Season 3 of Last Chance U.

Worth watching if you are the type that watches auto racing for the crashes.


The head coach is an aggregator, a snake oil salesman, but far from a molder of men.  A huckster, a hipster, with little in the way of the traits that you like to see developed in  your own kids.  Zero humility, tries to pass for wisdom what is his unique version of, in his own mind, street smarts.  Profane, ill-mannered, uncouth.  Makes for good TV, but not for a good life.


Talk about college players having zero leverage.  You end up at a football bordello like Independence because you have nowhere else to go.  You are desperate to get to the FCS or FBS, you had character or academic lapses or both, and you as a poor kid make your deal with one of many devils -- the dictators/predators who run these banana republic fiefdoms for their own personal glory.  The head coaches anesthetize themselves by keeping kids eligible so that they can go on to play at four-year schools.  Whether the kids belong in college is open to debate; the "system," as it were is at best paternalistic and at worst exploitative and racist -- using the kids without compensating them meaningfully.   These kids can be like cans that get kicked down the road -- all with a view of providing players to the big-time schools.  What would be more interesting is to see what happens to them within five years.  Do they get their degrees?  Are their degrees helping them make a good living?  Or does the system chew them up and spit them out.


The head coach tries to come across as the hero, albeit someone who runs his program on his own terms.  The junior college president at best is naïve and at worst has prostituted his mission in order to gain some fame for his school that has eluded his other programs.  The question is why and at what cost? 


It is interesting watching.  I feel for each and every one of these kids.  They are young, some are desperate, some spoiled, some frustrated, some in need for honest-to-God therapy for what they have gone through in life.  But they are kids, mostly poor kids.


They deserve better than this wacky system provides them.