Actually, it IS how you play the game

Is it my imagination or is the chest pounding and macho posturing of football players becoming both more intense and more ludicrous lately?  I don’t suppose you can tell the pros much, but have we become so completely inured to the idea of college kids as athletic mercenaries -- as opposed to student-athletes -- that we no longer think it worthwhile or possible to steer them away from making buffoons of themselves on the field? 
             The spectacle is even more grating, if that’s possible, when it’s done by members of lousy teams.  The inability to produce football victories is, by itself, totally forgivable and even a little endearing.  The better schools generally lose at football more than they win, presumably because they have something resembling a sense of perspective when it comes to understanding football’s place in the great scheme of things; and they therefore refrain from, or at least limit, the laying of scholarship riches at the feet of young fellows who can only sort of read but who can run 100 yards at warp speed and reduce anything that gets in their way to a spot of bleeding ooze. So the coaches’ feet, in these circumstances, aren’t held as unremittingly close to the fire as they are in places where won-lost records are thought to actually matter.
               This clownish muscle flexing and touchdown dancing – along with the custom of insulting one’s opponents and their bloodlines, belittling their talents, threatening them, and engaging in all the rest of the macho gibbering known as “trash talking” – is not endearing at all. It’s just juvenile. But put this prancing and jabbering together with losing, and you enter into the realm of the truly pathetic.  Pathetic, indeed – and, it would seem, the antithesis of the concept of a college as a place to grow through learning – is the sight of a young man whose team is four touchdowns in arrears pointing, gesticulating, strutting about like a rooster and, presumably, trash talking in an exquisitely empty-headed display of childish machismo, after having participated in a more or less routine tackle.  One can imagine the tackle-ee looking at our strutter in puzzlement and asking that person if he has checked out the scoreboard lately.
              There was a time when the players on the good teams, far from whooping it up over the most minor and ephemeral of successes, treated every success, touchdowns included, with studied indifference, the better to position themselves as people for whom success was not a novelty but an expectation, and to thus intimidate their opponents in a way that being mouthy could never do. In the upside-down world of big-time college athletics, the coaches either don’t notice this infantile japery or ignore it, creating the impression that is has never occurred to them to worry about such trivia as how their young charges behave. Not when there is winning and losing football games to worry about.  We all know that college football has little to do with education and everything to do with money and commerce…and, of course, coaching jobs.  Still, one holds out the hope that coaches would at least have the grace to show some outrage – well, okay, irritation – at this tendency on the part of their players toward ostentatious self-expression – the sort of self-expression that is in danger of revealing a bit too much about the level of education they’re receiving as participants in a major college football program.   
                What coaches, administrators, and boosters can never get through their heads:  It really isn’t whether you win or lose.  It really is how you play the game.