David McRaney  |  Journalist

Football maintains healthy testosterone levels

II think I recently read that a group of scientists in Western Europe discovered that football, especially high school and college football, is just a game and should not be taken seriously.

Wait a second, I have that mixed up. It says right here that they recently discovered that men experience a 20 percent drop in testosterone when their team loses. So there you go.

But, that does not change a harsh reality that more people should turn around and face. Football is a game, you know, like checkers; and no one should care more about it than they do about "Wheel of Fortune" or Hopscotch.

Of course, like any other human endeavor, there are people who get wrapped up in football and take it to clearly absurd extremes. There are people who have committed suicide after losing their high level Dungeons and Dragons character, and there are people who sell their house to travel the country competing in dog agility contests. So, it is no surprise that there are people who strip to their underwear and paint themselves before the big match up on the gridiron.

But, what is surprising to me is that the USM athletics department thought that it was a good idea to spend $75,000 sending their football players to Memphis after Hurricane Katrina, most of that going to a hefty bill at the Hilton. I don't know about you, but while USM sent its football players to Memphis to eat well and have hot showers, I was cleaning up debris in Biloxi with my family because the water had destroyed everything they had. At some point during that ordeal, I played a game of Trivial Pursuit while the daylight allowed.

It's oddly comforting to know that while I moved my little plastic game piece around the wagon wheel of color coded questions, the USM football team was running around in their own trivial diversion and throwing a ball on my dime.

But hey, they had to have a place to practice, right? I mean, if you are going to make sure that anyone on campus gets food, water and electricity you have to have your priorities straight. People in the dorms who are studying to be engineers and scientists don't fill up stadiums do they?

The annual budget for the athletics department is $15.2 million. $4 million of that goes to the football team. Officials recently announced that there will have to be cutbacks and fundraising efforts if that trip to Memphis is going to be paid for. About 20 to 25 percent of the income of the athletics department comes from student fees. Since the Gulf Coast campus was obliterated, the money might not just come rolling in.

That's too bad. Because, although I could not care less about USM football, I do not want anyone to experience any dangerous drops in testosterone. And, in the end, it is probably worth a $40,000 hotel bill to keep some frat guy's sperm count up.

Originally published in The Student Printz on October 6, 2005