Ticked Off

Last night Virginia Tech's Hokies played North Carolina's Tar Heels. Thursday kickoffs at Tech and other schools tick off various professors and perhaps even a few young scholars.

Academics often come to a halt early on game days. Although Tech does not formally cancel afternoon or evening classes for Thursday night football games, yesterday's Washington Post reported that professors say they feel implicit pressure to shut their classrooms. Fans covet parking spaces, you see; students do not mind free passes to attend tailgate parties, we suspect.

This happens at almost every school playing big-time football (and at some small-timers). The situation seems more amusing than outrageous. It instructs. When broadcast revenue beckons, who can resist? We remain antediluvian, naturally, in believing that college football was created for Saturday afternoons (except for Baton Rouge where it was created for LSU's Saturday nights), yet we watched -- and planned to surf between Blacksburg and the Bronx for the World Series. The tube at our neighborhood shebeen was not tuned in to the History Channel.