Tetched in the head University of Tennessee (follow its mad sports program here) is now, after years of medically unsupervised activity, in unbelievably deep shit.

… [F]our losing seasons in the last five years, and home attendance has steadily declined… Tennessee fired Derek Dooley following this past season and owes him $5 million. That’s after paying Phillip Fulmer a $6 million buyout (over 48 months) when he was forced out following the 2008 season.

… Tennessee’s reserves have been depleted by $21 million in transfers back to the university over the last three years and $11.4 million in buyouts to fired coaches in football, basketball and baseball, as well as administrators. Former Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton walked away in 2011 with a $1.335 million buyout.

That $11.4 million figure doesn’t count the $5 million owed to Dooley, nor an additional $2 million to his assistants.

It’s worse than that. The reeling drunks running the show have much more public cash than that dribbling out of their mouths. Plus we can anticipate plenty of player scandals and all that Chapel Hill stuff…

What to do?

Well, if you’re the University of Tennessee I tell you what. You do one thing and one thing only: RUN AWAY!!!! You’ve made your bed; now you have to …

RUN AWAY!!!!!!!

Don’t nobody get to watch us whiles we chew the fat ’bout our next move: A new stadium, fire the next coach and give him a ten million dollar buyout… We’re runnin’ the joint see and we do it our way and fuck you all.

A board that makes recommendations about the direction of the University of Tennessee’s athletic department reversed a longstanding policy last year, leading to closed-door meetings, little written documentation and questions from the press and transparency advocates… Transparency advocates counter that the university is a public institution, and its doings should be public record. The fact that two athletic board members are also on UT’s Board of Trustees caught the eye of the Tennessee Press Association’s Frank Gibson.

Lots of this stuff coming out now.

Whether he realizes it or not, my son likes watching football for the same reason I did: because it’s intimate time with his dad. If I didn’t let watching football become one of the things we shared, if I told him it’s something I regret, he might take to it anyway. But it would be less likely. And if he made it to adulthood without heartwarming memories of sitting alongside his old man watching other men pulverize their bodies and minds, he’d be more able to rationally decide whether professional football is something a decent society should allow.

All my life I’ve heard that women are irrational.

Baby, women don’t know from irrational.

This of course is the deepest nightmare of every jock-school trustee and president. It’s much deeper than current worries about tanking ticket sales. You can still maybe bell-and-whistle tanking ticket sales; you can imagine ways of turning a stadium into, I don’t know, something that in significant ways resembles a really plush, high-tech, Las Vegas gambling hall/hotel/restaurant. But you can’t change the system of recruitment and cheating; you can’t stop the fact that Florida State University’s revenue-athlete graduation rate is a sick joke, or that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, qua academic institution, is a sick joke. Lying and cheating your way around this problem is starting not to work. That’s the nightmare. Because the guy making the comment in my headline is saying that he can’t identify with the people playing on the gridiron anymore; that he feels like a jerk trying to pretend they are part of the college world.

Eventually the remnant true believers will trickle down, as it were, to the south, where the few locations that have always been honest about being football stadiums and nothing else (Auburn, Clemson, Alabama) will continue to stage games. Eventually most of the audience for the games will be like the tourists who go to “Old West” towns to watch pretend shoot-outs.

A commenter at the Charleston Gazette rebukes a columnist who dared question a planned six million dollar “auditorium to help inspire [the West Virginia University] football team.” I’m sure what set the commenter off was this:

The primary purpose of a university is to educate students — including football players.

Does anyone think educating the dudes will turn around humongous loser WVU football?

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Background on this jewel in the American university crown here (scroll down).

If universities and the NCAA continue to cling to an amateurism model that limits the earnings potential of top college athletes, all of that new television revenue must go somewhere.

“If you’re not going to pay players,” said Brian Goff, a professor of economics at Western Kentucky who has studied the business of college sports. “that money is going to try to find ways to entice players” to come to your school.

It’s weird that you never hear Tea Party people complaining that their education taxes are on top of so much sports-generated revenue that their state universities can’t figure out what to do with it… Wouldn’t you expect some proud Kentuckian to ask Why is our state university so shitty when it gets so much of our money? When it generates so much of its own money that heck it don’t know what to do with it?

The front porch of some of our greatest universities.

Life of the mind, America, 2014.

That was the kind of game it was. Rough and angry and so violent that at times it was hard to watch.

This, of course, is part of the attraction of football. And part of the reason so many players leave the sport crippled and concussed.

Richard Sherman made the big play Sunday. His team is going to the Super Bowl.

More important, he survived the carnage.

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UD thanks David.

“I would not let my son play pro football,” [President Obama remarked]… “At this point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” he went on. “[The players], they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?”

True, the question was not about college football. But UD wonders: Since on many campuses college football is indistinguishable from pro, wouldn’t a person object to that as well? You’re getting just as much brain tissue kicked out at the University of Georgia.

[Penn State University trustee Joel] Myers said the [Joe] Paterno statue idea came to him last week. He envisions Paterno and [Fred] Pattee — whose eras are decades apart — either shaking hands or standing arm in arm.

… Scott Paterno, a son of the legendary coach, said any Paterno-Pattee statue must include his mom, Sue…

The American university as plantation.

… they’ll be able to calculate that their share of that money is zero percent.”

Colbert on the University of North Carolina.

… is that Glenn Reynolds assumes no one’s noticing.

… When hundreds of fake courses can be taught, to often functionally illiterate students, without anyone noticing, it suggests that there’s not much going on in the way of quality control. UNC isn’t even offering makeup classes for this fake coursework, meaning that the bogus credits will remain on students’ transcripts…

It’s possible that this problem is limited to the University of North Carolina, and that some particularly toxic strain of corruption has somehow infested its lovely Chapel Hill campus. But it’s more likely that UNC isn’t as unusual as all that. Near-illiterate athletes are certainly not limited to UNC…

[I]t’s also quite possible that many classes, taught at many schools, are only a cut or two above the no-show classes that Julius Nyang’oro allegedly offered. Because if you can get away with offering hundreds of bogus classes at a top American university for years before anyone notices, the quality control [in general] isn’t very high.

Everyone notices. Everyone knows: the athletes, of course; the athletics department, the professors, the academic departments, the student body. The local rah-rah media. Unless the shit for some reason hits the fan really really hard (as happened at UNC), no one cares, no one’s going to talk about it, and no one’s going to do anything. And certainly nothing will come of this latest national university scandal, the whole UNC thing. It’ll blow over.

“We’re going to make sure they understand that Jesus Christ should be in the center of our huddle, that that’s something that is important,” [said a University of Connecticut football coach]. “If you want to be successful and you want to win, get championships[,] then you better understand that this didn’t happen because of you. This happened of our Lord and Savior.”

(I’ve taken the quotation from an article that expresses indignation over U Conn’s, uh, reservations about the coach.)

… when all we care about is our receivers. When your football team is your university, as is the case at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, you’ll accept anyone who can catch a ball well, and you’ll make up pretend classes for those people to get A’s in so they can remain eligible to catch balls for your sports factory.

This has been true, is still true, and will remain true at all of America’s big-time sports schools, and if you think a little academic scandal is going to change that, you’re a fool. The system can’t work if you only admit college-level students.

The high schools do their bit – America now has a rich and complex system of diploma mills feeding their staight-A grads to the sports factories. All the sports factories have to do is keep the mill going – fake classes, fake grades, piece of cake.

If, as at Chapel Hill, the system occasionally breaks down and reveals itself to the world… Well, point one, the world already knew and doesn’t care; and point two, there is no point two.

And if, in a class action suit against the NCAA’s refusal to pay athletes for the commercial use of their names, the athletes’ lawyers point out that the only justification for this refusal – universities are providing athletes with an education – is a total joke (see above)…. Well, the NCAA has lawyers too. I’m sure they can get around this somehow. Still, it’s fun to read stuff like this:

The athletes are using the [Chapel Hill] case to contest the NCAA’s claim that the athletes were getting a meaningful education in exchange for helping universities and the NCAA make millions of dollars from their exploits on the football field or basketball court.

This week, Mary Willingham, the UNC learning specialist who blew the whistle on the lecture-style classes that never met, was named as a witness for the attorneys representing current and former college athletes in a class-action suit against the NCAA. The lawsuit is commonly known as the O’Bannon case, after former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon. He sued after seeing his likeness being used in EA sports video games without being paid.

The case, nearly 5 years old, has a trial date in June. Michael Hausfeld, one of the attorneys representing the athletes, said Willingham’s experiences as a former learning specialist for the athletes’ support program, plus her research into the academic abilities of those athletes, make her a strong witness. She would counter the NCAA’s claims that athletes can be barred from being paid for their athletic efforts because the universities are providing them an education.

“The NCAA is arguing that it is necessary to impose restraints on the athletes because in doing so, it promotes the integration of academics and athletics,” Hausfeld said. “We think that’s patently false, and we have other statistics that demonstrate that very vividly. Mary adds a personal experience which further highlights the falsity of that representation.”

I mean WHOOOPS. You forgot the educate them part!

But then, who could blame you? Ain’t nothing around here that looks like a university.

Really? Well, shut ma mouth.

[Mary] Willingham … has said in interviews that she has received death threats and hate mail. [University of North Carolina Chapel Hill] police spokesman Randy Young said investigators have contacted her and “are responding appropriately.”

Why must Willingham die? Because she said this.

… Willingham said her research of 183 football or basketball players at UNC from 2004-12 found 60 percent reading at fourth- to eighth-grade levels and roughly 10 percent below a third-grade level. She said she worked with one men’s basketball player early in her 10-year tenure who couldn’t read or write.