… hyper-disgusting big-time university sports… I’ll live-blog it...

Let’s see. Starts with an incident in the life of the way-bogus Knight Commission, when ‘sneaker pimp’ Sonny Vaccaro told all the university presidents in attendance that if he was a pimp, they were whores. “[T]here’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it.”

(Later in the article, a coach calls coaches “whoremasters.”)

UD has attended quite a few Knight Commission meetings and has been astounded at its self-regarding nothingness. Vaccaro is entirely correct.

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Moves on to an interview with a former president of schlock jock University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who confirms the sluttishness. “If television wants to broadcast football from here on a Thursday night,” he said, “we shut down the university at 3 o’clock to accommodate the crowds.”

It’s a mark of pride to cancel swathes of classes for the big game. A University of Utah vice-president exults that no classes is “a recognition of the reality that the stadium is now filling for every game.”

Branch now notes that concepts like student-athlete (“[S]uch is the term’s rhetorical power that it is increasingly used as a sort of reflexive mantra against charges of rabid hypocrisy.”) and amateurism are “cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

It is pretty amazing… I mean, it’s not amazing that the NCAA is cynical (“From the summary tax forms required of nonprofits, [one investigator] found out that the NCAA had spent nearly $1 million chartering private jets in 2006. “What kind of nonprofit organization leases private jets?,” [he] asks. It’s hard to determine from tax returns what money goes where, but it looks as if the NCAA spent less than 1 percent of its budget on enforcement that year.”) and that the Knight Commission is cynical. But it is kind of striking that so many universities are so cynical. After all, they’re educational institutions. Why do they only care about money?

Nothing prods students to think independently about amateurism—because the universities themselves have too much invested in its preservation. Stifling thought, the universities, in league with the NCAA, have failed their own primary mission by providing an empty, cynical education on college sports.

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Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.

(At one point, “Cam Newton compliantly wore at least 15 corporate logos—one on his jersey, four on his helmet visor, one on each wristband, one on his pants, six on his shoes, and one on the headband he wears under his helmet—as part of Auburn’s $10.6 million deal with Under Armour.”)

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Branch says we should pay these athletes.