Just because Ellis Johnson has landed on his feet with an $800,000 per-year contract at Auburn University doesn’t mean that Southern Miss is off the hook for any of his $2.1 million buyout.

… [At a faculty meeting, Aubrey] Lucas affirmed that contracts are being examined more carefully, though he did not elaborate in what ways. He also stated that he intends to put a better payout clause in the contract of the next head football coach.

Thanks to a report on a national sports website called Deadspin, it has become commonplace to assume that Johnson’s buyout will be paid with the $2.125 million that Southern Miss will receive for its football game in 2013 with the University of Nebraska.

In fact, Lucas said school officials aren’t planning to pay any of it with the game revenue, stating that other pressing issues will require the money, such as the ongoing athletic department debt and the loss of revenue from the steep decline in ticket sales throughout the year.

As for the buyout, it’s actually greater than $2.1 million when you take into account the assistant coaches that will need to be bought out once a new coach brings in his staff.

Lucas said that school is on the hook for $1.1 million for this fiscal year (ending July 1, 2013) for the contracts of Johnson and his assistant coaches…

Then the school will have to foot an additional $1.95 million for the next three fiscal years for Johnson and the assistants that remain under contract.

… Bracing for a $15 million deficit, the university released $14.8 million in budget cuts for Fiscal Year 2012[.] $5.4 million came from academics and academic support, while $136,000 came from athletics.

Since then, Southern Miss also has announced a $35,000 salary increase for head football coach Larry Fedora from $650,000 to $685,000 yearly.

Meanwhile, 29 faculty members stand to lose their jobs next year…

Hattiesburg American

The witty commenters at Deadspin do it again, as Louisiana State University finally dumps professional girlfriend beater, Drake Davis.

But of course it won’t be Baylor that gives him a scholarship, much as that self-righteous institution adores violent men. It’ll be East Central Southern Mississippi All Praise To Our Savior Junior College.

Tennessee! And of course there’s the University of Texas too. The two schools are linked in today’s news stories because like virtually all sports factories, they’re both corrupt as hell. No one cares. Some random professor complains about some player in her class and, you know, people start sniffing around, but nothing comes of it. Coaches leave for similar salaries at slightly more sordid schools (but they’re all sordid); players disappear into obscure junior colleges.

Tennessee also had coach Donnie Tyndall, just the sort of appointment for which that august institution is known:

During [a] single season leading the Volunteers, reports surfaced that Tyndall was involved in a messy NCAA violation situation at his previous school, Southern Mississippi, and while that’s never good, it was triply bad for both Tyndall and Tennessee.

That’s because Tyndall already had been found to have committed NCAA violations at Morehead State a few years earlier. And also because Tennessee had been forced to fire the popular Bruce Pearl after the NCAA slammed him for violations as coach of the Vols…

And, you may ask, what is Donnie Tyndall up to now that he’s an ex-coach of the Vols? Managing a pro wrestling match Saturday. If that doesn’t secure sideshow status for Tennessee basketball, I don’t know what does.

The article says nothing about the Vols players, a number of whom, when doing armed robbery one night, wore clothing with University of Tennessee written all over it, giving witnesses a real leg up in identifying them.

The farcical University of Southern Mississippi is being helmed by a bunch of big strong men who know exactly what they’re doing. The school’s very president turns out to be a major jocksman who – now that he’s prez – is gonna jigger things so that that pesky ol’ million plus athletics deficit is gonna be gone with the wind just you wait and see. He’s hired a really expensive search firm (for the fourth athletic director) and he’s paying coach Vince Dooley to advise and … well, all this extra expenditure and personnel turnover is gonna make the deficit disappear!

… I’ve wanted the University of Southern Mississippi (you owe it to yourself to read the entire article, plus the letter at the end) to be stupider than the University of Massachusetts. I’ve assumed that that deep south school would obviously be dumber than a school in my enlightened part of the country.

Yet they’re actually neck and neck. They’re actually destroying themselves at the same rate, for the same reason. They’re both sports fuck-ups.

6,385 people showed up for U Mass’s most recent football game — played far from campus in Gillette Stadium (where the big boys play!), which offers 68,756 seats.

So let’s see. UD stinks at math, but… 6,385 / 68,756… That’s, uh (pause for phone call to Mr UD) … 9.3%!!!

OR (pause for visit to Percentage Calculator) … that’s 9.2864622723835%!!!!

Of course, “students and taxpayers [are] picking up the tab.”

General Subbaswamy has announced from his bunker that “we haven’t completely mobilized the alumni yet.” His last job was at the University of Kentucky, so he knows university sports.

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

UD thanks Andre.

… when a University of Southern Mississippi professor working on a lesson plan learned real quick that living near football players meant fights and gun play in the neighborhood.

That was 2009. Since, then USM’s budget has collapsed (here’s the school in 2010, defending continued use of a private jet and continued stoking of the football program at the expense of academics) (here – also 2010 – it’s defending cutting faculty while giving the coach a big raise) (and here’s a 2012 piece about how their totally losing team will not even hold games on campus – USM makes a bit more money having them take place hundreds of miles away in different venues, and, as the faculty senate president says, “We need to think about solvency, rather than the fan base.”).

Now, as the team finishes its winless season and fires the coach, those students and faculty who have been missing fights and guns can take heart that that USM sports tradition is alive and kicking: Its freshman quarterback has been charged with aggravated assault, and another student, brandishing a handgun at the scene, has also been arrested, after a fight on campus involving at least four people.

This article says two guns were recovered at the scene.

The great thing about big-time university sports, we’re told, is how much excitement and esprit de corps it brings to campus…

Or, uh, to 750 miles from campus.

Once you get into the sort of sports debt the University of Southern Mississippi is in – they’re draining academics to deal with their majorly in the red program – you “need to think about solvency, rather than the fan base,” says the head of the faculty senate. Whatever the most lucrative venue for the game, you’ve got to go there, so forget about actual students and alumni attending.

Strange, ain’t it? UD doesn’t associate post-modernism with places like Hattiesburg, but the simulacrum’s alive and well in Dixie Land.

Several questions garnered loud applause, including that of senior political science major Avrell Stokes, who said that it is his understanding that athletics received the cut it did ($137,000), because a deeper cut would have meant athletics being lowered a division.

“What I would like to know is who made the decision to cut education rather than to go down a division in athletics and why?” asked Stokes, as his fellow students clapped.

University of Southern Mississippi students confront hapless administrators at an open meeting. They got the same bullshit answer to this question that administrators always give: Big-time sports make universities ever so much better!

Oh, and about the plane the university leases:

Saunders explained that the reason for the plane is to maximize administrative time.

Administrators for USM are simply jetting about all over the country all the time! They have to! And a limo to a distant private airport, flying for a hundred miles, putting down in another nowheresville airport, getting limo’ed from there to somewhere… You’d be amazed how much time this saves.

… when you live near the University of Southern Mississippi football team.

Southern Miss’ all-time rushing leader Damion Fletcher was arrested outside the apartment complex that houses the football team late Sunday night on charges of discharging a firearm inside the city limits.

… Malachi Martin, an adjunct professor who lives on nearby Mable Street, said he heard about 15 gunshots late Sunday night. Martin said he looked out his window to see an unidentified male firing four or five rounds from a handgun into the air.

“I was working on a lesson plan when I heard the first few gunshots,” Martin said. “When I looked out the window I saw a guy standing over there holding something up, then I saw flashes and heard shots that coincided with the flashes.

“The police pulled up and talked to me for a minute or so, then they saw someone moving outside the apartments and flipped on their lights and flew into the parking lot.”

A Hattiesburg Police Department release corroborated Martin’s observation, and said that a small-caliber hand gun was found at the scene.

Fletcher was the team’s leading rusher for the 2008 season with 1,313 rushing yards, and his 4,287 total career rushing yards make him Southern Miss’ all-time leader in that category. He was also named Conference USA Offensive Player of the Year following the 2007 season.

… The incident is just the latest of several involving football players that has taken place since the athletic department approved a measure to move the football team to the off-campus apartment complex on 38th Avenue.

In early October, police responded to gunshots and a report of fighting at the complex, but no arrests were made. Two weeks later, a student’s residence across the street from the apartments was burglarized during a Halloween party, and former Southern Miss running back Torris Magee was arrested and charged with burglary after leading police on a foot-chase….

Not really that big a deal. If you’re a USM professor working on a lesson plan after a certain hour during the weekend, you should probably go someplace else, like the library, or a Starbucks.

… the scummy world of big-time Southern football keeps rolling along. For years and years she’s followed the beautiful, profoundly rooted culture of obscenely overpaid coaches cheating their way to championships that get rescinded when some filthy traitor on the staff spills the beans. Then there’s the old-timey defamation lawsuit the fired coach files, in which he demands a billion dollar settlement cuz of all the damage the school has done to his beautiful reputation. There’s the charming buzz that ensues among the faithful: Who among the equally scummy cheater-coaches out there will be the dumped cheater-coach’s replacement? And everybody cheats, so why were we singled out? There’s the sweet perennial controversy about whether tailgate parties which turn the campus into a urinic heap where drunk out of their minds pre-teens reel about should be subject to a few rules, and the equally perennial controversy about the advisability of a university holding courses during the same week important football game are played (answer: scheduled classes are inadvisable). There’s the inexhaustible thrill of watching this or that heavily-recruited player with a notoriously violent past assault people all over town, as well as the larger traditional spectacle of groups of bulked up football heroes making use of monster SUVs, monster rifles, and illicit drugs all at the same time. The fraternities make their own venerable contribution to the Southern football landscape, killing pledges during fan parties through the time-tested method of alcohol and neglect.

The University of Tennessee is the scummy football school du jour; but places like Ole Miss, which combine all aspects of this culture with campus white supremacy riots, are real – uh – historic.

And yet at the same time what could be more totally up to date than white supremacy rioting?

… when she sees scathe-worthy writing, she rises to the occasion.

Here’s the SEC commissioner trying to get Mississippi university leaders riled up against the overwhelming passage, in that state’s House, of legislation clearly paving the way for conceal carry folk to bring their guns to football games. He intervened in the very same way when Arkansas tried to get guns in the hands of football fans; now he’s sticking his nose in the business of the good people of Mississippi. Here’s what he wrote to the chancellor of the University of Mississippi.

Given the intense atmosphere surrounding athletic events, adding weapons increases meaningful safety concerns and is expected to negatively impact the intercollegiate athletics programs at your universities in several ways… If HB1083 is adopted to permit weapons in college sports venues, it is likely that competitors will decline opportunities to play in Oxford and Starkville, game officials will decline assignments, personal safety concerns will be used against Mississippi’s universities during the recruiting process and fan attendance will be negatively impacted.

Yes, SOS hears you. ‘SEC Commissioner’ describes a position of dignity and gravitas. The SEC Commissioner is not in a position to say

I’m shitting bricks thinking about your wasted frat boys whipping out their AR-15s and blowing everyone away.

But he could still have done a better job of writing to the chancellor. Let’s consider how he could have issued his warning more eloquently.

There’s a stiff bureaucratic feel to the whole thing, isn’t there? And given that he wants above all to convey a sense of urgency, dead language of this sort does the opposite. Notice that he begins all bass-ackward, backing up to his point rather than stating it right out.

Given the intense atmosphere…

No. Start right off with guns. Guns make football games more dangerous, and they’re already somewhat dangerous. In other words, the whole intense atmosphere thing begs for clarification.

I mean, having for a long time read coaches and fans talk about university football games, UD would have thought ‘intensity’ in their regard referred simply to wholesome fellowship and partisan fun! No? Ok, then don’t leave me hanging: Is there something else intense going on at football games?

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

Well, think about it, UD. Look around an SEC stadium during a game. Did you ever see so many police? Why do you think they’re there?

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

But of course the commissioner doesn’t want to specify the nature of pre-addition-of-weaponry football game intensity, because there’s a large athletics industry supporting him and his family, and that’s nothing to fuck with.

So, along the same lines, he goes for the unbearably ugly negatively impact to try to delicately gingerly ever so lightly skip around …

Skip around what? Good writing is more direct than this. You’d have to be insane to add guns to crowds of drunk agitated immature males.

And now for the windup, which of course features a second use of negatively impact. Finds it so nice he uses it twice.

… it is likely that competitors will decline opportunities to play in Oxford and Starkville, game officials will decline assignments, personal safety concerns will be used against Mississippi’s universities during the recruiting process and fan attendance will be negatively impacted.

I wonder why football players, specially in the south, might not be happy to play in front of tens of thousands of Mississippi university students with big ol’ guns at the ready??? Hm. Hm. That’s a real poser.

But anyway… Let’s redo this final clause, shall we?

Pads and helmets can only do so much. Bad enough you’re concussing your head. You’re also putting yourself out there in a huge open shooting gallery with armed angry drunk southern males. Ditto for sitting-duck game officials. People get real angry at officials. In the pre-technological world of high school sports, you have to get up, run onto the field, and beat officials to death with your own fists. With guns, it’s a piece of cake.

Georgia will not hesitate to tell recruits trying to decide where to play that they definitely could get their asses blown off in Mississippi. As for your fan base: Though the lads’ aim might be wobbly from a few hundred feet, they’re for sure not going to miss the nice broad back of the guy two rows ahead who just called them a motherfucker. So your attendance numbers aren’t going to be enhanced. Unless you add all the new fans who are there to shoot off their guns.

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

Yes, yes, SOS knows that she has slipped into the sort of language incommensurate with the moral stature of an SEC commissioner. Sorry.

Now, this is how you write.

But before I get to that – Let me just say how much SOS likes it when she is brought, through idle online pecking, to a piece of writing that she loves. The last piece of writing she liked as much as Drew Jubera’s essay for GQ on southern-football junior colleges was about trailer parks, and she lighted on that piece in the same way.

The specific trail that took me to Jubera’s piece involved UD‘s interest in Zeke Pike. Zeke Pike is a superfuckup who plays really good football. Quarterback even. Plus Zeke has a great football name.

Zeke has now flushed out of three RDQ (Rapidly Descending Quality) schools onaccounta the fuckupery (do you really, at this point, need details?) — Auburn, Louisville, and Morgan State. UD was going to write a post speculating about the fourth school Zeke will attend (possible post titles: SNEAK PEAK, ZEKE. IS PIKE PAST PEAK?) (Pike’s Peak: Get it?), but she was having trouble coming up with the next RDQ school…

Then she read this comment on the article about him to which she linked up there.

They are desperate for a QB in East Mississippi.

So off she Googled to East Mississippi Community College, star of Jubera’s GQ piece. SOS offers some excerpts. Watch carefully. The guy knows how to write.

First paragraph – Setting the scene.

The landscape is drunk Faulkner: small and spooky and piss-poor. Piney woods run deep enough to hide whatever you don’t want found. What passes for the old downtown is one side of one block. Five brick buildings still stand; another four are gone, just disappeared, as if by cremation — nothing left but rubble and little piles of red dust. Drive by most days and the only open business is a working Coke machine on the sidewalk.

With the next excerpt, you note that one of the things Jubera’s got going is a wonderful back and forth between highfalutin (Faulkner) and lowfalutin (piss-poor). See how he continues the trick.

To local existentialists, it makes perfect sense. “There’s a lot to offer in Scooba, Mississippi. Want to know what it is?” Nick Clark, a white-haired former Lion who works in the school’s development office, asks me from across his desk.

I allow that I am totally stumped.

“There are no distractions!”

Existentialists. We’re going to keep this going, this glorious juxtaposition – not just because it’s funny and rich, suggesting at once the reality of the place, and the consciousness ol’ Jubera (and his readers) are bringing with them when they visit Scooba, but because many of the people Jubera talks to are self-conscious at quite a high level about their existence.

[The school’s] roster does tend to over-represent the discarded and dispossessed: lawbreakers, rule-benders, dropouts, dipshits, potheads, and assorted other screwups — almost all of whom can flat-out ball. Coaches recruit kids from houses without food, without parents, without floors. One coach sat across from a mother who stared back at him with four eyes. “She had a pair of eyeballs tattooed right over her titties,” he told me. “It gets surreal sometimes.”

Noticing some similarities to the article on trailer parks UD also loved? And notice too how the high/low thing keeps working: dipshits/surrealism.

Now to meet the coach:

The glassy eyes of an eight-point buck stare me down from a back wall as Buddy greets me from a big padded chair behind his big wooden desk. Buddy is big, too: A former center, he’s short and wide and rounded off at the edges. One of his chins sprouts a white goatee.

Buddy spits Red Man tobacco into a Diet Coke bottle. Originally from Alabama, he’s still Bama enough to name his yellow Lab Bama. Now 49, Buddy has said he got into coaching because he wasn’t smart enough to do anything else. He’d really like you to believe that. Tucked between the sports books on his shelves: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

A typical Buddy takeaway: “As a rule of thumb, big fish eat little fish.”

… “I try to be self-actualized enough,” [Buddy later] says, “to realize I’m an asshole.”

Can Jubera sketch a character in six sentences? Are you fucking kidding me? And another existentialist/surrealist! (Would have been even better if the book were Trout Fishing in America. Higher-level surrealism-consciousness.)

And again: Lyrical plus sordid:

Later that evening, in heavy air that feels more like bathwater, [the] players jog onto a practice field they share with the adjoining agricultural high school. The cornfield across the road and the little Baptist church beside it turn gold, then pink, then indigo in the sun’s lowering light.

It’s still football: Coaches bark insults, players run into one another, fights threaten to break out. A fat kid bends over after running gassers and pukes.

Gassers and pukes. The sun’s lowering light. Can you get enough of this stuff? SOS can’t get enough of this stuff.

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

Update: The notorious woman-beater De’Andre Johnson has “made his way to East Mississippi Community College.”

Well, UD‘s been on a tear lately about empty university football stadiums even at many of the big frothing at the mouth schools… But she’s been focused for the most part on student and alumni sections, and it’s useful to take a peek upstairs at the amazing, tax subsidized, luxury suites.

So here’s an email (one of hundreds) to the USM athletic director from a Southern Miss fan (earlier posts here – scroll down) pissed because he’s spending – even with the tax break – an awful lot of money to entice people to join him in controlled atmosphere splendor (UD loves “controlled atmosphere.” If you can be a university football snob, this is the way to do it… I mean, I think by definition you can’t, but if you could, boasting about the absence of shitfaced rednecks in your suite would be the way to go.), and because the team’s losing all of its games he can’t even give these things away.