Next Up: Bowl Season

We’re back again after a weekend break for Christmas, mostly with an eye to the year-end flood of commemorations, top pics and year’s bests. With the glut of college bowl games just around the corner, this caught our eye, but probably not in the same way the editors intended.

The new ESPN cover cites sexual abuse as the sports “story of 2011.” But also note the NIKE’s behind the chicken wire when everything else about the kid is generic and virginal. The brand ID can be seen to implicate the overwhelming role of sponsorship and advertising money in college sports. And it’s the incredibly amount of cash that makes college sports and the people that profit by it seemingly more powerful than God. Given that’s the game, the image of kids in the pen has a much wider significance.

But then, strictly talking about sexual abuse, remember the tell-tale line… It’s not about sex, it’s about power.

Via Coverjunkie