Everybody loves a good story, and the University of South Florida’s football season is almost too good, or too bad, depending on who you ask.  On one side, it’s the most Cinderella of Cinderella stories: a football team that’s barely over a decade old, never before ranked, is now #2 in the nation.  Granted, they’re that high because so many other teams (LSU, USC, et al.) have faltered, but still, they’re there. 

On the other side – and one you won’t hear as much about – the success of South Florida is nothing more than an eventuality in an atmosphere where college football is big business (even though it makes more money for ESPN than the colleges themselves), where university presidents gamble that great teams will bring good students (only the very best teams cause an increase in applications, and that’s only temporary), where all this gambling (literal and figurative) on bigtime sports leads to quantitative and qualitative destruction of the larger purposes of higher education. 

For the Cinderella version of the story, see this.  For the Wicked Witch version, see this.