I Wish I'd Known Before the Season Started

To me George Will has always been the personification of the effete snob – the kid named Sidney who wore a suit with shorts and knee socks and ate watercress sandwiches. A real-life Chadsworth Osborne, Jr.

But I didn't know he was tin-foil hat crazy!

College football became a national phenomenon because it supposedly served the values of progressivism, in two ways. It exemplified specialization, expertise and scientific management. And it would reconcile the public to the transformation of universities, especially public universities, into something progressivism desired but the public found alien. Replicating industrialism’s division of labor, universities introduced the fragmentation of the old curriculum of moral instruction into increasingly specialized and arcane disciplines. These included the recently founded social sciences — economics, sociology, political science — that were supposed to supply progressive governments with the expertise to manage the complexities of the modern economy and the simplicities of the uninstructed masses.

Football taught the progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity. Inevitably, this led to the cult of one individual, the coach.

[snip]

Progressives saw football as training managers for the modern regulatory state. Ingrassia says that a Yale professor, the social Darwinist William Graham Sumner (who was Camp’s brother-in-law), produced one academic acolyte who thought the “English race” was establishing hegemony because it played the “sturdiest” sports.

Well, there you have it, guys. He has a regular column in the Washington Post and appears weekly on one of the Sunday talking head shows. There's really nothing I can say.