BIG TUNE from Future Joyner, Dope visuals too! If you don’t already have it pick up “Listen To Me”. Its a Free Download.

Super Producer; The Arcitype sits down with Dante Luna.

Shout out to The Whole AR CLASSIC TEAM!

Show Love! New Video From: STRICK – “High On The Inches” The next video Strick will be releasing is “smoking that Fruity” Ft. KILLER MIKE.
Be on the look out for that early February.

Admittedly, I’m not from Tuscaloosa or Lincoln or Ann Arbor or South Bend or Knoxville. I live in Los Angeles. I was raised in the Northeast. My alma mater has no football program (to speak of) and I grew up without the passion and pageantry of college football. Still, for the past twenty-five years, I have at least casually, and sometimes intently, followed the rankings, the Heisman races, the conference rivalries and even, gulp, the Bowl Championship Series. But after Monday’s developments, I think it might be time to reassess my fanhood and affix an astrix to my affirmative answer.

Last month, Atlantic Magazine featured an opus of an article written by Taylor Branch entitled, “The Shame of College Sports.” It’s a meticulously crafted, devastatingly poignant, historical summation about the rise of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The evil genius behind the NCAA, is that it is perceived (by your average sports enthusiast) to be some anonymous, nonpartisan, non-profit, governing body of college athletics, when in fact its operational functionality much more closely resembles the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. A major difference between the oil cartel and the collegiate athletic association is that OPEC suppresses laborer wages, fixes prices and manipulates markets, whereas the NCAA doesn’t need to pay for its labor at all. While I’m not comparing the commodity of fossil fuel to college sports, we might think about our oil consumption differently if every gas station had a shiny OPEC sticker slapped on its sign post. But best believe that every jersey, hat, t-shirt, sweatshirt, snuggie, video game, ticket stub, television broadcast etc. is officially licensed by the NCAA, meaning: the lion’s share of revenue (in the billions) from our discretionary spending goes directly to that for-profit governing body and the “student-athlete” who is the true engine of their entire economy is compensated only with a scholarship from the University. I’ll refrain from making this yet another dissertation of why college athletes should be paid. That much is obvious. And my focus here is not about the NCAA but much more specifically the abject cesspool that is college football.

Just when you thought the scandal season was dying down, this endless circus of sordid plots and seedy characters offers up yet another log for the fire. Early Monday morning, Pennsylvania state prosecutors arrested former-Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky for raping at least 8 underage boys over a period of 15 years. While this is not inherently a football story (Sandusky retired in 1999), legitimate scrutiny has shifted to Nittany Lion’s head coach, Joe Paterno, who has been a demi-God in college football for nearly half a century. While scandal after bloody scandal rocked the landscape — from illegal pay-for-play deals; to bribing and gifting in the form of tattoos and strippers; to the insipid booster and donor influence on recruitment; to money-hungry agents hovering on campuses like vultures; to coaches, athletic directors and school presidents that look the other way — we have celebrated JoePa for running a “clean program” since 1966. Let’s no longer be naive. There’s no such thing as a “clean program” in college football. The system itself is inherently corrupt and immoral, so let’s curb our shock when corrupt and immoral news continues to break. Sure, as far as football goes, there have been almost no allegations of “misconduct” at Penn State in Paterno’s long reign and by those standards he has run a clean program, except for one minor detail: His close friend and consigliere, the defensive coordinator at “Line Backer U” was quietly known as a pederast. Joe knew, for years, and chose to keep it within the hallowed halls of  “Camelot,” because when you live in the bubble and your very existence is defined by it, nothing is more sacred than football and protecting the pedagogues that preach it. The broader question remains: Why, as a Nation, do we cherish this sport? Why is it so sacrosanct in our culture? Why do we support it, so unwaveringly and in such astronomical numbers, with our attention, our fanaticism, our wallets?

Recently, I had the privilege of going to the Rose Bowl for a UCLA v. Cal game. Sometimes you need to insert yourself into the fray in order to fully understand the appeal of the fray. Oh, I get it. While neither team was ranked in the Top 25, and the game had no ultimate consequences beyond the painted grass stage and cheering crowds, the atmosphere was no less incredible. The expansive tailgating ranged from sophisticated to simple. There were horseshoe courts and impromptu long-tosses; beer kegs draped in Bruins blankets and an aromatic potpourri of grilled meat and hot kettle corn. For a few moments, on that sun-soaked Saturday, I exhaled, appreciating the simplicity of college football’s grand tradition. I was brought back to reality shortly after I settled in my seat. Ten miles southwest of Pasadena, just off the 110 freeway, USC v. Standford was set to kickoff at the Coliseum. It was a gorgeous late afternoon, perfect Pac-10 (or is it Pac-12, or Pac-16?) football weather. Someone in the crowd made the mistake of asserting how USC doesn’t deserve to win because they “broke the rules.” (USC was stripped of their 2005 National Championship and forfeited 20 scholarships and two years of Bowl eligibility due to “improper benefits” given to all-American runningback, Reggie Bush.) So, I took it upon myself to insert my opinion into the fray. I prefaced my argument by stating how I despised USC football almost as much as its fans. (This went over well in the UCLA student section.) Then I posed a simple question: What does, say, a current USC defensive back, who presumably committed to the program before sanctions were imposed, have to do with Reggie Bush or Pete Carroll? Nothing. He was likely in junior high when the “recruiting violations” took place. And, I’m speculating here, in his recruitment process, the University of Southern California turned on its massive, well-funded charm offensive, draping itself in pomp ‘n’ circumstance and past achievements in the hopes of luring the NFL-caliber defensive back into the Crimson ‘n Gold. Months later, said DB learns that he will not get to showcase his talents in a Bowl game nor will he get the opportunity to play for a National Championship because of the “transgressions” of former Trojans, who were ironically part of the sales pitch and perhaps one of the reasons he chose the school in the first place. Furthermore, if he wanted to transfer to a program that offers him these inalienable rights as a superlative college athlete, he’ll need to sit out a year and compromise his eligibility. (Yet if USC found a better TV deal with the Big East, they would hop conferences instantly, and with impunity, geography and academics be damned.) Meanwhile, he can take comfort knowing that Reggie Bush voluntarily returned his Heisman trophy to the Downtown Athletic Club and is now well on his way to earning nine-figures in pro contracts and endorsement deals. Pete Carroll, the man who oversaw the program during the scandal, jumped ship just as storm clouds were brewing in early 2010, using his impressive resume at USC as leverage. Despite failing twice as a professional head coach with the Patriots and Jets, Carroll was rewarded with a five-year, $33,000,000 contract from the Seattle Seahawks. Certainly speculation of Carroll’s timing entered into the discussion, but the general theme was that it was “time for a new challenge” and that he “maintained an open and honest relationship with the NCAA.” Cough, cough… Just as I put the exclamation on the point, practice squad wide-out Jerry Rice Jr. caught his first pass as a collegiate athlete and the crowd went wild. I added an anecdote about how the only reason Rice Jr. got to put on a Bruins jersey that Saturday was because of the multitude of player suspensions due to undisclosed violations of team policy. By then, no one seemed to care.

What baffles me about NCAA football is how it is NOT, by any measurement, a regional sport. It has broad-based appeal across all key demographics. College football enjoys immense popularity despite having almost an entirely irrelevant regular season, no playoff system whatsoever and completely inconsequential Bowl games, with the exception of the BCS Championship game, which is a match-up determined by a computer equation, and where the outcome may or may not crown a champion or co-champion, which may or may not be disputed by hundreds of factors that are, at that point, inconsequential and irrelevant. The whole system is a chaotic, cash-flushed catastrophe but as long as sponsors, advertisers and consumers keep flocking to it year after year, not a damn thing will change. It’s bullet proof. Not a single scandal nor a systemwide scar will soil its reputation or cause national audiences to turn away. And my guess is that this Saturday’s Penn State v. Nebraska game will get a bigger rating than usual, particularly if 84 year-old JoePa is still coaching from the press box.

If you are a student or happen to live in Tuscaloosa or Lincoln or Ann Arbor or South Bend or Knoxville, or you are an alum scattered elsewhere, I applaud you as a fan of your school. I imagine you clad yourself in officially licensed NCAA merchandise and you enjoy watching your team play. Each game has meaning to you even if the consequences have been skewed, stripped or systematically gutted. I mentioned at the outset that I am not vested in breaking your spirit. That is not entirely true. It is high time for every college football fan to mix in a little perspective with your passion. Although the NCAA is an insidious cartel, consider this: Between the two “revenue sports,” college basketball has many of the same inherent problems and scandals, but there is no comparison between each product. College basketball has a sensible ranking system, a reasonable regular season, conference tournaments that lead directly into “March Madness,” which is a month-long, nationwide, 66-team, single elimination extravaganza that is arguably the greatest spectacle in American sports. Whereas, college football begins each season with 126 schools competing and no less than 120 of them are instantly and unequivocally eliminated from that elusive BSC title game in January simply because of their conference, their schedule, their national appeal or some NCAA imposed sanction. Bowl games are a joke. More than half of every Division 1-A school can be “bowl eligible.” A 6-win season is good enough! And why not? A Bowl game, on average, becomes an eight-figure windfall, split amongst the Universities, their conferences and the NCAA. Who cares if 99% of all bowl games are meaningless? They are corporate sponsored exhibition matches at neutral sites in front of packed houses. The traditional BCS games (Rose, Sugar, Fiesta, Cotton &  Championship) are strategically rolled out in TV time slots, as to maximize the ad revenue and Nielsen ratings. This means, the ten elite teams selected for these games (by computers and NCAA committees, I might add) will have anywhere from 4-6 weeks off. For example, if LSU runs the table this season, wins the SEC outright and plays for a National championship, its last game is on November 25th. The next time we will see LSU play football is January 9, 2012.

I know it is sacrilege to speak ill of American football, but let’s put tradition aside for a moment and acknowledge the whole sport is a deeply contaminated mess and will continue to be as long as its popularity goes unchecked.