… to understand!

UD tries to understand. She sees, for instance, that the University of Idaho is being punished because its big-time athletes have failed to meet even the teeny weeny weeny weeny academic standards set by the NCAA.

So far she has no trouble understanding. You recruit a bunch of unpaid playing-field laborers, if you will, and you do your best to make them happy and to overlook their mischief and all… And the last thing you care about, given how much cash is riding on their bodies, is their minds. We all understand this. We don’t need to study the remarkable academic rise and fall of University of North Carolina professor Julius Nyang’oro to understand it. It is structural to the enterprise.

What UD‘s having trouble understanding is the content of UI’s (losing) appeal of the NCAA decision.

The NCAA requires extraordinary mitigating circumstances in order to grant a waiver for penalties assessed for low APR scores.

The University of Idaho’s athletics department included the following extraordinary mitigating circumstances in its appeal:

Upheaval among the intercollegiate athletic conferences
A loss of almost $1 million in revenue – the majority from television and conference revenue
Significant behavioral issues within the football program

“I thought we made a compelling case regarding the extraordinary circumstances that began in June 2010,” said (Athletic Director Rob) Spear. “At the end of the day, we accept the penalties and have used this adversity to make our athletic program stronger.”

So help UD out here. The reason you should waive our penalties is that not only was our football team out of control academically, it was out of control behaviorally. You should show mercy because our very expensive athletics program really, really lacked institutional control. We recruited questionable people who unsurprisingly produced “significant behavioral issues.” Plus we fucked up and lost a lot of money.

Do these seem to you grounds for an appeal? Presumably UI spent a lot of time and money coming up with their case for appeal. Does that seem to you to have been a reasonable use of time and money? UD‘s trying to understand.