A New Perspective on Student-Athletes
Cool story brah.
...it's not a brah, brah.
Well, i say that you are, so that should be good enough for all of the "MogCommmunity"
for the joy you gave me while negging all of your posts.
Is this first day point total a record?
thanx brah!
First day and you're already at a lovely -25? Good work.
Yeah, what's up with this point thing?
tl;dnr.
Excuse me?
I think he meant "Too late; do not resuscitate."
it was too long. i did not read. duh. look at my name. I am understood.
seriously, how stupid are you? how on earth do you not understnd that?
I guess I just don't spend enough time talking to middle school aged girls on the internet.
I'll leave it at that, since you're obviously a troll.
I always try to remind myself that I won't let a bunch of 20-year-old kids that I've never met determine my mood for the weekend (or longer), but it doesn't work so well.
Teaching and coaching high school kids made the youth of college athletes much more apparent - college freshmen are not very different from graduating HS seniors, only a few months older. Having kids of my own also drove it home even more.
Good luck to your son at VPI.
ummm...did you READ THE ORIGINAL post???@!!!? his son is going to virginia tech, not VPI or whatevet the heck that is...
BIG PENIS IN YOUR FACE
dude. cool man.
The correct terminology is RAD DUDE
This comment is even funnier with the troll posts removed.
Edit: Meant as a response to "BIG PENIS IN YOUR FACE"
located here, all I could think about when I read this was...
"sweet ass in ya face... sweet ass in ya face"
Virginia Tech is technically known as Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
I realized this a bit when I started college. I almost wet myself just thinking about having to make an accurate pass in front of 100,000 people.
I'm going to be a freshman this fall. I remember during the WMU game last year I turned to my dad and said "imagine if next year at this time I was the starting qb for a major college football team"
Of course, that was never going to happen, it just put things into perspective for the rest of the season.
I'm 25 so I officially think that soon I will need to call them 'kids' as well. I'm still holding on to the fact that even though I out-age everyone on the Michigan squad, I still have Weinke. Next year, I will officially be too old for that whole walk-on turned star quarterback pipe dream. At least I have a year...
Haha but yeah, they're kids. At their age, I was still trying to walk through drive-thru's drunk and 'hey dude' it at the local 7-11... it's funny what 6-7 years will do for you.
At their age, I was still trying to walk through drive-thru's drunk and 'hey dude' it at the local 7-11... it's funny what 6-7 years will do for you.
I still do that now at age 27. Well, only sometimes.
I thought they existed for my amusement.
When I transitioned from undergrad to grad student in Ann Arbor... whole lot of things changed at that time, including the realization at the first football game that year that I was older than every player on the roster... weird feeling.... didn't change the fact I cussed my throat sore at the hockey game a few weeks later (in fact, I think being a grad student at the hockey games somehow gives you more gravitas in leading the chants)
I used to get so pissed off at a player, the team, etc. You know the type - asshole. Embarrassment. Jerk...
Then I started to remember that these are just 17 to 22 year old kids trying their best, and I became a fan again.
Still get frustrated, but I am much calmer knowing that they're JUST KIDS.
Yeah - I get it.
ps - Congrats to your son on getting into Virginia Tech and good luck to him. Give him a hearty "Go Blue" from your friends at MGoBlog!!!
...he grew up a Michigan diehard and has been with me to many games. When you live in Virginia, you have to take advantage of the great state schools. His sister is at UVA so we have our own family feud going.
I'll make sure I slip one or two of his Michigan sweatshirts and tees in with all of his new maroon and orange gear when we drop him off in a month and a half.
It's pretty crazy coming to terms with that fact. This last semester I found out that one of my students was a low-level recruit and it was really an eye-opener. He's such a....kid.
I dunno. College actually sort of made me think the opposite. Oh, sure, looking back on college I can see in how many ways I was pretty immature about things, but I also remember reading this same kind of "they're-just-kids" thing back then and not agreeing. Granted, the only college sports I ever played were of the intramural variety and not in front of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. But I remember thinking that your average 19- or 20-year-old, especially the football type, isn't likely to ever admit he needs or wants to be sheltered from the pressure. I mean, they don't exactly seem to be scarred for life.
I do draw certain lines: I loved heckling as much as any college student, but now as someone who's theoretically and technically a grown-up it's probably not appropriate for me to heckle a college kid. But I don't feel a conscience pang for sometimes not cutting them enough slack on the Internetz because of their age.
Besides, in so many other arenas, whenever it's convenient it's argued that the players are big boys and grown-ups: for example, the playoff argument, even though losing a playoff game is typically when they show the most emotion.
It's still hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that a lot of these guys were born in the 1990s.
iknorite?
I don't mind so much that the football players were born in the 1990s.
But seeing the birth dates of some of the Playboy centerfolds makes me cringe. Yikes.
I just can't believe that Tate and Shoelace had to put an entire Athletic Department on their shoulders last September as freshman. Looking back on my college career there is no way that I would have been prepared for that at 18. I was not even close to mature enough at that time. When I joined the golf team, it was still 3 years before I could drink an adult beverage legally. To think that someone that age was given the responsibility to lead 85 other guys is overwhelming to imagine. Especially here. This is the University of Michigan Football program - the team with the most wins and tradition in history. We have raised our own bar here. The expectations are that much higher. I know both players had seniors and leaders in other positions to look to for guidance, but to think about the burden they faced really puts a lot in perspective. I am a competitor now and I was a competitor then, and I am sure both would say they enjoyed the challenge of leading the team last year but the pressure must have been just excruciating. Although in some ways I doubt whether athletes can fully comprehend or be aware of how important their role is to a team, a university and a fan base at that age. It is difficult to step away from the present in order to comprehend its significance.
I'm about to begin my junior year of college, and it's been hitting me since about last year. I realized that Tate and Denard were the year below me (although they're both older than I am), and I was looking at them in the exact same way that I had been looking at Michigan football players my whole life-people who exist only on Saturday from 12-3PM, people who are far more experienced than me, people who are hardly even people, really: they were always a different species. I realized that, not only were Tate and Denard that young, but Woodson and Brady and Braylon and Henne had all been that young around the time I started paying attention to them. It's been a startling year-and-a-half-long revelation.
Additionally, last year, when Denard threw the last INT against Iowa, he crumpled into some OL's (Moosman's?) arms. He didn't look just sad; he looked absolutely in anguish, like he was going to burst out crying on the field and was doing everything he could to keep it in.
Finally, I think one time on WLA or Genuinely Sarcastic or something it was posted that Stevie Brown was shaking in an interview on Rivals cause he was so nervous to be on camera. I have never felt like a more reprehensible person. I know there's the argument that, you know, athletes want the attention and don't want to be sheltered and all that. But since then, it's been really difficult for me to get too mad at a player. I can still be disappointed by the results of games, but it's difficult for me to think, "Damn it, Denard!" or anything in that vein.
As soon as I graduated from UM, it gave me an entirely new perspective. The first point in my life as a fan where every kid I'm watching play is younger than me. It hit me as a student as the stars on the gridiron were sitting next to me in class, but once I graduated... 18 year olds, 20 year olds start looking quite young. That's all these guys are.
It's a pretty healthy perspective to have, honestly.
...this is the kid who's the "absolute mountain": DT Nick Acree. 6'5", 295+.
I could take him. . . . in an MS paint challenge.
super neato bro!
off topic, but can someone tell me how i can post a new diary thing or board thing? I have a good topic to discuss, and i want to see wht other peoples' opinions are...thanx.
You are new, and I want to be nice; so, I don't mind explaining things to you, especially because I know others won't:
In order to post new topics, a user needs to have a certain number of points. If I'm not mistaken (and the specific answer is most certainly provided in the link above that a different user provided you when you asked "What are these points about anyway?"), then the number needed is something like 20. Currently, you have roughly -400 points. Needless to say, you cannot post new topics. It probably doesn't seem fair or nice from your perspective, but this is the imperfect-but-still-pretty-darned-fair-and-more-reasonable-than-unreasonable system that the site creator, Brian, preemptively developed to help keep things civil in Mgoboardland.
I don't think you are a troll. Instead, I think you are Michigan fan that doesn't always play nicely on the internet and has a bad habit of making awful first impressions (and, yes users, that's different than a troll--still not good, still not a troll). Consequently, you won't ever be able to post here as Mr. Understood unless, of course, you make a drastic change in posting style and give a concerted effort toward providing in your posts information, analysis, and/or wit that the other users couldn't have easily provided themselves--or at all.
Welcome to Mgoboard. If you can change, then I (we?) will be happy to have you, but, damn man, you have to think before you type, be nice, be helpful, and use good grammar. These are the idiosyncratic ways by which the Mgoboard has come to label itself a success. Individuality of the disliked kinds isn't permitted.
It is weird. They are kids and in reality, most will be for awhile even after they graduate. It's one of the many reasons I love college sports.
Zoltan Mesko is 23, but seems far more mature than his age while Morgan Trent is 24. When Morgan opened his mouth earlier regarding RR, I dismissed it as the typical foot-in-mouth syndrome of someone his age.
However, I now expect Lebron James to have all of this free agent stuff figured out and to have all of his professional ducks in a row. King James is only 25! ans so is Reggie Bush. They seem like veterans at this point, and they are.
Braylon and Avant are 27.
Woodson is only 33 and A-Rod is 34, as is Jay Feely. Biakabatuka is 36. Shaq is 38.
Ken Griffey Jr. retired at 40. Desmond is 40 as well, while Rich Rod is only 45 and Michael Jordan is 47.
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I'm not sure what any of this means, but perhaps it just means that an aging sports fans' perspective seems to always change. As a parent with a college age kid of your own, I would assume your perspective would start to be a little surreal.
Since I'm only a junior in hs, the michigan athletes still have a few years on me, but not for long. Now I'm beginning to realize how ridiculous it is when people criticize these young guys. I
As a soon-to-be college freshman, I can say that I would be scared shitless of playing college football. I can't imagine what it'd be like to start in front of 110,000 fans like Tate did.
And beat Notre Dame rolling out and throwing a clutch pass in the last 11 seconds ...
- Tate Forcier
when I read about an 18 year-old "man" and I think "18 is not a man! Hell 22 is not a man! That is still a kid, son."
IM 23!!!
Oh wait, I fit your age brackets... OK then