have truly experienced what football is like.
That should be enough of the sentimental arguments for football. In the cold, hard financial world we live, a university needs every dollar it can get. Besides admission prices, what is a better way for a university to raise money than appealing to every major athletic company via a football team?  Most of the money given to a football team is not Mississippi State’s. Most of this money comes from a contract with Adidas, boosters who love and support our team, sponsorship from other private institutions, advertisement premiums, the list goes on. The financial beauty of college football is this: it turns a profit. When I played high school football, every cent went back to our already-poor football team. The school did not benefit at all financially from our team. However, in college things are very different. A major SEC school could raise millions of dollars from ticket sales coupled with the sources from above. Of course it could get some of that money back — it should, it earned it — but a lot of that money will find its way back to MSU’s budget under the “revenue” column. So before you scream, “get football out of our universities,” know some of your scholarships and the other wonderful resources MSU provides us may be paid by our football team.
Lastly, some claim a correlation between caliber of a university’s football program and incompetence of a university’s academics. To those who claim this: correlation does not prove causation, and it never has. What about Stanford, one of the top football teams in the country while also being the fifth-best undergraduate university in the nation according to Forbes? A love of football is completely independent from a love of academia, and opponents of football forget this far too often. Football is a great game that brings much to many universities, and I find it saddening some cannot see and admire the culture it has brought here to Mississippi State University.
Tim McGrath is a freshman majoring in aerospace engineering. He can be contacted at opinion@reflector.msstate.edu.