Maybe they’re waiting for a less corrupt, violent, and generally disgusting program with which to affiliate themselves. UD finds it strange that local booster-journalists think everyone will come out to celebrate morally despicable teams. Because, you know, often they won’t.
[Time] to grab hold of the third rail of Arkansas politics — athletic spending at the [University of Arkansas]. It’s a good time to do it. When the Hog football team is winning, no one dare utter a word about the sloppy, secretive and sometimes shady practices in the athletic kingdom… A big chunk of its money is laundered through the secretive Razorback Foundation… The money wouldn’t exist but for the university and its athletic department. But it is often spent in ways out of reach of public inspection. And sometimes, the numbers don’t match up.
By the way: The Razorback Foundation rarely responds at all to questions about its business…
American university football: The most perverted product of Western culture since The Story of O.
As college football stadiums around America get emptier by the minute, we need writers like Dave Bratcher to remind us why we so love those Saturdays in the fall.
As we made our way into the stadium, a few things struck me. These things are applicable to life and need to be mentioned. Across the United States, Saturdays in the fall remind us of what true equality looks like, teach us why keeping score is important, and loyalty is not to be taken lightly.
When fans show up to cheer on their respective teams, discussions about race, religion, wealth, or family lineage do not factor into the discussion. The things which sometimes divide us, even on Sunday morning, are completely irrelevant on Saturday. Nobody cares what color, what church, how much money, or who their parents are. The identifying factors and circumstances of our lives are completely forgotten about when the teams take the field. This is to be praised.
Guess ol’ Dave missed the $100,000 per box luxury seating! Look up, Dave! See the rich people up there, divided behind glass enclosures from the yahoos? Only the rich people in the stadium get to drink alcohol, Dave! These things are applicable to life and need to be mentioned.
What you gonna do when she is gone?
If you’re the University of Alabama, famed for your rabid fans and regally compensated coach, you’re going to “review photos and video of the [student] section during games to determine which organizations are leaving early and violators could have block seating privileges taken away.”
So, uh, let’s step back and review.
Although we are assured that fan rabidity is positively mythic at Alabama (you can’t walk for all the statues of coaches all over campus; watch for Penn State’s toppled Paterno statue to be re-erected with full honors at UA), everybody walks out once it’s clear the team has won the game. In the most recent case, victory was obvious well before half-time, see, and the stands emptied…
But get a load of those stands! Part of the wild carefree business of being a Bama fan is constant electronic surveillance. Whee! And just so you know, kiddo — Your school is watching your every move, and if you leave your fucking seat your name is entered on UA’s Enemies of the Tide list and you will be punished. Okay? ‘Kay?
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UD has written a good deal – and she will write more as the problem intensifies – about what she calls fantasms: the vanishing fans of university football. She has suggested some remedies for the situation short of UA’s (and other schools’) petty and doomed-to-fail procedures. (What do all the cameras pick up when they’re filming – for a national audience – students who don’t want to be there? Students who are drunk and displeased? Expect an uptick in mooning.)
Short of the placement in the stands of animatronic fans (not all universities will want to go this route), UD sees no alternative to the use of drones. The Phantom (Fantom?) Drone is available at Amazon for under five hundred dollars and can, with, say, five or so others, continually buzz the student section in such a way as to make use of any mounted weaponry unnecessary.
… can be found here, at Inside Higher Ed.
Body of article:
[One LSU student and] many of her friends skipped the game to study for midterms that started Monday.
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Well, now at least we know what the problem is.
Solution: Stop giving midterms.
And this was Florida-LSU! This is a huge rivalry game that holds major SEC implications each season.
I guess HDTV and air conditioning wins out but that just makes me sad.
Words of wisdom from a colleague of UD‘s.
… It’s easy to sit back and pontificate about why so many players are violent, both on and off the field, or how they ended up with ruined lives. We often blamed the players themselves. “They were irresponsible men, or had bad agents, girlfriends, wives who took advantage of them,” we explained. We blamed everything but the game itself for so many ruined lives and serious psychological problems.
… We have all made a very comfortable living off the game and the backs of men like Harry Carson, Tony Dorsett and Junior Seau.
Whoa, look out. The budgets of many universities rest on the recruitment and use of young men as football players.
American university sports events get more and more violent, so much so that it wasn’t much of a story when, last year at this time, Syracuse University was host to multiple fights and one stabbing at their “Orange Madness” opening basketball event of the season. Police swarmed the building and everyone was ushered out before the event was scheduled to end because security couldn’t control all the fights.
Big deal. The life of the mind.
But yeah sure, as the chancellor said up there in my headline, we promise to do better next year.
So here we are and “how could this happen?” asks the local paper. How could it happen that Syracuse University, in designing this “family friendly” event to prevent last year’s violence, hired Ace Hood? Ace Hood…
After a night rocking to songs about fucking bitch pussies and shooting the fuck out of everyone with your arsenal, Syracuse will be ready for the football and basketball season!
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UPDATE: Now that we’ve gotten a glimpse into the culture of the Syracuse athletics department and many of its fans (why not hire Ace Hood?), it’s time to cancel his act because a few malcontents object to his brilliant subversive lyrics.
Wonder how much his cancellation fee is. Yet another excellent use of university funds.
Everyone’s wondering who his replacement will be.
How about something for the girls? Rihanna!
Many “students” are little more than cogs in the great NCAA money machine. Sure, they receive their scholarships, and some are serious about their studies, but how much time can they put it on classwork when they are expected to practice, travel across time zones and play at a quasi professional level in order to keep those scholarships?
And what happens to them when they get hurt? Or more often, flunk out? The answers often aren’t pretty.
College sports and the big-time dollars they produce have effects on the core educational mission. When Nike founder Phil Knight builds his alma mater, the University of Oregon, a $68-million “football performance facility,” it is money not spent on a new science or performing arts building. D-III athletes don’t “inadvertently” sell their autographs, like Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel, to memorabilia collectors, nor do our alumni have reason to take the NCAA to court for compensation for use of their likenesses in sanctioned video games.
Attendance is tanking at lots of Division I football games, and UD wonders whether some part of that isn’t simply disgust, scandal fatigue. Americans expect the professional leagues to be disgusting, but there’s a vestigial sense that universities should be better. Amid all the theorizing about why people aren’t going to university football games, there’s maybe this, as the authors of the opinion piece suggest: Our tolerance for the Div I Big Lie is finally starting to weaken.
Empty expensive stadiums and sadistic highly compensated coaches and teams on a permanent crime spree are all well and good; but now Moody’s is warning about Division I schools becoming credit risks, so say goodbye – maybe – to all that fun.
In laying out risk factors to Division I programs, Moody’s cited the increasing use of public subsidies to fund sports, exposure to litigation over head injuries, and the possible movement away from the NCAA amateurism model. Moody’s views future costs as uncertain.
I love that possible movement away…
The amateur tv networks that have taken over amateur Division I sports at our universities will have to bail out these schools when no one will lend any more money to them… At which point tv will call all the shots – not just most of the shots, which they do now. That means they will demand butts in all seats. Viewers hate to see empty stadiums. But how will we do that, the universities will ask their tv guys. Not our problem, the tv guys will say. Meanwhile, each year attendance is effing hemorrhaging .
The university goes to robotics and it goes to engineering and it says to the professors there solve this for us. And they do solve it, they make animatronic students but it’s not cheap, so the university’s athletic division continues to lose zillions every year meaning that they’ve been able to please the tv overlords but they’re still in very bad shape credit-wise…
If they were just sports programs – and not also universities – there wouldn’t be any problem here. You’ve got a certain sort of conduct – verbally violent… sometimes physically violent… – but that’s the norm, that’s how you motivate the little buggers. That’s how you make them angry motherfuckers like you so they want to kill the opposing team. But there’s this teeny vestigial sense at some American universities that qua university they shouldn’t be seen countenancing this sort of thing – that the ethos of a university…
I mean… not that the university itself will ever interfere with its coaches! Noho. But when coaches get so vile that large numbers of players leave the school rather than endure them… Or – God forbid – when players or coaching assistants go public with their complaints… Well then! Ahem! Yes! We’re a university, not a BDSM club (in all of these cases, including the latest one at in-some-obscure-and-actually-no-longer-discernable-way-Jesuit Georgetown University, there are multiple masochists on the team ready to defend their sadist)… We’ve got standards of behavior here…
Oh Giunchigliani really. Go back to Italy or get with the program. You live in Las Vegas, not Parma, man. When your local university has a football program this successful, you spend hundreds of millions on a new stadium. Get it?
Of the panel’s 11 members, only Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani addressed whether there was a need for the stadium. Nearly everyone else in the room — from UNLV President Neal Smatresk to the stadium board chairman Don Snyder — appeared to be poised to build some type of venue… Stadium board member Cedric Crear, a Board of Regents appointee, even went as far to say that a new stadium would “revolutionize our football program. This city wants a winning, big-time football team. I don’t want to be shy about saying that.”
Don’t be shy, Cedric. Say it loud and say it proud.
Even though some Strip casino companies such as MGM Resorts International said the previous stadium proposal of $900 million was too much, Snyder told the Review-Journal after the two-hour meeting that there is no price ceiling.
“Why not?” Snyder said when asked if the new stadium proposal could match the price of the old one.
… “The temptation is to cut out the bells and whistles. When you start cutting costs, there’s a tendency to look like all the other stadiums across the country. Then you get mediocrity and I don’t think mediocrity is acceptable in Las Vegas,” [another booster] said.
The last thing I’d associate with the Las Vegas public education system is mediocrity. The Las Vegas public education system is way, way, below mediocre.