Baffoe: National Signing Day Is The Damn Worst

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) Damn it. Damn it all to hell.

National Signing Day is the culmination of the worst of us -- all of the toxicity, the fragile egos, the tribalism run amok.

Damn the pageantry. The celebration of inhumanity. The commodification of naive boy dressed in his Sunday best on a Wednesday morning while missing first period American literature to give the masses a thesis such as "Roll Tide" or "Go Blue." Damn the press conferences for a kid telling a gape-jawed mouth-breathing collective where he will spend the next year wearing the mandatory minor league yoke while still not knowing how to do his own laundry.

Damn the war room. The home base of this dystopian farmer's market. The reverse draft to create draftees. The room full of polo shirts and Chick-fil-A breakfast lowing about the teets on these bovines that they can squeeze for all their worth. They bought these cows, but will still get the milk for free.

Damn the media molestation of it. The Troy McClure infomercial that you might remember from such other videographies of our empty souls as "Ducking Out of a CTE Documentary" and "Hey, Here's Some Nationally Televised Grade Schoolers Playing Sports."

So dang #blessed to devote energy to the really important stuff.

Look at that young man. Notice the thrill of being a show pony for the national TV piranha audience to pick apart. Having tens of millions of people let him know that he just made a decision that's going to affect the rest of his life. And just mere millions of his new school's fans letting him know the pressure is on him to be worth something more to them than mere human decency.

Feel the joy emanating from this superhuman teen.

Damn Tom Brady and the luxurious, top of the line Tom Brady Appearance Experience™ brought to you by Trump™, the finest in celebrity endorsements. Ditto fanboy Derek Jeter giving his figurative gift basket of approval to this entire silly carnival.

And Ric Flair … OK, having Ric Flair show up to anything is pretty great. But get Jeets the hell outta here.

Damn the hairy-palmed pseudo-adults with trigger fingers itching to tweet a kid in high school. A hearty congratulations for validating that man on the couch, for joining the "us" to which the couchman thinks he belongs because of a logo on his sweatpants. But a bigger f#$% you to the cathartic vitrioler, the strongman chiding a child stranger for making the worst decision of the strongman's life until the next time the strongman is given restrictions on visiting his own children and threatening them not to grow up to disappoint him athletically.

And damn the other high-and-mighties scoffing at the swollen proles for not appreciating the cake they've been allowed to eat. Playing college football is an honor, you know.

The most national coverage your Illinois program has received in at least a decade was a recent feature on HBO's Real Sports for crimes against student-athletes that go beyond the crimes against humanity perpetuated by your on-field product on Saturday mornings.

This is the look of a man who owns other people, who gets to make gobs of cash making automatons do his bidding for an education in the classroom they don't actually receive and tangential one they do by way of cold, calculating sports business.

The non-televised, unceremonious stuff is fine. The star at the top of his class signing somewhere to actually pursue education along with football, the smaller or less sexy programs getting local talent, the kid who worked his butt off to sign with Directional State and be the first in his family to attend college, the high school promoting it to a few thousand social media followers. All that is cool, because none of those kids are being built up with the potential to be torn down if they disappoint on the field. None of them has been run through a swollen TV graphics budget to be perceived as some video game fictional character.

Wednesday was National Girls and Women in Sports Day, and what did we do? We saturated the sports infosphere with saliva spilled over adolescent boys put on a pedestal. They were baptized as the shiniest of new cogs in the football program's machine, glorified for their potential and then demanded -- after being given the keys to the (sometimes literal) car -- to be humble, to treat others with respect, to know that you are a teammate and not an individual.  

Damn lying to ourselves about what this is, about what got these kids on TV to these "commitments." That the decisions were tough, while adults negotiated an NCAA-under-the-table version of a signing bonus with the parents/guardians/agents in the kid's life.

Damn the ignorance of how the sausage is made while we inspect the mouths of these thoroughbreds. Jump for me, boy. Now run in place for the good TV people. Smile for the audience. Good boy.

[tweet https://twitter.com/WendellPierce/status/164908310972203008]

Tell 'em, Bunk. Damn it.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.