Jim Tressel was the first.

But this article makes clear why within five years (UD predicts), at least ten American universities will have coaches as presidents.

‘Josephine Potuto, a University of Nebraska law professor and former chair of the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions from 2006 to 2008, said the idea of a sanctioned coach becoming a university president is “unprecedented.” She characterized Tressel’s violations as “very significant.”’

Get used to it. Socialism used to be the “historical inevitability.” That didn’t work out too well. Football and basketball coaches as university presidents will happen. Anyone who looks at American universities can see it coming, and you don’t need to be a fancy social theorist.

Tressel Gives Way

Support structure withdrawn.

Ohio State’s ex-coach Jim Tressel
Has made of himself the Lord’s vessel.
He’s preached and he’s preached
And he’s preached and he’s preached.
But he overlooked 21 (Thessal.)

“Fans of Jim Tressel are angry that the national media won’t leave their football deity alone.”

There is no God but Tressel, and he’s about to be pummeled by a schismatic.

A lovely, lovely walk…

… down Memory Lane.

Vei, vei! It gets more corrupt…

… as Simkin the lawyer says to Moses Herzog, and today’s just been a long long day of university sports corruption, topped off by the just-released big story about Ohio State’s Urban Meyer (what a beaut of a program he ran at Florida before he went to Ohio! OSU really knew what it was after when it hired him; and it got it.) probably having known about his assistant’s frequent domestic violence against the assistant’s then-wife…

Ohio State gives Urban Meyer more than seven million dollars a year to run a dirty program – even dirtier than that of his predecessor, the disgraced Jim Tressel – and everything works beautifully – the team wins games – but what are you going to do about ex-wives who give interviews blowing the lid off of everything?

OSU must be good at multitasking: there’s the sex scandal in the wrestling program too, with the lads routinely diddled by the long-serving team doctor…

‘[The University of Louisville basketball team] was a kind of Potemkin Village, not so much elevating the university as hiding it. Louisville was a commuter school with a reputation so lackluster that a professor once told the Courier-Journal, “When I have a really first-class undergraduate, I tell them to transfer.”’

A Potemkin Village is “a pretentiously showy or imposing façade intended to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.” The three Bloomberg writers who make this comparison – it appears in a long piece summarizing the ongoing national basketball scandal, which they call “the worst since college basketball players were caught shaving points for gamblers in the 1950s” – mean to suggest, I guess, that the glitzy University of Louisville basketball team masked whatever there was of the shabby non-basketball University of Louisville.

It’s quite a statement. Can we have gotten to the point where we’re not a tad astonished by it?

I mean, yes, one remembers the witty president of the University of Oklahoma back in the ‘fifties telling a senator he wanted to “build a university our football team can be proud of.” More recently, the president of Ohio State, “asked whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, … said: ‘No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.'” One has no trouble imagining how the puling little president of the University of Alabama feels about his stature vis-à-vis Nick Saban. And of course we know how the leadership of Penn State felt about that… curious couple, Sandusky and Paterno. Going to jail for them was a small price to pay.

Still…

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

And does the analogy really work? For after all, as is the way with many big-time athletic programs, there was never a clear separation between the shabby embarrassing academic UL and the rich degenerate basketball UL. The squalor of college sports spreads itself all over the campus – literally, as in the way the University of Georgia campus for a long time looked the morning after big games; and figuratively, as in the establishment of a house of prostitution in a UL dorm for players, recruits, and the fathers of recruits.

It’s not really that you’ve got on the one hand the glitzy sports program and on the other the hidden humiliating university. The whole thing tends toward looking like the Calais Jungle.

Getting Rid of McRobbie…

… must be current Job One for the trustees and boosters at Indiana University. Jock school presidents are supposed to keep their mouths shut about rule-breaking and cheating and crime on their teams. They’re supposed to leave the We’re waiting for all the facts to come out announcement to the Athletic Director.

Can you think of anything the president of the University of Alabama has ever said?

Page One in the jock school workbook quotes Gordon Gee, veteran jock school president.

Asked whether he had considered firing [Coach Jim] Tressel, Gee said: “No, are you kidding? Let me just be very clear: I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.”

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

There’s something both inappropriate and pathetic about a jock school president who thinks what he says matters, and who actually lets himself get all puffed up about an athletic program that has absolutely nothing to do with him.

Indiana University President Michael McRobbie issued a blistering warning Tuesday to members of his athletic department staff, telling them player misbehavior had to stop.

McRobbie’s stern admonishment came during remarks at the department’s annual all-staff meeting, at which the president often shares his thoughts on the academic year ahead. Departing from his usual position as supportive but passive when it comes to athletics, McRobbie didn’t mince words when discussing the recent spate of off-the-field incidents that have made unwanted headlines in Bloomington.

… “What I do not want to see is any more stories of repeated student misbehavior. They embarrass the university, they embarrass all of you in Athletics, and they are a complete distraction from our primary role as an educational institution,” McRobbie said. “This misbehavior simply has to stop.”

Supportive but passive: The ideal jock school president is the iconic ‘fifties housewife, with a twist of Kay Adams-Corleone. McRobbie will soon be out on his ass.

Christian Hypocrites Downfield

The best-known so far is Jim (“In the morning he would read the Bible with another coach. Then, in the afternoon, he would go out and cheat kids.”) Tressel, but in today’s New York Times Joe Nocera identifies a rival for top seed.

[Baylor University president] Ken Starr was as complicit in the two-year-long silence [about a football player/rapist)] as anybody in the Baylor athletic department, which makes his current “anguish” seem like little more than P.R. posturing…

But it’s at moments of crises like this one when people discover how a university, and its president, prioritizes athletics. Baylor, a Baptist school that professes to adhere to Christian principles, appears to have “sheltered” a “perpetrator,” to use Starr’s own words, because this particular perp might be able to help the team win a few games.

“A feeling of sleaziness hangs in the air.”

How to approach the delicate topic of football culture and the gifts it has given the American university? It’s not merely the obvious stuff – the pointless stupid scary violence that scads of sports heroes like Richie Incognito bring to campus (idle Google Newsing turns up the latest helmet-bashing-in-the-campus-locker-room, this one at the University of Delaware, where last February another player “was charged with assaulting three other students at a party.”).

This violence has turned professors into police:

Days after the incident, [an Oregon State student who got beaten by team members] said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

The violence is hard-wired, of course, into the coaching of both university football and basketball, so that on a routine basis latter-day Bobby Knights are filmed and parodied (start at 1:15). The coaches are quickly replaced, sometimes by women, who are symbolically part of the clean-up routine cuz you know women just want to mother the team and would never be violent…

In fact, let’s pause there and think about the incredibly important role of women in big-time university sports. I don’t mean merely as tools of recruitment (several schools attract players via, er, dates with carefully selected female students), and objects of rape, assault, and harassment (see, most recently, the Norwood Teague unpleasantness at the University of Minnesota). And I don’t mean merely the importance of trotting out mom, post-assault, on Good Morning America. (Or, as Matt Hayes puts it, “GMA’s utterly repulsive decision to allow De’Andre Johnson on television to apologize for punching a woman in the face.”)

I mean, think about Donna Shalala’s tenure as president of Miami University. Her main role was as cover for a team that got in big on-field brawls and whose best buddy was Nevin Shapiro. She was like the Good Morning America mom times a hundred. They kept wheeling Shalala out to apply the back of her hand to her naughty charges, and this routine actually worked for a while.

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

A local commentator asks incredulously where the University of Minnesota found the likes of Teague (the answer is that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a search firm). “Were the other finalists Bill Cosby and Donald Sterling?”

Donald Sterling, Zygi (“bad faith and evil motive”) Wilf, these are the guys who give professional basketball and football such a great name… And, as the commentator suggests, there’s not a lot of discernible difference between professional and big-time university football. Even in the matter of violence, there’s the NFL…

In the N.F.L., … fits of violence hardly blacklist players chasing roster spots. The day after punching [Geno] Smith, [Ikemefuna] Enemkpali latched on with the Buffalo Bills, whose new coach, Rex Ryan, has created a haven for wayward players…

(What a sweet, Victorian, girly way of putting it! A haven for wayward players! Like Ikemefuna’s teammate, the aforementioned Richie Incognito! The way Jane Addams created a haven for wayward girls! SWEET.)

… and there’s college ball, where getting kicked out for violence means the same thing it meant for Ikemefuna – you just find another team.

All of which is why, as UD has often recommended, universities with big-time football need football coaches, not academics, as presidents. (See Jim Tressel.) In a pinch, a politician will do. You could also go with a figurehead, a Queen Elizabeth to Nick Saban’s prime minister. But you’ll keep getting stories like the one coming out of the University of Minnesota as long as you take some guy – some random polite reflective well-meaning university denizen – and hand him the management of what is essentially a professional football team.

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

The petri dish for university football culture is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their new field design is all about Vegas. A sample headline:

UNLV REBELS WILL BE PLAYING FOOTBALL ON ONE BIG CRAPS TABLE IN 2015

The team’s field and uniforms now reek of the Strip — it’s glitz, gold, gambling and most importantly, its promise of future fortunes.”

This is a team with one of the worst records in university football. An appalling record. Very few people show up to their games. Season tickets sold last year: 3,890. In response, the university decided to build a $900 million, 55,000 seat stadium with an Adzillatron spanning the length of the field. Although they’ve cut back on that original plan, they’ll surely come up with something like it. And they’ve got yet another miracle coach who’s going to shock everybody with the greatest comeback story this side of Elvis.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm Scathes Through…

… that classic mode of American letters, the apologia for the depraved university football program.

Local Minnesota booster/journalist Chip Scoggins shows you how it’s done for that state’s benighted school. Let us do a close reading.

Tone-wise, the big sustained thing, the ground tone, is a variant of Coacha Inconsolata (put the phrase in my search engine if you’re not yet familiar with it), in which shock, heartbreak, and an indomitable will to be shocked and heartbroken again rule. Have at me! says the bankrupt befouled and humiliated campus…

Oh my men I love them so
They’ll never know
All my life is just despair
But I don’t care
When they take me in their arms
The world is bright – all right!
What’s the difference if I say
I’ll go away
When I know I’ll come back on my knees someday…

Texas Tech is the nation’s sluttiest pain slut, hands down. Penn State assumes the crown if for any reason the current titleholder cannot fulfill her reign. The University of Minnesota is one of the five semi-finalists.

Why, just four days ago, before UM’s Athletic Director, via text, volunteered his muffdiving services to some random woman, Chip was burbling about how the program had finally begun to regain its respectability (church groups were mentioned). Now it’s back to the post-oral-sex-offer, pre-alcohol-rehab-stint status quo, and Chip’s got some familiar heavy lifting to do.

Headline: Teague Scandal Rocks Gophers Athletics Amid Recent Gains

Always give them some shred to hold onto – allude to vaguely defined gains.

Opinion piece summary: The accumulation of disappointment over the years — NCAA violations, misdeeds, awful hires, heartbreaking defeats — has created this perception that the U can’t get out of its own way.

A couple of points here. Note how the random expected fact of lost games gets included in this list of self-inflicted misfortunes. All teams lose games, but at masochistic schools it’s always one heartbreaking loss after another, and what’s a girl to do?

Note further: The “U can’t get out of its own way.” What does this particular formulation mean? It means that the stupid stubborn fact of a university, of all things, having to run a football program is once again the stumbling block. Where the hell does a university get off running a football program? You want to run a football program, be like Alabama and Clemson and get rid of the university!

The Gophers athletic department suffered another black eye that brought the kind of negative, unwanted attention that has become all too familiar.

No one felt surprised. That’s the sad part.

Again, always keep it more in sorrow than in anger. Sad. Sad.

Oh, we’re all shocked by the lewd details, the fact that a person in Norwood Teague’s position would act like such a Neanderthal. But not shocked that something like this happened to the Gophers, another deep dive into a pile of dung.

… Within hours of Teague’s resignation as athletic director, three people sent me text messages. A former university employee, a die-hard fan and a booster. All shared a similar theme in their words.

Here we go again.

It’s fair to guess that employees inside the department shared that same deflation of morale, which is too bad because a lot of earnest, hardworking, passionate folks work in the Bierman complex. They deserve better.

Shocked? Really? But as SOS points out above, it’s crucial for schools like Minnesota to keep an ever-refreshed stock of shock alongside heartbreak. A man coming on like that to a woman? What a shockingly lewd Neanderthal! In Minnesota, stuff like this is just so unfunny and shocking…

University President Eric Kaler tried hard to create a clear divide between Teague’s conduct and his school’s image, saying one man’s deplorable actions shouldn’t define an entire operation.

Please. UM doesn’t belong to its president any more than Joe Paterno’s Penn State belonged to whoever that dude was who made the public service announcements.

Instability at key positions in college sports — AD, football and basketball coaches — stunts momentum and forces athletic departments to continually hit the reset button. The Gophers know that too well. They need normalcy for once.

But constant administrative turnover, hugely expensive buyouts and lawsuits, relentlessly criminalized teams, and of course indifferent students who fail to fill up the brand new hugely expensive stadium is normalcy at jockshops like Minnesota. There are no earnest prudes in Bierman; there are only suckers. Everybody else is studying or whatever.

Teague ultimately proved to be a bad hire by Kaler, and the president can’t swing and miss on such an important position again. The Gophers carry a $105 million athletic budget. This is not a mom-and-pop operation.

See SOS‘s point above. You hire some goddamn academic to run a football program and this is the kind of dumbass hiring decision that gets made. Lose the president. Get Jim Tressel on the phone!

Those who cling to the idyllic perception of college athletics probably resent the fact that football and basketball are placed on a pedestal above every other sport, but that’s the reality now.

Sing it sister. But take it a teeny step further and tell the whole truth.

Those who cling to the idyllic perception of college athletics probably resent the fact that football and basketball are placed on a pedestal above every other activity on the UM campus, but that’s the reality now.

See? That was easy. That didn’t hurt.

Fond as we are, on this blog, of clerical hypocrites…

… the Rev Prebendary Stephen Green is obviously a major find – a much bigger find, indeed, than University Diaries has ever, uh, found. (A close contender is Monsignor Nunzio “Cinquecento” Scarano, but he didn’t run the bank the way Rev Green did.)

So far this blog has made do with the rad-rectitudinous team of Gordon Gee and Jim Tressel, plus (batting for UD‘s side) Yeshiva University trustees Ezra Merkin and Bernard Madoff. All of these men stand directly in the Elmer Gantry tradition, cloaking themselves in piety while engaging in antics that range from the morally despicable to, well, Madoff.

But Rev Green is made of bigger stuff than this, and he dovetails brilliantly with one of this blog’s most-used categories: Beware the B-School Boys. Banker and priest and tax evasion enabler extraordinaire, Green inspires the Guardian’s editorialists to rhetorical heights.

“Values,” wrote the Rev Prebendary Stephen Green, “go beyond ‘what you can get away with’.” Reassuring words from the part-time priest who for years ran one of the world’s biggest banks, before being brought into government by David Cameron. Courtesy of the HSBC files, however, we now know that this bank, when under his stewardship – first as chief exec, later as chair – was involved in concealing “black” accounts from the taxman, servicing the secretly stowed funds of corrupt businessmen and allowing the withdrawal of “bricks” of untraceable cash.

In the face of these ugly facts about his old bank’s Swiss operation, Lord Green has said only that it is for HSBC, and not for him, to comment on that institution’s past and current behaviour. No wonder. His obvious refuge would be to claim that, as the boss of a global business in London, he had other worries and could not be expected to know every detail of what distant colleagues in Geneva were up to. Sadly for him, this potential shelter took a battering from something else he wrote: “For companies, where does this [ethical] responsibility begin? With their boards, of course. There is no other task they have which is more important. It is their job … to promote and nurture a culture of ethical and purposeful business throughout the organisation.”

You can’t blame HSBC. What better cover for a tax evasion scam than an Anglican clergyman who writes books about morality?

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

Green is also “advising the archbishop of Canterbury on how to shake up the Church of England, advocating more vicars in an MBA mould.” Stay tuned!

If you ever doubted the comprehensive, whoroscope (as Beckett would call it), nature of big-time university football…

… note that when the New York Times went in search of a sage, gravitas-rich voice on the absolutely shocking academic fraud at Notre Dame, they could only find Dave Schmidly.

Schmidly! Dave! Dave – comic-book ex-president of the unbelievably corrupt University of New Mexico; a man who tried hiring his son for a high-level university position [scroll down for some Schmidly posts]; a man drummed out of office by faculty… Yes, get Schmidly on the the phone! He’ll have something sage to say!

And he does. He obligingly knits his brow for the New York Times about how, you know, competition to recruit the best football players “increases the likelihood of people cutting corners.”

Dave would know about that! Why interview lots of people for a $90,000 a year UNM job when your kid’s sitting right here?

… Eh. It’s not as though the NYT could find a clean president of a big-time sports university to interview. It’s more a kind of how far down the list do we want to go thing… Donna Shalala? Yikes. No. Hey, there’s Tressel! He even used to be a coach! … Oh yeah. Scratch that…. Next…?

Scathing Online Schoolmarm Says:

When it comes to the sort of writing people do about university sports, she is often at a loss. Here’s what she means. Here’s a post in Forbes – respectable magazine – about noisily pious Jim Tressel, the compleat coach-hypocrite. (Search my Tressel posts here. ) Tressel, as UD predicted, is now a university president. Let’s take it nice and slow through this piece about Tressel, written just before he took the presidency of Youngstown State.

What does it mean when arguably the most successful coach in the history at one of the most historically ideal football colleges would rather not ever coach again? It’s not like Jim Tressel has no tread on the coaching tire. His football engine has plenty of horsepower. Before being derailed by tattoo-gate at OSU, Tressel’s accomplishments were the envy of every one of the 100+ D-1 coaches in America, save maybe a few.

Okay so the writer’s going to explain to us why despite plentiful coaching opportunities Tressel’s not going to coach anymore. The writer’s going to tell us it’s because the conditions of university football coaching are so horrible these days. And that Tressel’s rejection of the position is… representative of a trend? And so we should… worry that we’re making university football coaching so horrible that we’re in danger of … running out of coaches?

Or wait. Is there any sign at all that coaching jobs are going begging? Why, no. That salaries are tanking? Or even doing anything other than escalating a mile a minute? No. Salaries are insane, and jobs are hotly contested. In fact, coaching is so high-profile and admired that a football coach – Jim Tressel – has just been given the presidency of an entire university.

True, he was “derailed” by a very bad scandal under his watch recently. But note the “derailed by.” This certainly wasn’t about (to pursue the author’s train metaphor) Tressel being asleep at the wheel… Or, even worse, looking the other way… No… It simply happened. To him.

The writer reviews Tressel’s many games won record and then wonders why he’s left coaching for administration.

It’s really no mystery. Because of the scandal that happened to him, he’s banned from coaching.

He probably would not have been in academic administration at all if the NCAA had not forced him out. He was officially and publicly banned from athletic-related positions as part of the OSU punishment, or as many allege, the over-punishment. Despite the lack of a lifetime ban, Tressel reportedly just said he has no plans to ever coach again.

The evil NCAA which despite a thing just having descended upon Tressel without his being at all involved has “forced” the man out – an “over-punishment,” many allege. But anyway it wasn’t a big deal at all because Tressel didn’t get a lifetime ban…

He could probably make millions annually as a head coach. He will likely make hundreds of thousands less if he becomes president at YSU. He probably loves football and the youth who play it far more than herding pompous professors and administrators.

Right, so he began by saying coaching is really shitty now; his headline calls present-day coaching “unattractive.” Yet Tressel’s salary as a coach would be in the millions, so that doesn’t sound unattractive. And the wonderful “youth” who populate bigtime university football (we’ve followed this splendid crew on this blog for years) are ever so much more attractive than “pompous” professors… Yet despite the great kids and the great money, Tressel isn’t coaching. Why, why, why? What’s wrong with present-day coaching?

You see why SOS has such trouble with this sort of writing? The reason Tressel’s not coaching is because he can’t. It’s like asking why oh why has Steven Cohen stopped managing investments the way he used to? He could make millions (billions) at it. There must be something really unpleasant about being a fund manager…

But the reason Cohen isn’t investing is that the SEC has banned him from managing outside money. Tressel’s not coaching because he can’t, and Cohen’s not investing because he can’t. What Tressel is doing right now is what we call slumming, pulling down a few hundred thou making speeches at a school until his ban ends. Tressel’s story tells us absolutely nothing about coaching, so one wonders what this writer thinks he is arguing.

Okay, so here’s the guy’s concluding paragraphs. This is where he nails his argument.

So why would he do something he loves less for far less money? Could it be the administration of big time college football takes all the fun out of the pure coaching of the athletes? Could it be that the media, alumni, and crazed fan pressures is so unsettling to his lifestyle that he would rather forfeit more money just to avoid it? Could it be heading a relatively small obscure school where he once coached, and is still loved, worth more than one of the premier coaching jobs in the country? Is part of the fallout from the NCAA’s decreasing stability and integrity and the increasingly sophisticated athlete pool make coaching less attractive?

Okay, big breath. One thing at a time. The concept here is “the pure coaching of the athletes.” The idea here is that something, again, happened to Tressel and the other purists – the guys who are doing it for the love of the game and seven million dollars a year plus free cars and country club memberships. The forces of evil – beyond the NCAA – are the media, alumni, and students. They happen to the purists, who are trying to protect their quietude from the masses.

Do coaches basically run the NCAA? Shh. Don’t tell the Forbes guy.

Do coaches and their staffs do everything but attach electric cattle prods to students to get them crazed about games? (Even Saban at Alabama has to do it.)

Is the increasingly sophisticated athlete pool a function of increasingly sophisticated coaches creating a system indistinguishable from the professional leagues?

So here’s the Forbes writer’s conclusion:

If all the answers to the above questions are “Yes”, then there is more than a canary in the coal mine. There may be more career college coaches leaving earlier. Perhaps current and prospective coaches alike view big-time football coaching as less desirable. No business or industry likes trending instability and insecurity, and resultant insomnia. Increasing comparisons between high coach salaries and low waged or no-waged players they exploit has a consequence, even if only raised in polite debate.

Yes, Tressel is representative. Tressel is telling us that something is terribly wrong with coaching and if we’re not careful coaches will become university presidents. He warns us that other coaches will leave coaching early. But again, Tressel’s early departure was involuntary. He. Was. Banned. “Perhaps current and prospective coaches alike view big-time football coaching as less desirable.” Than what? Evidence for this? “Increasing comparisons between high coach salaries and low waged or no-waged players they exploit has a consequence, even if only raised in polite debate.” He basically ends with this. And what the fuck does it mean? Coaching is unattractive and coaches are leaving in droves because… they make so much relative to players? No. Because people are increasingly noting the disparity between their millions (there’s that moral purity again… the pure coaching of the athletes…) and the players’ nothings? And only raised in polite debate? SOS is sorry. She just doesn’t get it. She does not get what that means. Only raised in polite debate… What is that? What’s he saying? What’s his whole post saying??

“A purely cynical atmosphere is bad for business.”

Whether authorizing the payment of a modest stipend to student-athletes in order to ensure their continued loyalty or penalizing academically noncompliant programs to remind fans that college sports are not simply a farm for professional sports, the NCAA will do whatever it can to preserve its extremely marketable illusions. Absent organizing myths that appeal to casual fans, public interest in a spectator sport will dwindle. A purely cynical atmosphere is bad for business… Revenue-generating college sports will endure as an ungainly appendage to American universities until the precise moment when its costs outweigh its benefits. That day may come sooner rather than later. A chain of unfavorable legal decisions, culminating with a massive judgment award in one or more of the 65 concussion-related lawsuits pending against the NCAA in state and federal courts, could accomplish what a long tradition of media outrage has not been able to: the effacement of a puzzling 100-year marriage between research universities and high-end athletics. Should the plaintiffs prevail in some of these cases, payouts to injured athletes could run into the millions or perhaps even billions of dollars, rendering athletic departments insolvent and unable to continue subsidizing athletic exhibitions of any sort.

While UD agrees with Oliver Bateman that absolutely nothing will change about university revenue sports (beyond these sports plantationizing [Don’t think it’s a word? Look it up. – And I use it because Taylor Branch calls the revenue sports-mad university a plantation.] our universities yet more than they’ve already been plantationized), she disagrees about the cynicism thing. What more purely cynical atmosphere can you think of in current American culture than professional revenue sports? Professional football, professional basketball, professional baseball… I mean, baseball — are you kidding me? UD barely follows baseball, and every year it’s a race to the bottom to see which component – players, owners, agents – can out-cynical the other. Cynicism is part of the American Master of the Universe mystique (watch the game players in this film) and a national hero like Nick Saban or Bob Knight or Johnny Manziel or Cam Newton is a hero because he’s cynical, not despite the fact that he’s cynical.

(Sports like cycling are definitely bringing up the rear in the matter of sports and cynicism in America. What brought down Lance Armstrong would never bring down a baseball player. Not a really good baseball player. Eventually we’ll come to revere cyclists for their cynicism in the same way we revere other sportsmen for their cynicism.)

There’s no reason to think the illusion of student athletes is what makes university revenue sports profitable. The most profitable university programs are the most professionalized, the most nakedly cynical. These programs will fail – if they fail – due to financially crushing personal injury lawsuits.

College fans only care about the same thing professional fans care about: winning. You’ll find a few rows of drunks freezing their asses off in the stadium waving their school colors, but everyone’s laughing at them.

Even the drunks aren’t in it for whatever the old school thing means. They’re in it to get disorderly.

It’s not the sports program which is an ungainly appendage to the university, but the university which is an ungainly appendage to the sports program, and the university is ungainly because by definition it cannot be purely cynical (it’s a non-profit, and people like Charles Grassley are watching). It can be very cynical indeed, as Gordon Gee made clear when he made the mistake of going public with the absolute cynicism he brings to the concept “university president.” (‘When asked in March 2011 whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, a grinning Gee said: “No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.“‘)

Many presidents of our present-day Penn States know they owe their job to the politezza of the coach. They are very very very cynical. But unlike Gee they keep it to themselves.

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