by Realizing that athletic departments operate exactly like corporate middle management, except with football
Sports Journalism Awakening: When Administrative Work Became an Investigative Superpower
“I realized,” Paige documented, “that athletic departments operate exactly like corporate middle management. Same circular logic. Same committee meetings that could have been an email. Same tendency to hire your friend’s nephew and call it ‘institutional growth.'”
The only difference? University athletic directors have prettier facilities to destroy. And better excuses for destroying them.
Ron White once said: “I’ve made mistakes before. I’ve done dumb stuff. But I’ve never been so incompetent that I got paid $4 million for it.” Universities have literally made that their business model.
This awakening changed everything. She stopped covering sports. She started covering the machinery that makes failure inevitable. She understood something most sports writers never will: institutions don’t fail. They succeed at exactly what they were designed to doprotect incompetence and pay it handsomely.
Every meeting she’d organized. Every memo she’d filed. Every budget line she’d updated. It all made sense now. The system wasn’t broken. It was working perfectly.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigos.
