You stay classy, FAU.

… Miami.

… like New Mexico, is that you’ve got to read shit like this.

Most people just lie there and read it and try not to feel so defiled by its stupid lies that they want to jump off a cliff (there are amazing cliffs in New Mexico). Others can’t help taking the words in and responding to them, as these two New Mexico State University students did.

Although their effort to introduce reason, decency and (you gotta be kidding) intellect to the state – and, more specifically, to the chair of the NMSU board of regents – is the very definition of noble futility, along the lines of, say, the Warsaw Uprising, they are to be admired for the effort. Attention, as they say, must be paid.

[The chair's letter] is a strangely defensive account of the glories of our sports program and why it deserves the funding it currently receives, including a controversial $4.1 million annual transfer out of the academic fund.

The Cheney letter may have largely been prompted by the “firestorm” created when then-presidential candidate Garrey Carruthers stated that dropping football to a lower division or even eliminating it entirely were options on the table.

Carruthers nearly immediately retracted that statement, but Cheney seems to still feel the need to rally against the critics. “Like it or not,” the chairman of the board tells us, “we must live in the reality that is collegiate sports today.” We have to keep doing what we’re doing, because everyone else is doing it. We have to pay our football coach more than the entire philosophy department combined, because that’s just the reality of the market…

… [It is impossible to] justify the robbing of academic funds to cover the athletic program’s debts at a time when professorships are being reduced and money for research and public service continues to decrease. The Aggie-pride factor doesn’t take away from the fact that many student-athletes leave NMSU with a subpar education and a host of physical and financial problems. Wins don’t justify the overblown importance of big-time sports on college campuses. Instead of blindly going along with the “reality that is collegiate sports today” — the reality of the NCAA’s perverted money-making machine, of rape cover-ups, of steroid abuse — why don’t we put our foot down, be different, recognize that they’re just games and act accordingly? Why not do groundbreaking work to redefine the role of collegiate athletics rather than just trying to keep up with the big schools?

Bravo. You lose.

… (the big three here are Hawaii, Alaska, and Nevada) has a farcical public university system.

HEADLINE #1:

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII AT MANOA
ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT DEBT
EXPECTED TO REACH $13M

HEADLINE #2:

BUILDING ENROLLMENT, FOOTBALL TEAM,
PART OF PLAN FOR NEW UNIVERSITY OF
HAWAII WEST OAHU CHANCELLOR

And what a chancellor!

[With Rockne] Freitas’ background as a [football] star at Oregon State University and his many years in the NFL, as well as being instrumental in bumping up UH football to the Mountain West Conference, anything is possible.

… the University of Colorado. They’ve had years of absolutely fascinating violence, rape, alcohol, and spending scandals, and it just keeps coming! One of their players went out the other night and drank, by his estimation, “six glasses of wine, 10 beers and six shots of various other alcohols,” and got into a big ol’ fight with some random guy on the street and practically killed him. Haha! More great shit for the team; plus for the … … … university? I think there’s a university somewhere in these stories…!

UD thinks all the people who want to end the alcohol ban at CU’s Folsom Field should use this guy in their ads. LOL.

… Mike Rice.

If you want to be among the top twenty most highly compensated public university presidents in the United States, it helps to preside over spectacular crimes. Penn State’s Graham Spanier, “awaiting trial on criminal charges of perjury, obstruction, endangering the welfare of children, failure to properly report suspected child abuse and conspiracy,” took the number one spot for 2011-2012; coming in at #11 was Florida A&M’s James Ammons, who had the beating to death of one of his marching band members at the hands of other members of the band on his watch. Even if your sports factory doesn’t manage to produce child rape or manslaughter, the simple expedience of being an eager slave of your coaches may do the trick: Auburn’s president made the list, as did Gordon Gee of Ohio State.

… as Neil Young would say.

Helpless schools like the University of Charleston will never be anything but sports factories and arrest generators. They’ll take anyone tall for their basketball teams, including people with arrest records for very serious crimes. When their players team up and get arrested together, the schools haul out their presidents to say we feel helpless.

Someone needs to step in and help America’s sports factories/arrest generators. Alone, they are helpless.

****************

UPDATE: And now: Three from each team!

This is the second mass arrest of University of Charleston athletes in the last few weeks.

Three University of Charleston football players have just been kicked off the team for drug dealing. You’ve got to acknowledge the remarkable degree of teamwork in both Charleston sports – three-man strategy in each case.

She lives for stuff like this.

************************

We always lose lose lose

but we take solace in our booze.

Free market, baby. When students don’t give a shit about your professional football team located on a university campus, they will buy and sell and buy and sell their student tickets to make a buck.

You taught them how the game’s played, with your trillionaire coach and athletes/pretend students and all. Bit late in the day to complain that you get to make a fortune but your players and the student fans get nothing but massive student fees to pay for your fortune.

Sure, the students will show up for the big games. They want to get drunk and excited and maybe win something. But they don’t give a shit about the team, and they’re certainly not showing up for blow-off games. Why should they? What’s your problem?

Or, uh, Drew. My Drew. Lazy, dim, and… er… let’s say not entirely straightforward. But can he ever coach swimmers! The taxpayers of Indiana can’t wait to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to my Drew!

God shed his grace on thee.
And crown thy coach
Without reproach
From sea to shining sea.

******************

(UD thanks Jon.)

Quilty’s borrowing scheme didn’t work out at all well in Lolita (Humbert killed him anyway). Nor, more recently, did University of Texas baseball player Cameron Cox’s. He borrowed a teammate’s pee for a urine test – knowing that his own, I guess, would be drug-laced – and of course the other player was also drugging himself, so they both got in trouble.

… the worst university in America. Go ahead and type UNIVERSITY GEORGIA in my search engine. You’ll get a few hits for other Georgia universities, but mainly you’ll get one unbelievable UGA scandal after another. The board of trustees tried to take over the student newspaper because they haven’t heard about press freedom. A professor shtupped one of his students in front of other students. Sports teams are endlessly full of gun-toting miscreants. After tailgating, the campus is literally a pile of shit. The school has outrageous rates of student alcoholism.

The school is of course on this year’s top-ten party school list; it always makes the list, and often tops it.

The latest is that Jim Donnan, UGA’s amazingly compensated football coach (he recently left), is under federal indictment as a Ponzi schemer. Most of his victims seem to have been his fellow sports morons.

UGA. As ever, a class act.

The killer was seventeen years old.