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"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Twenty Games
One Billion Dollars



'...[I]sn't this a good time to drop football at Minnesota?

Gophers football is ground zero for those who point to an over-emphasis and distortion of college football. It provides a platform for Bruininks to make history and a bold unilateral statement...

Bruininks lobbied for an on-campus football stadium. Now, he faces soaring costs for the $288.5 million facility, while the NFL Vikings are seeking a second stadium that will likely wind up about one mile from the Gophers'. Minnesotans will have the unique privilege of walking 15 minutes between two facilities that will play host to about 20 football games a year at a cost of more than $1 billion...

Bruininks finds himself paying more than $3 million to one coach, Glen Mason, to leave, while needing to pay another coach probably more than $1 million to direct a football program that has shown it can't succeed in the Big Ten.

Bruininks is fending off state legislators who wonder why he's paying millions for sports matters out of one pocket while seeking funding for academic programs for his other pocket. It's all the same pair of maroon-and-gold pants, of course.

Meanwhile, as the Star Tribune reported last fall, academics among the Gophers football team under Mason were at the bottom in the Big Ten, with more at-risk students admitted into the Minnesota program than just about any Big Ten school, and with graduation rates the lowest in the conference, especially among African-American athletes....'



---Jay Weiner, Minneapolis Star Tribune---

Thanks to Bill for the link.