[The University of Alabama’s] athletic department gave $6.8 million back to the school’s academic side for 2011-12, according to a university spokesperson. Len Elmore, an attorney, a basketball analyst and a member of the Knight Commission, scoffed at that number.
“What did Alabama generate in revenue with football — $60 million, $70 million, $80 million?” he asked. “So they gave back less than 10 percent?”
Thank God they’ve got broadcasting standards.
Just a little icing on the cake for the chair of African and Afro-American Studies at once-respectable University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. $12,000 for teaching a summer course that didn’t exist … A summer course for UNC athletes …
UD likes the way the campus paper puts it:
… Julius Nyang’oro has been indicted by a grand jury after a year-and-a-half-long State Bureau of Investigation probe found that he allegedly received $12,000 for teaching a class he never taught.
Yes, someone’s finally gotten around to indicting the guy for teaching a class he never taught. What can Chapel Hill say? The latest chancellor (last one resigned in disgrace) insists everything’s hunky-dory now and they’re back to being a real live university, but it sort of goes beyond embarrassing when a highly compensated chair of a high-profile department might go to jail for obtaining property by false pretenses.
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This article lists all the current sports scandals at clown-school UNC.
Clown-school seem a little over the top? The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill offered “more than 200 confirmed or suspected no-show classes going as far back as the mid-1990s, plus more than 500 grade changes that are either confirmed or suspected to be unauthorized.”
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Put Nyang’oro in my search engine for a walk down memory lane.
This sentence could come from a contemporary American commentary on the Kaplanization of our once-great universities; or it could come from a contemporary American commentary on the NFLization of our once-great universities.
This particular sentence happens to be about the sporty arm of the pincer movement; and coming as it does from Texas, of all places, it tells you something. It tells you something about why immense new Adzillatronned university football and basketball stadiums are full of gaping holes during even the biggest games… Why a growing branch of the digital and design industries is now devoted to making an empty silence look like a crowded blow-out on network tv…
The author of this commentary is telling you why people are leaving the American university stadium, but you don’t want to listen because you know that the problems are too basic to fix.
If college football is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the A&M – LSU game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.
… It’s hard to say what should happen with college football. Paying the players would certainly be fairer, but it would finish off whatever remains of an institution that once meant far more than money. The arcane rules put in place to protect college athletics from market forces have spawned a densely complex culture of cheating, a tradition almost as old as the sport. How long can Universities, bastions of enlightened rational values, continue this charade? What toll is it taking on the wider goals of those institutions?
College football may be a necessary casualty of a freer, more prosperous world. We are all likely to cling to the remains at least a little while longer. Maybe someday (next year?), when the Longhorns’ helmets are sporting a giant BestBuy logo and the program is playing two additional highly-paid exhibition games each year against the likes of Abilene Christian and the fighting Javelinas of A&M Kingsville we’ll finally have to give it up.
Try his first paragraph this way:
If a college education is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.
Except that in the Kaplanization case, it’s not just emotional energy that’s lacking when the professor is a coached happy face on a jiggly screen full of funny little games. It’s also of course intellectual energy.
Stadium seats will go the same way as classroom seats: Eventually all university activity will jiggle on-screen. Imagine the University of Phoenix with a sports channel.
— the Marshall University football team manages to do it all: It gives an already intellectually-challenged state the gift of a high-profile jock-schlock university; it keeps the school barefoot and poor by extorting immense athletic fees from students; it refuses to allow anyone to examine its finances; and – of course – goes without saying – its team is in and out of jail.
UD likes the delicacy of this lede about the latest detainee:
An off-field incident has cast a bit of a pall over Marshall’s clinching of its first-ever Conference USA division title.
Oh teehee yes to be sure there was a wee incident wasn’t there? What was it… Oh yes one of our running backs beat the shit out of his girlfriend, burst a wine bottle on his bathroom floor with such force it broke the tiles, and then obstructed the police, didn’t he? My goodness. His second arrest in seven months. Dear me. But think of all the pressure he was under for the division title game! Ever heard of blowing off steam?
He’ll be back on the team in no time.
It’s deja vu all over again for NIU as police arrest a freshman storing in his dorm room the same make of weapon another student used five years ago to kill several students during a geology class.
Ah, the Glock, the Glock, gun of choice for campus paranoids…
Not that this guy only kept a Glock. Try body armor and an AR-15 rifle. A freshman can’t be too careful these days.
They lionize him at Brown (well, they lionize always-in-trouble-with-the-law trustee Steven Cohen at Brown too) (and… well…); they made him captain of the football team. A golden boy, an Aryan from Darien, Christian Garnett’s just one more big ol’ adorable football playing SUV driving violent drunk… The sort rife at our universities, and what a blessing to these settings of meditation and reason.
Having finished with Brown, Christian now plies his trade among high school football players, modeling for them the whole big car/big man/big thirst/big swing thing. It’s unusual, however, for these guys to beat up female police officers. That’s Christian’s own variation on the theme.
It all started [with] him driving his Jeep down Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk … A police officer, Michelle McSally, noticed that he was driving at a high rate and it seemed as though one of his tires were missing. She then spotted the tire on the side of the road. As she went over to the car, she noticed he was trying to conceal something in the back. Turns out he was hiding his drug [paraphernalia]. At this point, you would think you would just give up and go with the flow. After all, you’re screwed. Not our boy Christian. He told the officer that he knew his tire was gone, he was going to get it filled with air at the nearby gas station- (How do you fill up a tire that’s not connected to your car?) His bloodshot eyes and slurred speech alerted the officer to call for back up. After he failed the first two field sobriety tests, he told the officers he couldn’t perform the third… standing on one leg.
… When [an] officer… tried to cuff him, he used his 6’2”, 240 pound frame to kick her and resist arrest. As he continued to swing his arms around like a lunatic, another officer gave him a nice, quick two blows to the face … [Unable to subdue Garnett, police Tasered him – they had to do it twice.] [He] was so unruly at the hospital that they had to handcuff him to the bed. He tried to kick a camera out of [the hand of an officer] … documenting the injuries. He slightly calmed down after a doctor threatened to give him sedatives to chill him out. It was at this point that he turned his anger to the nurses- The male nurses. Whenever one would walk by he would yell out “You must be a real Tommy tough nuts”.
Is there any moment at which the University of Nebraska takes its hagiography of Richie Incognito off the web? Might Brown replace the photo of Garnett that accompanies its awed online account of him with his more recent police issued one?
The guy the University of Illinois chose for – among other things – outreach to high school student prospects “was convicted of battery in 2004 and served a year of probation.” It was a drunken brawl, and Matthew Sinclair apparently beat a fellow brawler very severely. More recently – couple of days ago, in fact – a witness watched him stick a gun out of his car window and aim it at another car. “Officers found an unloaded firearm, a loaded magazine with 16 rounds of ammunition and a set of brass knuckles in the vehicle Sinclair was driving.” Brass knuckles! That’ll keep the lads in line!
But if you really want to discipline the young, there’s nothing like pointing weapons at them.
“[A]lthough [Matthew Sinclair’s] gun was uncased and unloaded, ammunition was accessible, and Sinclair didn’t have a concealed carry permit.”
Pish posh. A mere “lapse in judgment,” says UI’s head coach. So the guy likes to beat the shit out of people. So he likes to point guns out of cars. So he doesn’t give a crap about concealed carry laws or ammunition storage. So he’ll probably do jail time and not just probation on this go-’round. So what. Lapse.
If a local judge or jury jails Sinclair, UD has just the replacement for him.
Richie Incognito ain’t doing nothing these days. Sittin’ on his hands filing grievances is all. Richie knows how to do Sinclair’s job real good.
The remarkable synergy between the values of universities and the values of big-time football is there for all to see: Commitment to free, independent thought, to dissent, to reason over violence, to sober deliberation over intoxicated impulse, to academic seriousness leading to the completion of advanced degrees, to academic integrity, etc., etc. And nowhere is that synergy on clearer display these days than at Washington State University, whose athletic director has compiled an enemies list of people who aren’t “on board and believing in what we’re doing.” No bowl game tickets for those people. Dissenters have been placed on a no-tickets list.
The list is based on “a crimson-letter file of any particularly snarky emails that haven’t properly embraced the new way.” As another true believer – this one from Rutgers – writes in one of Scathing Online Schoolmarm‘s favorite pieces of prose:
Great organizations have culture, and culture only comes from a set of shared attitudes, goals, and values that every individual within that organization believes in.
It’s the ethos that’s made North Korea such a success, and you’ll find it at almost all of America’s great football schools too – get with the game or get fucked.
One local writer doesn’t quite get it:
This is inspired marketing for a program that’s had almost as many empty seats as occupied ones for its last two home games.
Most schools rank donors for ticket eligibility on a priority list.
The place that’s foisted a decade of bad football on its audience suddenly has a blacklist.
[The AD] means it when he says he has to change the culture. But who knew what he had in mind was vindictiveness?
No, no, no – it’s not vindictiveness. And it’s not a moronic marketing strategy. No, no, no.
You are looking at it the wrong way. The Democratic People’s Republic of Washington State University is a benevolent, misunderstood state. It seeks, via shunning, to educate dissenters so that they may join the glorious new way.
This is also what re-education camps are for, and UD is certain the AD has these in mind too. Otherwise it would look vindictive.
The stadium could be at least a third empty Saturday, considering the combination of anticipated bad weather, a holiday weekend with students away from campus, and the relative insignificance of the Minnesota game in relation to the final standings
And that’s why they pay the coach almost two million dollars! Let’s not hear any more bellyaching about overcompensated football coaches!
This article about the University of Colorado destroying its academic mission in pursuit of football money will have you tearing up at the poor little rich boy story that frames the narrative.
Best way to read the piece is to skip over the hard numbers stuff.
Colorado’s athletics department is awash in red ink. It owes the school nearly $30 million in internal loans provided over a series of years to help cover the athletics department’s move from the Big 12 to the Pac-12 and the considerable cost of buying out departed coaches and athletics directors while paying bigger bucks for new ones, among other costs. Plus, [Coach Mike] MacIntyre’s contract specifies other areas in which the school commits to spend even more on football, from facilities to staff to academic support… The average compensation package for major-college coaches is $1.81 million, a rise of about $170,000, or 10%, since last season — and more than 90% since 2006… The department is paying back $21.4 million in internal loans over 10 years at 2% interest, with $3 million in internal payments to be paid this fiscal year, shrinking the balance to $18.4 million.
But with a $7 million deficit last fiscal year and an expected $4 million deficit this fiscal year, [the loans will] stand at $29.4 million at the end of this fiscal year.
Colorado also provides the athletics department with a subsidy of roughly $5.5 million each year under the category of institutional support that does not need to be repaid.
Skip all that and go right for the heart – Coach MacIntyre loves his dad!
Eco-friendly University of Alabama:
“[The Quad] gets torn up every year… It’s almost to the point that we need to replace the whole system.”
[One groundskeeper], who oversees all of the grounds on the University of Alabama campus, said though tailgating is a lot of fun, it does take a toll on the grass. Each year the University pays anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000 to rehabilitate the Quad.
“Before football season starts, the Quad is nice and pretty grass on both sides,” [he said.] “There’s grass on the east and west sides, but if you go on the west side now [to see the damage] it’s because tailgating just chews it up. We know that [it happens] every year. We over-seed and hydro-seed it in November, so that way it will be nice and pretty again in the spring.”
… “From corner to corner there’s beer tops… In the years past we’ve had to go in there and comb the Quad from east to west because there were so many that it had gotten really noticeable…”
Beer tops are just the small stuff.
Of all the items left on the Quad after home games, the most notable are not money or food. … [T]ents, living room furniture and televisions are left behind and never claimed.
Groundskeepers are impressed:
… “[Our] fans and visitor fans have been really good… ”
“You can’t put that many people in one area and expect it to be spotless… We’re realists. They do well for the most part until the beers get to flowing.”
… here. (Read the rest of my WKU posts here, if you can stomach it. Scroll down.)
Next, enjoy this beautiful observation from a faculty member at a university meeting last week.
Dick Taylor, an assistant professor in the school of journalism and broadcasting, asked [the president] if money spent on the football coach could be used towards education.
“In my three years, I’ve watched just the football coach … go from 250,000 a year to 450,000 a year to 850,000 dollars a year,” Taylor said. “I really wondered if the money could be better spent in what our core is which is educating students to get jobs.”
LOL.
Sports school presidents only say the truth on their way out the door and down the stairs.
UD has seen it again and again.
Here’s the latest case – the outgoing president of jockshop University of Nevada Las Vegas confides in an exit interview:
If we had paid as much attention to what the quality of the incoming deans were, as we were for a football or a basketball coach, I know this institution would already be at least on a peer with Harvard or anybody else. The level of scrutiny over athletics is a conundrum.
