Marcus Allen Is Smoking Something If He Thinks College Kids Hitting The Bong Is Like The Debt Crisis

Here we have a couple intelligent men discussing marijuana during Fox's college football halftime show. Marcus Allen, hall of fame running back, and this other guy are about to have a serious chat about athletes and drugs. Then we hear about the elephant in the living room—as though college kids doing drugs is something old cranks have not been talking about ad nauseam—then Marcus Allen, hall of very good analogizer, said college kids smoking weed, the elephant in the living room, is like the debt crisis. Then that "epidemic" word gets thrown around.

This is all because a former Michigan player came forward and said "several" members of the team smoked pot "hours" before their humiliating loss to Appalachian State. And, yeah, that's probably not a smart thing to do. I can't imagine believing a quarterback when he says "I'm just more creative when I do it, y'know? I see the passes that I'd never see without it and it's just...it's really fulfilling."

If we accept that "several" players smoked pot "hours" before the game, we are also going to accept that such a scenario is the exception in college athletics because it just doesn't make any sense. Yet here we are watching Marcus Allen and this other guy talk about an epidemic in college sports that is not related to exploiting minors for financial gain. No, let's talk about how five years after Michigan was thoroughly embarrassed, some guy on the team says they wanted to see if they could beat them stoned. And let's treat that as a real story.

Smoking pot is not an epidemic. Smoking pot before a college football game—that you are playing in—is definitely not an epidemic. The Plague was an epidemic. AIDS is an epidemic. The sports reporting community's obsession with drugs is a fucking epidemic. Especially in college. It's a strain of paternalism that would make Kipling's ears ring and it sneaks through the door because "crime" can be passed off as "legitimate news." We're talking about serious issues now, not just athletics.

That's the state of sports consumption we are in right now. But, what any of this has to do with the debt crisis other than that Marcus Allen says we are not talking about it when literally it is all that anyone can talk about, is beyond me.