… 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…
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
[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.
Okay, so it’s unnamed so far, so… uh… so… (thinking quick here!)… So here’s the description of U6:
University 6 is described as a public research university in Kentucky with an enrollment of 22,640. The University of Louisville is Kentucky’s only school that matches that description.
Here’s our play, guys. Listen up.
You’re getting hundreds of millions from Adidas in a sponsorship deal… In fact, you are
the highest-earning school in Adidas’ college portfolio.
Adidas sure don’t give a shit about that whole whormitory thing! Anyway.
Now, assuming the deal still goes through even though the FBI just arrested their head of global sports marketing, you take that money and with it you establish an entirely new public research university in Kentucky whose enrollment happens to be 22,640. This is an online university, of course… It’s all on paper… You recruit students (the names of students; no actual classes will ever be offered) the way many other online universities do… Hanging out at homeless shelters and offering bribes…
So anyway – this way you protect the U of L…
When you don’t know which scandal has so disgusted people that they’ve stopped – en masse – donating to your university, you’re probably talking about the University of Louisville. Which scandal, which mix of scandals, accounts for gifts to the university tanking by over twenty percent?
Was it the dorm for the basketball players that turned out to be a whorehouse? Was it revelations about UL’s recently deposed, corrupt, leader – a man who took loud offense if you questioned his need to be both president of the university and head of the now-notorious U of L Foundation?
[A] forensic audit found that the foundation wasted money on virtually worthless real estate investments and startups as well as football tickets and bowl games.
It also says [President] Ramsey’s administration raided the university’s endowment – a pool of investments worth about $800 million – to fund at least $42 million in unbudgeted and “overbudgeted” expenses.
And it found that the bad investments and loans forced it to spend money from its endowment at a dangerous rate, despite warnings that such spending couldn’t be sustained.
An outside attorney for the university, Craig Dilger, has estimated losses at $60 million to $65 million.
If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you know that along with these two scandals, there are many many others – all of which has earned for U of L the nickname U of Smell. If you’re not too averse to bad smells, you can read all about it here.
*******************
How did U of L get so bad? Just put it together. Just put it all together: The southland, good old boys, football, basketball, sex, and money. Add a hundred jiggers of Kentucky bourbon for a brilliant finish.
But she figured that whenever it did take off, the leading edge of the scandal was likely to be the University of Louisville. (Put Louisville in my search engine.) The only real competition for Louisville would be the University of Miami, but, post-Nevin Shapiro, UM is lying low.
What other American university features a trustee who tried to resign but was forced to stay on the board by the governor of the state?
[Steve] Wilson, who is co-founder and CEO of 21c Museum Hotels LLC, said he has been unhappy with the effectiveness of the U of L board and had offered his resignation to Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, who declined to accept it.
Bet Steve wishes he’d risked… what? what can a governor do to you? … and gotten out while the getting was good…
Go ahead and read this first article of many. The details are titillating, the taxpayer money impressive, and I promise the accounts will get even better after they interview the players. The school people call the U of Smell is at it again.
******************
Louisville’s coach, Rick Pitino, has had his own … uh… Here’s UD, back in 2009, posting on Pitino’s… er…
In 2002, as a member of the UK Athletics Administration’s board of directors, [Robert Gene] Lawson cast the sole dissenting vote against hiring Mitch Barnhart as athletics director. Lawson said he didn’t object to Barnhart, but the $375,000-a-year salary UK promised him was “ridiculous” compared to the more modest sums paid to other UK faculty and staff. (Barnhart remains in the job and now makes $600,000 a year.)
Over the past 50 years, the UK Athletics Department evolved into its own universe with its own rules, Lawson said.
“They have become an independent entity, separate from the rest of the university, which is a problem,” he said. “Their budget is their budget. The athletics department regards the money that comes in for athletics as their money, not the university’s money.
“And I guess I have felt, watching it through the years, that they sort of lost what I would consider to be a reasonable connection of these students to the university as compared to athletics,” he said. “Let me just give you an example. When I first came here, the basketball season was 20 games. It’s now 40. I have my doubts about how they can be a legitimate college student when they’ve got that problem.”
UD has loved following the University of Kentucky on this blog. It doesn’t get any crazier than UK. And it’s getting crazier. It’s the sort of thing that keeps me in business.
Be as Philip cutting through The Forest of Thorns and heal the pains of thought!
Our native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with a pale cast of professors. Your state’s universities lead the nation in ruddy red-blooded, black coal’d, athleticism. As it is said:
Among the top seeds in the March Madness NCAA men’s basketball tournament is the University of Louisville. The public university is known nationally for almost nothing except its ability to translate its success on the basketball court into money.
As it is said:
Ladies and gentlemen, sports fans of all demographic ages, Nike jersey and sneaker sizes, your University of Kentucky Wildcats!
Finally, a team without false collegiate pretense, a team that plays on courts stripped of scholastic varnish. Finally, a team fronted by a major university that knows we know that this team now annually has the same relationship to college as pigeons do to stone soldiers standing in town squares.
No team, as politicians vowing partial truths say, is “more transparent.” No team has made it so clear that its full scholarship recruits aren’t “student-athletes,” but assembled to spend seven months using Kentucky as a luxurious basketball facility.
Kentucky, your universities are luxurious basketball facilities. They are almost nothing but sports-revenue generators. You waste barely a spikelet of bluegrass, barely a burp of bourbon, on the weariness, the fever, and the fret, of consciousness. You are the nation’s true Sleeping Beauty.
**********************
UD thanks John.
[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.
Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)
Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.
This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:
[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.
Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”
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.
Everyone’s upset because Peevy – a UK athletics public relations guy – went and got all peeved with a UK student reporter who had the gall to interview a couple of basketball players without getting Peevy’s permission.
Yeah, just a couple of amateur college athletes, but there’s a big, big big old public relations machine right behind them, and you don’t, like, just, you know, call them… I mean, are you crazy?
When he found out that the reporter had committed journalism, Peevy punished him and his newspaper by withholding various other forms of access to the team.
The Associated Press Managing Editors group sent a letter to Kentucky’s Director of Athletics:
This is a level of abuse of free speech not tolerated at universities in other states and is particularly abhorrent at a taxpayer-owned institution…
Peevy does this sort of thing all the time – whenever anyone dares to do some independent reporting.
Because of course you need to control the news very closely when your franchise is filthy top to bottom (scroll down). You don’t want a free press reporting on what’s going on. Peevy is seeing to that.
Gray said that either Rupp Arena or a new downtown arena had to meet the needs of UK’s basketball program.
When asked how Rupp Arena was not currently meeting the needs of the program, Barnhart said, “In today’s world, we’ve got to make sure the fan amenities are what we think our fans deserve.” Those amenities include “electronics” and updated concession stands, he said.
Well, UK. University of Kentucky. What would this blog do without the University of Kentucky. Gotta spend their money on a brand new – or overhauled – stadium… It’s those needs… meeting the needs of the program…
For amenities (needed so that UK can charge more for tickets), and for mysterious ‘electronics,’ which probably means – yes! – the biggest, baddest Adzillatron money can buy! Our fans need loud, huge advertisements exploding in their faces every moment of every game, and, dammit, we’re going to find the money for it!
The short answer: Get a president who doesn’t preside.
From an interview with the latest one on his way out the door.
On UK’s scandalous athletics culture:
I wish the country as a whole wasn’t as crazy as it is about athletics. It’s out of whack. But it’s a reality that you have to deal with in this position.
On the Wildcat Coal debacle:
Todd and the Board of Trustees received a lot of criticism for accepting $8 million from coal operators to build a new dormitory for the basketball team in return for naming it Wildcat Coal Lodge. Author Wendell Berry pulled his papers from UK, and others complained that the university is too beholden to an industry that denies climate change and resists calls to become more environmentally responsible.
If he had it to do over, would Todd handle Wildcat Coal Lodge differently?
“I tried to handle it differently,” he said. “We had some other suggested names. You have donors who … want to name it what they want to name it. They are good donors for us across the whole university and they are capable of giving more. We discussed other names, but when it came down to it, it was a decision to take the donation.
“I would be glad to build a Wildcat Green Lodge,” he added, if donors would give UK the money to pay for it.
Common thread? You can’t expect me to do anything! I’m only the president.
Background on University of Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl, the lyingest good ol’ boy this side of anywhere.
… Not long after Pearl was hired, there came a day in 2008 when his wife reportedly got the day’s mail and there were two property-tax statements, not one. Yes, the coach owned another house in Knoxville where another woman lived. Whoops.
Of course, a divorce suit followed and a 25-year marriage was dashed because Bruce Pearl, aside from being a great motivational speaker and now a crowd favorite, was also a liar…
In Knoxville yesterday [the UT chancellor] said that once again Bruce would buy his way out of his latest lie…
University of Tennessee v. University of Kentucky: A race to below the bottom.