The Ohio State University continues to do dumb things

It was just announced that Senior Day for the Ohio State Buckeyes will be on the season opener. Traditionally and barring catastrophic incident, across all sports, 'Senior Day' is when senior athletes and their family/parents gather on the field or court at the end of the season to celebrate their last home game together.  It's one of those traditions you check each year, but a tradition that means something.  That 'last hurrah before we go our separate ways.' It's something I've seen done in every town and city and state I've lived in. 

Until now.  There is nothing about having that on the first home game of the season that means anything.  Because the players will return time and again for the rest of the year.  I mean, all it is now is saying 'Hi, we're the seniors this year, see you next week.'  If the argument is that it was only some old tradition we had to do, at least it meant something.  Now it's a tradition we have to do that means nothing.  There is no word on whether this is now permanent or not.  But we know how these things usually go.  

Despite the reasons given, virtually nobody believes that the driving force behind this isn't contracts with broadcast corporations and sponsors for the televised final home game - which happens to be against Michigan. College athletics is in a flux right now, and few sports have been hit harder by the 'make the students professional millionaires' (NIL: or Name, Image and Likeness) decision than college football. The sport has been flopping about like a goldfish on the living room carpet ever since they began trying to wrap up the season without the old Bowl series.  The 'money for important athletes' rule has merely torpedoed an already listing ship.

Now this.  An obligatory tradition that will still play out for no reason now except being an obligatory tradition, shorn of what heart and soul it possessed, most likely for the money.  It makes me think of the Mirror Lake debacle, which I mentioned here.  Long and short, in the 90s a 'tradition' emerged in which hopped up, drugged and drunk morons gathered to jump into the shallow waters of Mirror Lake.  For ages, that location was voted one of the most beautiful locations on any college campus in America. Nonetheless, that new trend kept up until the inevitable, when someone dove in and snapped his neck and died.  So naturally, instead of dropping the hammer on the practice, the OSU leadership gutted the entire location, turning it into a 'natural beauty area.'  Another way of saying 'just a pond that, half the year, looks like a fetid swamp instead.'  

Another fumble of worth I can think of was when OSU announced it would no longer give a shout  out during graduation to the students graduating with honors.  We wouldn't want those students who didn't achieve the highest grades to feel bad after all.  And the last thing we want to do is celebrate greatness or success.  

For me, things like this symbolize the dearth of worthwhile leadership in our nation as much as anything.  A leadership that seems capable of doing not much more than strip away everything meaningful and leave an empty husk of an institutional stamp in the wake. Sometimes I think all of our problems today are because of nothing more than the fact that our modern leaders suck. They're no good.  They're Barney Fife without the virtues.  It might be as simple as that.