Blue Mountain State

One of the largest and growing networks of the world is Netflix. Netflix is the ultimate movie collection that one can access from just about anywhere using technology. And since technology is so easily accessed today that means all of the movies and shows one could want are on hand ready to watch. Any movie or show of many different genres are available to watch and soak in the message each movie or show is trying to relay to the viewer.  The popular Netflix series Blue Mountain State displays an exaggerated  stereotype of the "jock" lifestyle of college football players; none the less, some of the stereotypes prove to be true from real life examples.

The "jock" stereotype can bring a lot of negativity towards male athletes, especially football players. The first thing that people say is that a football player is all strength and no brains. The show Blue Mountain State or BMS gives many of it's characters this identity of a typical dumb jock. Thad Castle, the teams captain and linebacker, takes this stereotype and blast it out to the world through his actions on the show. To best describe Thad one could say he is an overly muscled young man with the brain of an eight year old boy. Everything about his personality screams immaturity. The lacking of knowledge has nothing to do what sport you play, so that idea that all football players are at the shorter end when it comes to intelligence is unfair. In my own personal experiences some of the smartest people I've come across were those in a sport like football. A lot of people believe that regardless of grades that a player can get by with skill. In some cases that may be true but normally in order to play football or any college sport one must be taking care of business in a classroom.  

Another stereotype that haunts athletes is the excessive partying and drug use they are held to. College is definitely a place where drugs and alcohol are easily found and heavily used. As athletes, it is against the rules as well as illegal to use drugs. The show goes on to display this stereotype as long as another one that I will talk about later in the paragraph. One of the many examples from the show BMS is the episode where the team gets drug tested. In the episode the team is forced to stop using drugs due to the test they will have to take for the NCAA. The entire team struggled with drug use and continued to use drugs up until the day of the test. The day of the test came and the team was clearly not clean; none the less, the team got away with it due to their status as a winning football team. This would be the second stereo type that I had mentioned earlier in the paragraph. The claim that football players get away with everything and never seem get in trouble as a normal student would. To argue these two stereotypes I could speak from experience that no matter what status one carries as an athlete, he or she is not excluded from the punishments of breaking a drug policy.

The next stereotype displayed by the BMS show is not only put on football players but placed on our generation as a whole. Our generation can be directly related to the "hook up" culture. "Hook up" culture meaning those in our generation are more likely to have sexual intercourse amongst each other with out marriage as done in early generations. The show depicts many examples where the characters prove to be true members of the hook up generation. There is not one episode in the BMS series where some type of sexual action was performed or hinted heavily by a character waking up in a bed with a female companion. One of the characters, Alex Murrain, seems to be the poster boy for our culture of hooking up. Alex plays the role of the back up quarterback for half of the series and it never fails for him to find a girl to hook up with, and in a few occasions it was more than one girl. Although the show seems to blow the stereotype out of proportion, it is not to far from today's reality. I have attended Merrimack college for just this semester alone and I have seen many real life examples of what BMS tries to explain through out the series.

To conclude and wrap up the claim that Blue Mountain State shows an exaggerated  stereotype of the "jock" lifestyle of college football players and that some of it may be true I will retouch on each example. From the statement that football players are all muscles and no brain, which we know may be true in a few cases but for the most part is not. To the drug use and partying, which is partially true but not to the extent in which the show displays. Lastly the stereotype and label that our generation has rightfully earned and that is the claim that we are apart of the "hook up" generation.