Let me start by saying I am a Texas fan. I bleed burnt orange. If that weren’t bad enough I have passed the disease on to my son. I’ll be the first to say this is a great time to be a Horns fan. Texas currently holds the NCAA baseball championship, is hopefully headed toward a showdown with USC for a football national championship and begins the year with a second ranked basketball team. Times are good on the forty acres.

This past Saturday I had the opportunity to attend the Texas, Kansas game along with almost 90,000 other folks. As I sat in a literal sea of burnt orange I started doing a little thinking. If everyone in the stands spent 55.00, which is not hard to do, you have roughly 5 million dollars changing hands. Consider that there are at least 20 other stadiums just as big if not bigger then this one with the same numbers involved. Add to that the 50 or so smaller stadiums across the country hosting games and your suddenly talking about a lot of money.

As I sat watching a full stadium cheer on our modern day 18 to 24 year old gladiators some very discomforting thoughts came to mind. If 30 to 40 thousand children starve to death every day it is not for lack of food or money. People starve because those of us with an abundance of the world’s goods really don’t care. If the passion and commitment I saw devoted to college football teams were some how redirected to caring for the suffering and poor, what would the result be? Why is there so much energy involved in sport and so little involved in living a life devoted to others.

Let me say again I’m a big fan of college sports and I don’t claim to have answers but I’m getting more and more uncomfortable with what I see in me and others like me.