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 I get why the folks in East Lansing are a trifle whiny these days. No one likes being laughed at.

That's what happened at the Big Ten Tournament this week, when the MSU Spartans Presented By Rocket Mortgage (their new official name) took a raft of stuff about their new official name. People all over America have been hooting at this for a couple of days now, ever since MSU announced its new corporate deal with Rocket Mortgage and it was announced that, henceforth, Michigan State would be referred to as "MSU Spartans Presented By Rocket Mortgage" at all game in the Breslin Center.

Folks wondered when Tom Izzo and the lads would start dolling themselves up with sponsor patches like NASCAR drivers (OK, so I wondered that). Or, like NASCAR drivers, would say stuff in the postgame like "We'd like to thank all our sponsors for the wood chipping we laid on those poor Golden Gophers today," or "The MSU Spartans Presented By Rocket Mortgage were a Rocket ship today."

And then Izzo would wink and say, "Rocket ship! See what I did there?"

Sparty got so butt-hurt about this, the school put out a defensive release that said, hey, schools do deals like this all the time. Everyone has corporate sponsors now, so what's the big deal?

To which the Blob responds: Well, at least they're finally admitting it.

What I mean by that is college athletics are no different than any other business venture, no matter what fiction their poo-bahs try to sell about edukashun and the like. And they haven't been for a long time.

Corporate sponsorship is nothing new. Schools have been making their athletes shootin', reboundin', tacklin' and go-route runnin' ads for their apparel deals for decades now. Assembly Hall in Bloomington is now Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, and college arenas and stadiums everywhere are plastered with corporate signage.

And who could forget Bob Knight in his Texas Tech days, logo-ed up like Jimmie Johnson for O'Reilly Auto Parts?

Hardly much of a leap from there to MSU Spartans Presented By Rocket Mortgage.

The heinous thing about all this, of course, is the Michigan States cut these corporate deals on the backs of their "student-athletes" (i.e., "unpaid labor.") In exchange for some book-learnin' and state-of-the-art facilities, the "student-athlete"/unpaid labor gets zero say in this. If  Happy Clown Party Supplies dumps a truckload of cash on Whatsamatta U., the unpaid labor will go out there dressed like clowns if Happy Clown decides that's the tradeoff.

And the school will go along with it because, you know, dollars.

"Oh, come on, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "That could never happen."

Maybe not. But come talk to me when Sparty gets replaced as the Michigan State mascot by Zoom the Rocket.