Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Glossary of Abbreviations and Terms
- PART ONE COMMERCIAL SPORTS AS A UNIVERSITY FUNCTION
- 1 Strange Bedfellows
- 2 Priorities
- 3 The Bigness of “Big Time”
- PART TWO THE USES OF BIG-TIME COLLEGE SPORTS
- PART THREE RECKONING
- Appendix
- Notes
- References
- Index
3 - The Bigness of “Big Time”
from PART ONE - COMMERCIAL SPORTS AS A UNIVERSITY FUNCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Glossary of Abbreviations and Terms
- PART ONE COMMERCIAL SPORTS AS A UNIVERSITY FUNCTION
- 1 Strange Bedfellows
- 2 Priorities
- 3 The Bigness of “Big Time”
- PART TWO THE USES OF BIG-TIME COLLEGE SPORTS
- PART THREE RECKONING
- Appendix
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The public school district in Clarke County, Georgia, the county containing the University of Georgia, scheduled an unusual holiday in the fall of 2008. It designated Friday, October 31, as an official school holiday. The reason for this holiday was not Halloween, but rather the Georgia–Florida football game, which was scheduled to be played that year on November 1 in Jacksonville, Florida. This annual contest, which has been known for years as “the world's largest outdoor cocktail party,” is played every year in 76,877-seat Jacksonville Municipal Stadium, and many Georgia fans make the 700-mile round trip to attend the game. One year earlier, on the Friday before the 2007 Georgia–Florida game, so many of the district's teachers had called in sick that school officials could not find enough substitutes to fill in. Rather than face the prospect of unstaffed classrooms again, the school district decided in 2008 simply to designate that Friday a school holiday. So did the school districts in neighboring Madison and Oglethorpe Counties.
From Athens to South Bend and from Pasadena to Charlottesville, football Saturdays provide a quintessential demonstration of the reach of big-time college sports. These events attract attention so intense, both local and regional, that weekend activities are planned around them and they become as common a subject of everyday conversation as the weather or the day's top news story. Yet the thousands of spectators attending one of these games represent only a part of the influence of these events.
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- Big-Time Sports in American Universities , pp. 43 - 66Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011