… on a story I’ve covered on this blog; and now, courtesy of Philip, a UD reader in Texas, I can do that.

I bitched back in 2012 that a high school in Texas had just built a $60 million dollar football stadium.

A high school! I was shocked. I was contemptuous of any state whose taxpayers would agree to this – I was incredulous that Texas in particular, with its pathetic secondary schools, would …

Blah blah blah. You know the drill. So what. No one cares. Let them bash their kids’ heads in. Forget about it.

But Philip wanted me to know that a mere two years after it was built, this stadium has been closed because of cracks in the concrete, and no one knows when it will reopen.

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

So now UD feels comfortable about the whole thing. Now we’re in her beloved Dada territory, where Tristan Tzara and his surrealist pals gave us exactly this sort of instruction in how to do Dada:

1. Build a sixty million dollar football stadium for a high school.

2. Immediately close it.

Absolute Dada!

Here’s how Ben Rohrbach describes it:

The voters in Katy, Texas, who recently rejected a $70 million high school football stadium proposal, must be breathing a sigh of relief after what has become one of the most expensive prep athletics facility in U.S. history built just 18 months ago by another football-crazed town four hours north on Route 45.

To put it mildly, the $60 million tax-funded Eagle Stadium that is home to the two-time defending Class 5A, Division I state champ Allen (Texas) High football program just became a disaster.

According to numerous reports out of Dallas, the state-of-the-art 18,000 seat facility has been closed to address “extensive cracking” in the concrete. The news comes less than two years after the stadium, which features a $1.3 million scoreboard and other extravagant features, opened to national fanfare.

But what about the voters in Deepshit Texas who are about to approve an $80 million high school football proposal? Stay tuned, y’all.

Pointing to slides projected on a large screen, [the provost], a scholar of organizational behavior, accused [UNC athletics whistleblower Mary] Willingham of making slanderous statements about the academic abilities of Carolina football and basketball players. Her assessments “are virtually meaningless and grossly unfair to our students and the university that admitted them,” he said. “Using this data set to say that our students can’t read is a travesty and unworthy of this university.”

The verdict, recorded on videotape, was swift: The assembled scholars erupted in applause.

“In 25 years of faculty meetings, I’ve never seen anything like it,” [a history professor] said later. “It was a public conviction and an intellectual execution.”

Typical dullard editorial in the local booster press complaining about one of the few signs of social progress coming out of the south: People are refusing to go to football games. The Gainesville Sun editorial board, puzzling over growing indifference at the University of Florida, has it figured out:

Noon and 12:21 p.m. kickoffs certainly don’t help in attracting late-to-rise college students.

Yeah, I mean, you’ve got, what, eight home games a season?

On Dec. 15, shortly after Army football’s 12th consecutive loss to the U.S. Naval Academy, the superintendent of West Point, Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen, announced that he was considering institutional changes to build a winning program. “When America puts its sons and daughters in harm’s way, they do not expect us to just ‘do our best’ . . . but to win,” he wrote. “Nothing short of victory is acceptable. . . . Our core values are Duty, Honor, Country. Winning makes them real.”

See if you can follow along on the logic of this chick with me. Ms Caslen argues that there is a direct link between victory on the football field and victory on the battlefield. This babe thinks it appropriate to allude to people dying in armed warfare in the same breath as people playing a field sport. How can we, she asks, expect our sons and daughters to die for their country if we don’t also expect them to win football games? After all, winning on the gridiron is the same as winning on the outskirts of Baghdad. Winning on the outskirts of Baghdad isn’t real; it only becomes real when Army is also winning football games. Words like duty honor and country are hollow cliches until we beat Navy.

Does it worry you just a tad that the people running the nation’s defense don’t grasp the difference between football and warfare? Does it worry you just a tad that operational logic is in the hands of people who are, uh, nuts?

… the next guy can!

Tetched in the head University of Tennessee is on its way to another bought out coach.

As David Climer points out, $1.56 million is

a lot of money to pay somebody not to work. But it’s nothing new for UT. The Vols rank among the national leaders in buyouts.

UT is still on the hook for the bulk of Derek Dooley’s $5 million buyout, which is being paid in installments through December 2016. And don’t forget former athletics director Mike Hamilton. UT still owes four more monthly payments of $37,083.33 to fulfill his $1.335 million in parting gifts.

It all adds up. Over the last decade, UT has paid more than $15 million in buyouts to athletics department personnel.

Bankrupting a university in pursuit of a winning season – that’s UT all over.

… Kentucky University. Among America’s worst universities, WKU has a president who, faced with hard facts (via the Knight Commission) about his school’s indifference to anything other than athletics, says “There’s no good that can come from making statistical comparisons to try to prove a point.”

From the moment one of its trustees told a faculty member worried about the school’s switch to Division 1-A football that “People on this board dedicate their time for free. They have better things to do than let some university professor just keep talking,” UD has had a weakness for brainless, money-hemorrhaging, Bobby Petrino-worshipping WKU.

WKU spends over $36,000 per student-athlete and only $11,000 per full-time student — nearly a $25,000 gap — according to a study by the Knight Commission, a third-party organization that looks at both academic and athletic spending for universities across the country.

Faculty regent Patricia Minter raised concern over the spending disparity in last month’s Board of Regents meeting, citing the study and other statistics in her sole opposition [to] new head football coach Jeff Brohm’s contract.

“Faculty find it devastating that we continue to pay such large amounts of money for something that is ultimately really nice and fine, but it’s not the essential part of the university mission,” she said. “Apparently, we don’t have a problem underfunding the vital parts of the university mission, and that continues to be troubling.”

Sole opposition. Some broad. Figures.

… paying the almost $200,000 a year salary of a football coach who thinks it’s appropriate to say this at a public university:

[W]e’re going to make sure [players] understand that Jesus Christ should be in the center of our huddle…

UD thinks you can attract people like this to your campus for a lot less than $200,000 a year.

Anyway, like so many people in and around university football, he has apparently embarrassed the school enough to be asked to take his gospel of Jesus the Cerebral Hemorrhage Enthusiast elsewhere.

… descriptions of American football, remember: This is the game that dominates this country’s universities:

One thinks of ex-Denver Bronco John Moffitt, who quit [football] midway through this past season not because of a toxic locker room or for fear of concussions, but because playing in the NFL was getting in the way of living a fulfilling life. [Jonathan] Martin’s catalogue [of reasons to leave football] suggests that, whether or not the treatment he received was a stark exception, a workplace where the currency is misplaced bravado and casual cruelty is inseparable from professional football.

And hello? Does anyone think our big football schools, their teams coached by plenty of ex-NFL people, are any different?

Time to build a $173 million basketball arena!

… at the University of Nebraska, where he continues to be lionized online. You’d think that university would rouse itself to remove their we love richie page – not only because he was a vile bully while at Nebraska, but because he’s now an international object of contempt. (They let him play there for two years before – under the pressure of his incredible behavior – letting him go. But if you Google his name and the word Nebraska, you find that the university cannot bring itself to take down his official hagiography.)

(A walk down memory lane with Nebraska’s “little puppy” and his similarly “intense” fellow Husker, Dominic Raiola.)

And here’s Richie today:

It’s tempting to say something far-reaching and wide-ranging about The Game and how its structure and mores retard human development. It’s tempting to indict the league and the Dolphins for continuing a tradition of slipshod treatment of mental-health issues through their lack of follow-up after [Jonathan] Martin was treated for depression last spring. It’s more than tempting to take one last run at excoriating Incognito for his seemingly sociopathic behavior and its ability to flow seamlessly through the daily routines of NFL life.

… Incognito was the “team” guy, right? Member of the Leadership Council, bell cow for the offensive line, self-appointed hardener of the soft, he comes across in the report as a terribly divisive man whose bizarre and disgusting behavior cost the team a starting offensive lineman and subjected it to a phenomenal amount of unwanted scrutiny.

… [Jonathan] Martin’s feelings of inadequacy seemed to stem in large part from his academic success. An upper-middle-class black man with a run of good schools in his background, he was looked upon skeptically, as someone who might commit the unforgivable offense (in Incognito’s world) of having more than one thought running through his head at any given time. Martin wrote, “I mostly blame the soft schools I went to, which fostered within me a feeling that I’m a huge p—y, as I never got into fights.”

Martin’s upbringing stifled him, rendered him speechless amid the hypersexual, hypervulgar, hyperracial world of the Dolphins’ locker room, and it underscored a point worth considering: Education is not always a valued commodity in the NFL. It can be looked upon with derision, as a sign that its owner lacks a certain desperation needed to succeed. Martin might be the first person to express shame at having a Stanford education.

Nebraska will never truly repudiate its Jim Jones, the Dolphins “team guy” who brought to a university everything that “retards human development.”

As this professor quickly discovered, Nebraska, like Sandusky’s Penn State, is a cult. It continues its masochistic worship of mad sons of bitches. It is a university dedicated to blitzing the capacity to think.

Only in America.

Commentary on the release of the Richie Incognito investigation’s results.

What did you think you were watching all these years? What did you think football was?

… The report over and over again mentions the workplace, and what is appropriate in the workplace. Well, what do these men do for work, at their workplace? “Not an ordinary workplace,” as the report’s conclusion, doesn’t quite cover it. The employees slam into people running at them, over and over again. Sometimes they slam into someone’s upper body, and sometimes they go for the legs. In their free time, when they’re not slamming into others, they train, so that they can weigh more, with more muscle and less body fat, for the next time they slam into others.

Of course UD has no objection to American football. People like freak shows. Let them have them. Just get it out of our universities.

… Ohio State.

What? Sweet winsome university football a commercial enterprise?

So the National Labor Relations Board hearings on the Northwestern University football team’s proposal to form a union have just gotten under way, and we already have our first howler.

Here it is, from the mouth of Northwestern’s vice president for university relations, Alan K. Cubbage: “We do not regard, and have never regarded, our football program as a commercial enterprise.” OK, Alan, but you may be the only ones who don’t. How, exactly, is an entity that sells tickets to its events — not to mention the national TV rights to broadcast those events — not engaging in commerce?

… that they really cannot think of anything besides athletics for their universities to do.

I know you have trouble believing this; you will point to the existence of professors and administrators on all public university campuses. You will point to the baseline definitional truth – unmissable even to the most doltish – of universities as places of learning.

But the mere existence of professors and administrators at any campus of, say, the University of Hawaii system, proves nothing. You need to look at the fact that schools like UH do virtually nothing, decade after decade, but throw money down a sports hole. It is clear that no one in the state can think of anything else a university might be for.

Except for kickbacks from contractors.

Those are the two things:

1. Staff makes money via bribes.

2. Football games are staged.

Here’s the latest:

[The chancellor] cleared the department of a nearly $15 million deficit last summer and gave the department three years to balance its $30 million budget or face cutting sports offerings.

Dat’s right. He just up and used funds, available to educate people, to erase the athletics department’s fifteen million dollar deficit.

Since then, they’ve lost all their games, no one attends the games, they already have another two million dollar deficit, and UH is going to raise the student athletics fee.

One observer, complaining about the ten million dollars in athletics bailout money from Hawaii taxpayers the university looks likely to get, notes that even in this grim situation there is something for which to be thankful:

[N]o one was present when the ceiling in a classroom on the third floor of Moore Hall collapsed inward due to a leaking pipe.

UD presumes no one was present because, well, physical campuswise… no one’s ever present… There’s no there there as ol’ Gertie put it…

Again, UD would suggest that states like Hawaii actually cannot conceptualize university. And there’s no cure for that.

UD laughed so much reading that, her stress incontinence problem almost acted up.