… John Calipari, whose latest thing is losing lots of games at Kentucky but costing that stoooopid school over 33 million if it wants to get rid of him.

Zzzz… wha’?

How bout this.

In fact, an analysis of Forms 990 for approximately 100,000 organizations filing the annual report to the IRS in 2014 published recently by the Wall Street Journal found 2,700 nonprofit officials were paid more than $1 million. Although most were administrators at hospitals and universities, there were also many football coaches and executives at endowments like the Harvard Management Company. Nonprofit organizations respond that they are trying to attract the best candidates and are merely adopting compensation practices similar to those in the private sector.

Get it? See what happened? TAKE TO THE STREETS. FLOOD YOUR REPRESENTATIVE’S OFFICE WITH EMAILS. THIS IS A SERIOUS MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE.

Do I need to spell it out for you? Do you see what’s happening here?

You want to spend your kid’s tuition money on sky-rocketing multimillion dollar salaries for coaches and on twenty million dollar a year compensation for university money managers, and here comes the IRS to tell you that these aren’t appropriate non-profit expenditures! They even have the gall to say that giving all that money to coaches and money managers diverts tax-exempt money from students and shit! Whatever that means.

So they’re putting a crushing new tax on excess non-profit compensation, which means universities are likely to pull back on these amounts and you will have to pay the managers and coaches less.

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I know. So far this is all numbers and abstractions. Here is an actual story, from the University of Kentucky, of how it will be.

“The excise tax that was levied in the new tax bill is big,” [UK athletic director Mitch] Barnhart said. “That will have an impact on every athletic department.”

A change in the tax code requires non-profit entities to pay a 21 percent excise tax on payments to its five highest-paid employees that are making more than $1 million a year.

For every dollar over the $1 million mark, UK must pay the 21 percent tax, which for UK Athletics includes the salaries of men’s basketball coach John Calipari, football coach Mark Stoops and women’s basketball coach Matthew Mitchell.

According to figures reported to the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2017, Calipari was the highest-paid person on campus that year at $7.24 million, followed by Stoops at $3.9 million and Mitchell at $1.28 million.

The university also will be paying the excise tax on the salaries of Phillip Tibbs ($1,195,600), a physician, and Michael Karpf ($1,123,179), who ran the medical center until recently, UK spokesman Jay Blanton told the Herald-Leader.

With the new salary bump and potential bonuses outlined in the new amendment to Barnhart’s contract, the UK athletics director might top the $1 million mark in the near future. His base salary will be $1,025,000 starting in 2020, per the amendment.

This year’s figures were a part of the $147.7 million dollar 2019 budget approved by the university’s Board of Trustees recently, simply noted as “escalating operating expenses.”

How will these escalating expenses be paid? The same way other expenses are.

“How we make up for it on the other side is really difficult,” Barnhart said. “We have to work at that.”

I know you can do it, guys! A grassroots campaign of outraged professors, students, and parents will take to the streets and have that punitive 21% rolled back before you can say Nick Saban.

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Again, here’s the challenge, stated simply:

Every organization that pays a salary of more than $1 million per year to any of its top five earning employees will face a stiff new 21 percent excise tax. That means any nonprofit-designated charity, college, and hospital that routinely asks us for donations, or charges expensive tuition or medical bills will have to justify paying those high salaries against a hefty new tax.

Get out there and do what has to be done: justify.

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Know your enemies.

In [a recent] email to me, [tax law professor John] Colombo wrote, “Big time college sports is already a cesspool of money, and the federal government doesn’t need to be subsidizing 50-yard-line seats or skyboxes at the University of Alabama or Notre Dame, or Michigan or anywhere else.”

Amazingly, both the House and the Senate now appear to agree with Colombo. A spokesman for Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — and a Texan — told the Austin American-Statesman that the deduction is “the epitome of a special-interest loophole” and that it was forcing taxpayers to “subsidize front-row seats and luxury boxes for wealthy boosters.”

Not all of them do, but most of them do. (Read this blog’s Click-Thru U and/or Technolust categories.) They’re positively criminal for slower learners — and in public high schools, slower learners are exactly the people the system shunts into online “credit recovery” courses, unsupervised, cheating-friendly, online make-up classes. If you flunk out of a person-to-person class, you can still get the credits you need to graduate by pretending you took the same material online. It’s a solution sweeping the nation, a scandal in every state, but UD‘s own Washington DC has had truly remarkable results with the technology: Every year, all but two public schools illegitimately graduate gobs of students.

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The romance with tacky online education continues to power forward in this country, because there’s plenty of money in it for the vendor, and because it’s absolute bliss for give-a-shit cynics. Despite all the scandals, expect it to grow.

Take heed of one thing DC schools are doing right away in response to the scandal: They’re keeping the program but calling it something other than “credit recovery.”

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But they’ll never beat the pros.

Now that Rick Pitino’s out of commission, America’s filthiest, cheatingest, richest, college coach, John Calipari, struggles with the lamestream media:

Q. What is your reaction to the whole FBI investigation of college basketball? …

JOHN CALIPARI: Well, what’s out there right now is a black eye. But here is the thing for everybody here: I don’t want to come across as uneducated or dumb. None of us know where this thing’s going. So for me to really comment much on it, I mean, I don’t know where all this is going.

Obviously, what’s happened to this point isn’t good. At this point I don’t think me commenting without knowing all the facts is the right thing to do.

Q. How do you react to Mark Emmert’s statements yesterday? Do you think the culture of college basketball is so hopelessly corrupt that something has to change?

JOHN CALIPARI: I read the statement. I kind of liked it because at a point in there he mentioned about the students. At the end of the day, this is about the student-athletes.

I would say, again, this isn’t the format for me to go full boat in this. I would say if we make decisions about these kids, what’s right for these kids, we’re going to be right. If the NBA is worried about the NBA, and if the NCAA is worried about the NCAA, if each individual institution is just worried about themselves, and the last thing we think about are these kids, we’re going to make wrong decisions.

… Q. There’s a decent chance that next week Rick Pitino won’t be the coach at Louisville. Will you miss the rivalry in coaching against him?

JOHN CALIPARI: Look, it’s unfortunate, all the stuff that’s come down. But let’s talk about my team, please. Does anyone here have a question about my team, please?

Q. One more question about the FBI.

JOHN CALIPARI: Anybody have a question?

Q. Wait a minute. This is a Media Day, not Coach Day. I am entitled to ask a question.

JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.

Q. You cannot answer it, fine.

JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.

Q. The FBI reportedly has expanded into looking at Nike. Kentucky is a Nike school. What reassurance would you give your fan base, the Big Blue Nation, if they’re anxious about what this could mean?

JOHN CALIPARI: Again, you’re asking like you know something that I don’t know.

Q. That’s all I know is right there. If a fan would put two and two together…

JOHN CALIPARI: Wait a minute. We don’t know what you’re saying, if it’s true. Do we know if it’s true?

Q. It’s been reported.

JOHN CALIPARI: Oh, that makes it true.

I have no comment to it. I mean, we haven’t been contacted. The NCAA hasn’t contacted us. We’re going about our business of coaching this team.

How about a basketball question since it isn’t my day.

Did you click on that first Calipari link? The one that takes you to years of coverage of this vile, greedy, cynic? I think you should.

The University of Memphis is a stinker of a sports factory with a venerable history of violations and voided seasons. Mafia-style basketball coach John Calipari brought his special approach to coaching to UM a few years ago (he’s now at Kentucky) and got them wins and voided wins in time-honored fashion and fine. We all know the deal and who cares about the voided part? We still won. We won the way you win in big-time university sports: Hired an incredibly expensive cheater (“Cal probably doesn’t have to cheat now as much as he used to, but he’s still the standard. The rest of us can’t even deal in his league. He’s the best.”) who cheated us there. So?

Oh but now some moral purists at UM are balking at honoring Calipari at a campus event as he’s inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame because oh no he was a cheater and because of him we had to void our wins.

Listen up.

[F]ans are mad… because Calipari left in the midst of an NCAA investigation into Derrick Rose’s eligibility, which eventually voided the 2007-08 season and the Tigers’ Final Four appearance. This is rich, because they sure didn’t seem to have a problem with Calipari’s methods when his teams were marching deep into the tournament every year, even though his previous Final Four appearance with UMass was also voided because Marcus Camby accepted money and gifts. They also think he stole Xavier Henry, who had signed a letter-of-intent, and DeMarcus Cousins, who had verbally committed, away from Memphis as he left, as if those players should’ve been forced to attend Memphis after the coach that recruited them left.

John Calipari is a good basketball coach and a great recruiter, and in some ways his open recruitment of one-and-dones and promise to get them ready for the NBA is the most honest arrangement in college basketball. Sure, he almost certainly looks the other way as his players and programs commit NCAA violations, but it’s not as if Memphis didn’t know that when they hired him, and it’s hardly as if he’s the only college basketball coach doing so.

Or put it like this:

[Memphis fans are upset because] Calipari’s 2008 Final Four run with Memphis was vacated by the NCAA after star player Derrick Rose was found to have cheated on his SAT. (Even though Calipari himself was never found at fault — and even though rule-breaking and rule-bending is ingrained in the culture of supposedly “amateur” college basketball.)

[University of Kentucky deputy athletics director DeWayne Peevy said that basketball coach John] Calipari’s $1,550-per-night suite at the Atlantis [in the Bahamas], which totaled $12,400 for the eight-night stay, was booked partly so team meetings could be held there. Peevy said that if Calipari had a regular room, UK would have had to rent out an additional meeting space at added cost.

Excellent writing about one of America’s most prominent university figures, the University of Kentucky’s John Calipari. A sample:

Anyone who follows college basketball sooner or later develops a kind of ethical dementia. The sport is a perfect example of a functioning underground economy. Players have skills that CBS—to name only the most prominent parasite—values at something over $1 billion a year. Because this is not Soviet Russia, players find ways to get paid for these skills under the table, largely because a preposterous rulebook (and a feast of fat things called the NCAA) works diligently to prevent anyone from getting paid over the table. Since everybody involved in the sport has known this for decades, there’s a lot of the old nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on.

… But even in this culture, which is pretty much what a dockside saloon in Singapore would be if it had shoe contracts and golf outings, John Calipari always has been notable for the baroque happenings that seem to surround his every move. Coaches who have barbered the rulebook like Edward Scissorhands look upon Calipari with a weird mixture of awe and disdain. When he was but a baby brigand in the employ of the University of Pittsburgh, Calipari’s recruiting tactics very nearly incited a general hooley at the Big East’s annual meeting.

During his brief, and clamorously unsuccessful, stint coaching the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, a job he landed because of that UMass Final Four run that doesn’t officially exist any more [it was vacated because of rule-breaking], Calipari enlivened things by calling a reporter a “Mexican idiot.” Then he moved on to Memphis, a university with a proud history of employing coaches whom you would not trust to hang up your coat.

Those southern sports factories… You can’t keep ’em down…

It’s never too soon to start learning. If tradition means anything to you.

Legendary tradition.

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Duke pays Coach K, the genius who thought this photo-op up, ten million dollars a year. By some standards, he’s the highest paid college coach in America.

Expect him to earn twelve or thirteen million next year.

That scene from An Officer and a Gentleman captures what happens when a sports factory loses its assembly line — when all the investments and efficiencies fail and the place begins to shut down.

The University of Kentucky’s football team – the only game in town except for its basketball team, coached by the amazingly corrupt Calipari – is faltering, and customers are fleeing.

Recently, the University of Kentucky Athletics Department announced that season ticket sales for the 2012 UK Football team was down nearly 30% from last year’s totals. And, on top of that, roughly 2,000 unsold tickets were returned to the University of Louisville for the September 2 matchup. Needless to say, the apathy amongst the Big Blue faithful toward this year’s team is high. The question in most fans’ minds: How do we fix UK Football?

The writer is a fan. He proposes spending much more money on the team. The school just bought an incredibly expensive upgraded Adzillatron for the stadium, and there’s no doubt that UK will continue to spend every penny it has on sports. But what if all the money in the world can’t make the football team win? Meanwhile Calipari will probably play fewer and fewer games on the UK campus…

You see where this is going. Soon there will be no reason for the University of Kentucky to exist at all.

[T]he Penn State football program was sort of its own little fiefdom and people were aware to varying degrees of what was going on and … that never resulted in greater action until, you know, victims started coming forward.

… [F]or a long time now, there’s been a move, as football programs have gotten bigger, to sort of separate them from the university and when you bring in recruits to the university, you know, you say, this is where the students live, but this is where the football players live and this is where the football players eat and that sort of thing. And, you know, former players I’ve talked to at Penn State said you really could almost go through your whole career there hardly interacting with anybody who wasn’t part of the football program or part of your team.

That’s been a trend at a lot of universities, although I think Penn State to a greater extent. And, now, you’ve seen a lot of big programs sort of reeling that back and trying to reintegrate their football programs into the university as a whole.

Where is this happening? I can’t think of any campus where the trend is anything other than the exact opposite, with Kentucky’s John Calipari leading the way – he increasingly doesn’t even bother playing games on UK’s campus. Professional venues are much better than some dinky school arena.

No, the trend toward separation – or colonization of the university by the big sports teams – is obvious. There’s simply too much money involved in college football and basketball for things to go any other way.

But you’re a Kentucky fan, which means you’re much too far gone to give a shit.

Barnhart acknowledged that the [basketball ticket] increases could be considered ill-timed considering how Kentucky Coach John Calipari refused earlier this year to extend the series with Indiana on a home-and-home basis. That removed a potential game between top-five opponents from UK’s home schedule in 2012-13.

“I understand,” Barnhart said of any potential fan dissatisfaction. “There are some of those pieces that are difficult to reconcile.”

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Oh yeah. UK football sucks. The program is bleeding money.

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But at least Forbes ranks UK 427th best university in the nation!

UD reads these so you don’t have to.

UD reads the mainly indignant but occasionally explanatory (see this post’s headline) comments from University of Kentucky fans in response to an article that notes a faculty group’s objection to Kentucky’s basketball schedule. The notorious John Calipari’s insistence on “neutral sites” for games means “a geographic separation of entities which already can have a tenuous coexistence: athletic programs and the student body/campus community.”

In short, who gives a shit whether his team’s games have anything to do with whatever sports factory gives them a home? These are NBA men, not wussy college boys. As for that faculty group…

…who gives a rats opposite end orafice…They can say what they want…and make all the accusations they want…

I think he means Orafix.

Maybe what they ought to do…is have no college sports at all…maybe that would thrill the no life, calculus formula discussing intellects of the ever so popular and important entity as the faculty coalition….

Calculus formula discussing is nifty.

Most students take five years to move from academia to their chosen profession. We should celebrate those that are gifted enough to do it in one.

But they can do it in zero! We should celebrate that by shutting down Kentucky basketball.

IT’S FRIGHTFUL, HOME?

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Thanks, Dave.

[L]ast night was a validation of the Calipari Way: recruit a fresh stable of top talent each year, luring them with promises of immediate preparation for the N.B.A. and limited academic commitments, then let them go and find new guys to replace them. “What I’m hoping is that there’s six first-rounders on this team,” Calipari said after the game. “That’s why I’ve got to go recruiting on Friday.” What little shred of truth existed in the N.C.A.A.’s beloved moniker “student-athlete”—a phrase Calipari actively, and rightly, ignores—was whittled further away.

… [I]t becomes easy to imagine a series of factories set up, if they don’t exist already, in Lawrence, Chapel Hill, Lansing, Storrs, and the handful of other places with the clout to promise enough national-television exposure for a kid to wait out the N.B.A.’s minimum-age requirement in style. All this has made being a fan of “traditional” college basketball feel a bit like preferring rotary phones to cell phones—there’s no going back, so, best to get on with it.

Rotary phones doesn’t quite say it. It’s more like preferring petty larceny to grand larceny.

As you recall, we will gather this August in retreat, for one brief moment, far away from the busy bustle of the outer world, to think on our sins and, in sincere repentance, get them hence.

Are there scoffers? Naysayers?

[University sports corruption is] such a point of concern for Mark Emmert that he has convened a retreat for NCAA leaders in August to discuss the problem, play golf, and receive backrubs. The backrubs will be exquisite, and the results of the conference will be hey did we mention backrubs and golf? Seriously, backrubs and golf. That’s really worth the trip alone.

This is the voice of the devil. Do not heed him! The devil wants to banish tax exemptions from luxury boxes and cap what Kentucky can pay John Calipari. Do not heed him!

Gather, instead, with goodly folk like Brother Tressel, and think on how we can make our fellowship yet purer in the sight of God.