Read this. How are you doing? Do you have your Petrino and Pitino under control? Have you been able to add Ecarma and keep the balls in the air, or are there too many slimy coaches at UL for you to get a grip on? Do you understand why some of the slime has been bought out while some is fired with cause, generating zillion dollar lawsuits against the university?

But, er, what about the lawsuit UL has filed against its last president, UD?

Gevalt! One thing – three things – at a time.

… now coaching Greece’s Panathinkaikos basketball team, finds his level.

Panathinkaikos owner Dimitrios Giannakopoulos is known for his temper, and was once fined $150,000 in 2015 for threatening to kill officials and their families following a EuroLeague win over CSKA Moscow.  

… 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.

One of their football players studied.

None of the subsequent unfortunate events would have occurred if he had not, wantonly, crazily, studied.

I trust this will be a lesson to his teammates.

Last Sunday night, UL’s tight ends coach

swerved on Interstate 64, nearly struck a barrier wall multiple times and drove through a construction zone where workers were present.

… Sheriff’s deputies had to pull [him] out of his car after he refused to comply with their orders to exit, according to the citation. Deputies then attempted to run field sobriety tests, but [he] walked into the interstate, “almost being struck by a truck pulling a horse trailer,” before deputies pulled him to safety. [He] had multiple open containers in his vehicle as well as multiple empty beer cans in the passenger seat.

He’s been hitting the bottle ever since they closed the on-campus whorehouse.

Though you’d think he’d find some consolation in his $600,000-plus salary AND a monthly $500 car allowance.

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Hey! They’re paying this guy to drive his car into construction workers! What a deal.

Baby, baby, baby don’t sue me
Ooh, please don’t sue me for forty mill
I’ve got this red-faced shame-faced flustered feelin’ inside me
Ooh, deep inside me and it hurts so bad

Baby, baby, where did our love go?
Ooh, don’t you sue me
Don’t you sue me no more (baby, baby)
Ooh, baby

… with the safety of their community, as always, paramount in their admissions choices.

[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!

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…

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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.

[University of Louisville Coach] Says Normalcy is Returning

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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.

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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…

… who, when UL president, allegedly speculated away up to $100 million of school money. He will be sued; he will have to spend the rest of his life paying lawyers to draw out the suits against him until he expires in sunny splendor in one of his Florida mcmansions.

Meanwhile, though, the school ain’t got much money left over for anything but what matters most to it – football – and as a result, it’s no longer able to provide much-needed advertising revenue to the local student newspaper.

The withdrawal of those advertising dollars threatens the existence of the paper, which is why UD just gave it some money. You might consider making a donation as well.

… scoots.

The board of trustees is also on its way out.

It’s a start.

Plenty of background on the U of Smell: Put Louisville in my search engine.

… now features the comical board of trustee meetings that all schools going down the tube feature. The cronies want yet another big tuition increase so that they and the coaches can continue to live in the style to which they have become accustomed; a powerful faction of disgusted trustees wants them to stop doing this.

During the meeting, [one trustee] questioned how the university spends money, calling [the school president] and his administrative team “masters of financial obfuscation.”

The sharpest debate of the meeting was over a transaction [the president] approved last year in which the university loaned $38 million of its cash on hand to the University of Louisville Real Estate Foundation, a creation of the U of L Foundation, which [the president] also runs.

[Two trustees] questioned why the loan was not approved by the trustees and whether the money could be used to fund more pressing university priorities or to curtail tuition increases.

Jason Tomlinson, the foundation’s chief financial officer, told the board that the transaction is not a loan but a “receivable.” But U of L’s independent auditors called it a loan in the university’s annual financial statements…

[One of the trustees] blew up at Tomlinson, asking how he could tell the board the deal is not a loan when the document governing the transaction has a file name of “University Loan to FDN.docx.”

The U of Smell has gotten so comprehensively smelly (put Louisville in my search engine) that a strong faction of trustees now wants the school’s ridiculous president to leave. The president refuses to leave.

The stage is set; all the rest of us have to do is sit back and enjoy the show.