… The university also said its operations in the last fiscal year were dragged down by “nonrecurring” — meaning unusual — expenses.

Those included deferred compensation of $4.5 million owed to former Athletic Director Tom Jurich and a $5.5 million buyout of the contract of former basketball coach Rick Pitino, both of whom were fired after the program was swept up by a nationwide fraud and corruption sting into NCAA programs.

It’s always a pleasure to bankrupt ourselves and raise tuition by the highest percentage allowable in order to pay out huge bucks to assholes.

Oh, and on Pitino: Did you really think that $5.5 thing would cut it? He’s suing UL for FORTY MILLION.

Speaking of assholes, hold onto your hat as we sue our chiseling last president to see if we can’t get some money back from him! Meanwhile, though, legal expenses for that will add to our losses…

[C]omplicating a personnel decision that might otherwise seem obvious is [football coach Bobby] Petrino’s $14 million [!!!!] buyout and U of L’s comparatively shallow pockets.

Having depleted the Hickman Camp Fund to pay Tom Jurich’s settlement [!!!!!] and Chris Mack’s buyout [!!!!!!] from Xavier, ULAA’s largest source of discretionary dollars has shrunk from $16 million to $8 million. Though Petrino would not have to be paid off in a lump sum — his contract calls for quarterly payments on an unspecified schedule — the costs associated with firing him (and, presumably, buying out his replacement from some other school) could create significant cash-flow concerns for a department still burdened by its exposure in Rick Pitino’s breach-of-contract lawsuit [!!!!!!!].

Moreover, financial irregularities found in [UL president] James Ramsey’s U of L administration [!!!!!!!] and recent budget cuts imposed across campus pose a contextual challenge to an eight-figure buyout. It promotes the perception of athletics as apart from rather than a part of the university [LOLOLOL] and, at a minimum, invites blowback.

This is a public university, kiddies.

We shouldn’t forget, amid the current wrestling sex scandal and football domestic abuse scandal, significant alumni of that biggest of big-time sports universities. These are people whose words and actions speak the sorts of truths normally buried at places like OSU.

First let’s recall truth-bearer Cardale Jones, a football player who in 2012 tweeted:

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.

Ol’ Cardale counts as a wise man at a place like Ohio State, that rare person willing to just come out with it. Got all kinds of heat for it, too — but looks like he’s getting a bit of his own back these days. His tweet about the domestic violence scandal is short and sweet and attracting a lot of attention:

Funny how life works.

It’s clearly a dig at the coach at the center of the scandal – Urban Meyer – who like Rick Pitino is a big fat hypocrite and no doubt gave Cardale hell for telling the truth way back when. Pretty nice karma, ain’t it, Cardale?

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

And do not forget Kosta Karageorge, a mightily-concussed OSU wrestler/football player who one night dressed all in black, crawled into a dumpster, and shot his brains out. Reminiscent of Tyler Hilinski and quite a few other high-profile, macho, campus suicides, Karageorge’s mysterious gun-inflicted demise seems to carry important meanings about one form of young, heroic, American manhood.

With yet another University of Minnesota athletics sex crime, head coach Rich Pitino, of the distinguished sex crime family, calls for one of his private jets, a gift from the taxpayers of that state, to whisk him away.

**********
UD thanks Carl.

[Former University of Louisville AD Tom] Jurich has been stung by the backlash that came along with his dismissal, but he owes it to a remarkable tolerance [at UL] for scandal. Rehiring tainted football coach Bobby Petrino in 2014 dented the school’s reputation, as did the multiple issues with [Rick] Pitino’s personal life and basketball program. Fixated on justifying Louisville’s inclusion in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Jurich was willing to take all the hits to the school’s image in exchange for on-field competitiveness.

… But now the school that compensated [Jurich and Pitino] at the very highest levels of their professions wants to blame the employees rather than itself for the current chaotic state of the department. Pitino was the active wrongdoer; we simply gave him more power than a third-world dictator. Jurich amassed too much clout; maybe because we paid him $5.3 million in 2016, more than the entire budget of the English, Math, Biology and History departments.

… Everyone needs a boss, and neither Pitino nor Jurich were adequately bossed in recent years. Former school president James Ramsey was busy arranging stealth sweetheart deals for himself and other university leaders (including Jurich), which helped lead to his ouster. The Board of Trustees was a rubber stamp. Lacking adequate oversight, the whole thing spun out of control.

And so we reach a point where the University of Louisville blames Pitino, and Pitino blames [his underlings] Andre McGee and Jordan Fair, and we’re supposed to believe that this institution led by wealthy and powerful alpha males was brought down by the sorcery of a former director of basketball operations and a first-year assistant coach. Call it trickle-up corruption.

The bit at the end about the alpha males is interesting… Is there even one woman at UL? As Fanny Dashwood would put it —

I declare, I am beginning to doubt of her existence!

SONG OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE
BASKETBALL RECRUIT

‘Come,’ they told me
Pa rum pum pum pum:
‘Your dorm has whores for free.’
Pa rum pum pum pum.
‘You’ll play at KFC.
Yes! KFC YUM!
It’s facing bankruptcy.‘
Pa rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum

After bribery
Pa rum pum pum pum
We lived in luxury
Pa rum pum pum pum
They brought their gifts to me
Pa rum pum pum pum
Rick’s boys took care of me
And we all kept mum
We all played dumb
Rum pum pum pum

Feds came to talk to me
Pa rum pum pum pum
‘Bout our conspiracy
Pa rum pum pum pum
UL told Rick to flee
Pa rum pum pum pum
He sued, and they sued he
And everyone’s scum
Shitting their bum
Rum pum pum pum

Yes, I played for you
Pa rum pum pum pum
Feel a bit dumb

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.

Corruption is now synonymous with top-tier college [sports] programs, but typically, lower level coaches, like an assistant coach, take most of the fault while the head coach and higher officials continue business as usual. [Rick] Pitino was set to serve a five-game suspension this season for [the University of] Louisville’s sex scandal last season. He escaped that investigation with only a suspension because he claimed to have been unaware of the actions of his staffer, Andre McGee.

Pitino’s reaction at being named in the [DOJ/FBI corruption] allegations, followed by statements of being shocked and unaware, won’t do him any favors. It has been amazing how NCAA coaches are constantly submerged in accusations of misconduct, but high-profile names like Pitino get away with measly suspensions. The next step for Pitino is to try to recoup any of the $40 million left on his contract at Louisville. Through his lawyer, he stated that he is owed all of it, but messy contract disputes are sure to ensue after his termination is final.

I believe his reputation would be too damaged for any basketball team to consider giving him another coaching job, but with these types of actions being so common in NCAA sports, another team might just overlook Pitino’s recent history.

The University of Louisville athletics program, rotten to the core, doesn’t even turn a profit. If you’re going to prostitute yourself in every possible way, as UL has done, at least make some money doing it. But of course the corruption on that campus involves giving its coaches obscene salaries, building pointless sports palaces, bribing recruits, and anything else twisted and rotten you can think of. ‘Fraid there’s no money left over after all that to give academics, and in fact athletics gets immense subsidies from this beyond-pathetic university. UD wonders how it feels for faculty and students to sacrifice for decades, only to discover that all the money they’ve had withheld has gone to world-historical douches like Rick Pitino, currently preparing to sue the in-the-credit-gutter school for $44 million.

But I guess knowing how much of that money goes to disgraced ex-AD Tom Jurich makes it all better!

“Over the past seven years, through a byzantine array of longevity and performance bonuses, base pay raises and tax subsidies, Jurich collected total compensation of $19,279,710, an average of $2.76 million per year.
“Last year, his taxable income — enriched by the vesting of a $1.8 million annuity plus $1.6 million from the university to pay his taxes on it — totaled $5.3 million.”

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

The university budgeted less for its Biology ($3.3 million), English ($4 million), History ($2.4 million) and Mathematics ($3.5 million) departments, the [Louisville] Courier-Journal’s research showed, and his listed income was more than double that of the next-highest-paid AD, Ohio State’s Gene Smith ($1.98 million).

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

Much of the remaining money, after Pitino and Jurich took what they took to drag the school through the mud, was allegedly snapped up by disgraced ex-UL president, James Ramsey, and his cronies.

SONG OF THE TRUSTEES

We’re off to dump Pitino
The god of our campus that was.
We knew he was a bit of a scuzz
If ever a scuzz there was.
And now that he’s going to jail one day
We’ve got to make sure he goes away
For cause for cause for cause for cause for cause!
Because of the terrible things he does.
We’re off to dump Pitino
The god of our campus that was.

Interim Louisville president Gregory Postel sent a letter to suspended coach Rick Pitino last month saying the FBI investigation into college basketball corruption clearly implicated him and the program…

“The allegations contained in the complaint … insinuate a scheme of fraud and malfeasance in the recruitment of student-athletes involving you and multiple members of your coaching staff in violation of federal law and NCAA Division I Bylaws.”

… All the sad sad pieces in the local rags ’bout how the University of Louisville was lookin’ so good and then hell all hell broke loose and now look at the mess we’re in… Boo hoo! Everybody’s cryin’ for UL, for Louisville, for the state of Kentucky… Everybody’s favorite current phrase: Fall from grace…

What state of grace? The school went from being a lowly commuter campus to a jockshop. All under the larcenous eye of the ex-president — a guy the school is likely to sue in order to see if it can recover some of the funds he, er, took.

No, UD doesn’t think valedictories are quite the right tone … For a university that… Well, let’s tell everyone what you did, UL.

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

Short version: YOU WERE A VERY VERY BAD BOY AND THEN YOU GOT CAUGHT.

Longer version: You had a very long run as a bad boy and you made a lot of money. Your bad boy president and his cronies made a lot of money. Your bad boy basketball coach and his staff and some of his players made a lot of money. You won a lot of games by bribing the best high school players to commit to UL. You ran a house of prostitution inside one of your dorms and provided the prostitutes to sixteen year old recruits and their fathers. Bad, bad, bad. Naughty, naughty, naughty.

Still, for a long time you didn’t get caught, and your professors were silent and your trustees were silent and your students whooped at the games and your coach collected his annual seven million dollars and everything was great. And then you got caught.

That is, like bad boys everywhere, you gambled. You gambled that you wouldn’t get caught. You were Kentucky Gamblers, and this is the only valedictory you’re getting, courtesy of Merle:

… This Kentucky Gambler planned to get rich quick.

… But a gambler never seems to stop till he loses all he’s got
And with a money-hungry fever, I played on
I played till I’d lost all I’d won, I was right back where I’d started from…

But this missive – on the eve of Wear Red to Support the University of Louisville day – seems to ask for it. So let’s go.

It’s written by a local journalist/UL booster, in light of that school’s final burial under the weight of its massively corrupt leadership over many years. It argues that the way to respond to an institution that has thoroughly disgraced itself, and because of that disgrace marches smartly toward bankruptcy, unaccreditation, and the death penalty, is with ever more fervent support. Let us see how it tries to make this rather counterintuitive case.

If You Stop Supporting the University of Louisville, You’ll Hurt Us All

is the headline, a species of appeal reminiscent of Every Time You Masturbate, God Kills a Kitten. Sure, sure, stop supporting UL, and watch the entire city of Louisville die.

It may sound counterintuitive, but now is the time for University of Louisville fans and alumni to rally around their athletic teams, their academic programs, the students and faculty.

The future of the school and the city depends on it.

The cancer is gone. Cut out Wednesday morning in about 10 minutes worth of meetings during which interim President Greg Postel essentially fired basketball coach Rick Pitino and athletic director Tom Jurich.

Well, yes, he’s right that it sounds counterintuitive, so give him points for realizing that what he’s about to write is the essence of the uphill battle. But given that UL is (indulge us) primarily an academic institution, and that depraved indifference to that fact destroyed it, the writer ought to have rearranged his list of three to feature UL’s students.

Not even the faculty deserves a primary place on this list, because the bizarrely passive and silent UL faculty bears its share of the blame for this outcome. Most universities under threat produce people like Jay Smith; most not under threat have always at the ready people like John Banzhaf; most are capable of generating not just gadflies and op/ed writers, but coalitions of the concerned who produce petitions and protests, etc. Maybe I missed it, but UL’s professors just sat there. They deserve condemnation, not support.

The writer should have removed athletics from his list altogether. Several larcenous administrations also did a lot of damage to the school, to be sure; but you don’t get to spend decades bellowing your support for criminally insane seven million dollar coaches as they and their assistant coaches slash the school’s jugular, and then just turn around and go on bellowing for their replacements. Which brings SOS to her next point:

The cancer is gone. Cut out Wednesday morning in about 10 minutes …

Here’s where we know the writer is not only an emotional blackmailer, but a bit of a con man. We’re cured! Lord, I can walk again! Praise the lord! Turns out it was just a matter of scalpeling that pesky bit of cancer around the locker room …

Fraid not. You don’t get to declare the game over and start a new one. Remember South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions? The University of Louisville needs something like that.

But after embarrassment after embarrassment in the basketball program — including this involvement in what appears to be the biggest basketball scandal since the 1950s point-shaving affairs — why should you support the university?

Simply because you should.

These aren’t embarrassments. They’re crimes, and as accessory to decades of crimes, UL needs to pull back and shut down a bit and do some thinking. It’s far too soon to rally the troops, especially if the troops are only about athletics.

Failure of the KFC Yum Center — which is a very real possibility if folks stop attending Louisville basketball games — hurts us all. Everyone.

The comical, trashy name of that arena is indeed an embarrassment, and it speaks volumes about the corporate lowering UL – a university – has been pleased to undergo. And I’m afraid it ain’t much of an argument to point out that since the UL decided it was smart to assume a $700 million debt to get its finger lickin’ yummy thing built, it’s now our responsibility to sit there watching bribed players and criminal coaches running around a court.

The rest of it’s just funny, like one of those Rodney Dangerfield routines in which he lists his many misfortunes.

Members of the past administration had looted the university’s fundraising arm of millions of dollars in payouts for themselves and their friends.

The governor’s ham-handed attempt to reorganize the school’s board of trustees left its accreditation in jeopardy.

The basketball program was already headed for probation because it was paying for hookers for teenage recruits.

But here’s the good news.

SOS asks: At this point, who’s hanging around for the good news? There isn’t any good news – it’s all bad, and UL is going to have to take the fall it has abundantly rigged up for itself. The only advice SOS has for UL right now does indeed have to do with its students. Attend another institution.

Can they really have fired Rick Pitino?

And how many millions (buyout/defamation suit/other miscellaneous legal shit) is it going to cost them, now that much of UL’s endowment has been allegedly picked off by its last president?

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

And the capo di tutt’i capi too????

More buyout millions.

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

To recap: The board of trustees is about to sue the last president of the university and some of his comrades in – er – missing fundism to try to get some – er – missing funds back from them. The eyes of the world, the Justice Department, and the FBI, are upon their indescribably filthy sports program. They’ve just fired their famous basketball coach and their athletic director. They can expect humongous lawsuits from them. They can also expect various sports business deals to collapse and cost them more millions. They can expect enrollment to drop like a stone, along with attendance at basketball and football games. They’ve got some desperate nonentity in there as interim president to handle all of this.

Time for UL to apply for federal disaster aid.

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

[Pitino’s lawyer Steven] Pence promises that [the University of Louisville] ‘won’t fire Pitino without a bare-knuckle fight’….

According to Pence, Louisville would be in a legal fight over $44 million it would owe Pitino as part of his buyout clause.

Pitino’s always baring himself. A bare-knuckle fight; a bare-ass restaurant meal…

[If you didn’t expect this outcome, you’re like people who are still] stunned to learn that a game as inherently violent as football would lead to life-altering issues among players from repeated concussions and blows to the head.

Far worse, you’re like Louisville’s superscummy basketball coach, who says he’s “completely shocked” by the shocking corruption in university basketball. As completely shocked as he was by the whorehouse being run in a dorm lived in by basketball players and visited by recruits and their families.

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

So here’s UD‘s take. American university students are being trained to be Italians. Italians are living the good life and they don’t give a rat’s ass that their entire world is howlingly corrupt. In a New Yorker article about the sordid Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, Adam Gopnik noted French anxiety about

what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor …

The University of Louisville is the avant-garde: Can you grow a university whose students heartily endorse, and fork all their tuition money over to, Rick Berlusconi Strauss-Kahn Pitino? His sextortion, his whores for sixteen year old recruits and their fathers, his stuffed envelopes for sports agents in Las Vegas hotel rooms? Can you guarantee a university whose students will rush to the bookstore and buy out Pitino’s many books about how to be ethical?

The entire financial foundation of the University of Louisville rests on a bet that there’s no bottom – that students and alumni will be able — FOREVER — to look at a guy who could give Jerry Sandusky a run for his money and say WE LOVE YOU RICK. TELL US HOW MUCH MORE YOU WANT US TO COUGH UP FOR YOUR SALARY.

It’s a solid bet. This is Kentucky, after all.