Sang Bonnie Raitt – one of my favorite songs back when… Can’t find it on YouTube, but believe me it was sweet…
Okay, so best I can do is Joe Cocker…
Yes, forgiveness of the $19 million worth of loans it not long ago got from the university sure would be sweet, says scandal-ridden University of Colorado’s latest athletic director to its board of regents…
The AD himself is barely getting by at $700,000 a year plus up to $8.5 million in bonuses but has magnanimously kicked in some of that money (won’t say how much) to his program’s endowment… For which oh God thank you Mr Athletic Director! You are our hero! It’s incredibly selfless of you to take a bit of the money Colorado gave you when it gave you the highest administrative salary in the history of the institution and give it back! Lord Bountiful!
Still, that pesky nineteen mill remains to be paid back. And things don’t look good revenue-wise.
I’m sure the regents can figure this one out. Jack up tuition like mad so that the athletics department doesn’t have to pay its debt to the school.
That was August 2011. Saunders, after an error-studded term of just three years, is gone and the new stadium (FAU’s a public university; don’t Florida taxpayers care about anything?) is a morgue.
So Saunders was just off by a few letters: Instead of everybody coming to the games, it’s nobody.
Oh no, no. Football’s not about violence. It wouldn’t be on university campuses if it were about violence.
Say it ain’t so! Two absolutely filthy university football programs meet on the field! Homicidal Hazers v. Tressel’s Prayer Group! C’mon! Everything about this match-up was exciting and fun. The score says a lot of it: 76 – 0, with Tressel’s disciples edging out FAMU’s merry band…
FAMU’s actual band, the famous one that kills its musicians, wasn’t there, despite everyone having been real excited about a match-up between Ohio State’s musicians and FAMU’s during half-time…
[A] hazing death in the FAMU band around the time the OSU contract was signed meant the band is just getting back on its feet now.
Just getting back on its feet… Sweet way to put it… The band’s long-ignored violent rituals finally ended up killing someone… But it’s getting back on its feet again, struggling up like little Colin in A Secret Garden! It’s not that FAMU’s embarrassed that when its bloody band takes the field Ohio fans will add insult to shutout by chanting things, as fans are wont to do…
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Oh, and the whole thing is even prettier than that.
The Florida A&M athletic department is digging out of a $6 million deficit. [And it] is looking for its 10th athletic director in the past 11 years.
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If it’s true that spectacles of this quality are going away, UD is afraid she might not be renewing her decades-long season tickets to such riveting autumnal all-American delights, these front porches of our universities, where what’s best about our academic institutions is broadcast all over the country and to the world.
But you know what? UD‘s been covering American university football for years, and she is absolutely – absolutely – certain that the guy in her headline, the guy trying to scare her, is wrong.
Cornell, you’re as cold as ice. Simply because your lacrosse players force alcohol down freshmen, you shutter the team! Lacrosse, hazing, and alcohol have always gone together – ask George Huguely – and any university that expects a winning team without bonding rituals rooted in proud histories has another thing coming.
Florida Atlantic University’s desperation to get people to come to its new stadium grows. As a local columnist pointed out during the prison-naming fiasco, “[FAU] built a $70 million facility that’s nearly empty year-round, even during home football games.”
Specifics? You’re looking at four thousand people scattered around 30,000 seats. And remember how it goes: Four thousand show up… Game doesn’t look promising after a half hour or so… Two thousand begin leaving… The two thousand left stay because they’re too drunk to walk…
Better keep the stadium swimming pools shallow, or you’ll drown your students… Remember Chico State!
It all adds up to a massive police state – nanny state – presence at the games. Two hundred armed police glare at two thousand drunk and despondent (team lost; alcohol’s a depressant) students furiously slashing at the water in their baby pools…
The degradation of being president of hopeless-loser New Mexico State University.
… that Les UDs watched the other night, UD set about looking for ways to visualize American university football. She set about looking for visual equivalents of a situation that everyone realizes is totally, totally nuts.
The BBC thing got her thinking, because it represented a clever solution to an obvious problem: How do you make visually compelling a massive and impossible to grasp abstraction (infinity)? How do you make visually compelling a bunch of unkempt mathematicians and physicists droning about a massive abstraction?
The producers solved the problem by doing things like putting one of the mathematicians on a trampoline and filming him bouncing up and down while his voice-over droned.
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True, bouncing on a trampoline has nothing to do with infinity, but it was something to watch while the mathematician droned.
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Everyone talks about the sickening farce of university football, and there are always new books coming out chock-full of shocking language about the farce… And there are routine visuals of players’ and coaches’ mugshots and their long days in court… routine visuals of the brand-new cost-overrun stadium on game day with 10,000 rather than 60,000 fans in it (two or three thousand at the very end of the shut-out)… routine viral YouTubes of the interview with the coach who earns five million dollars a year by telling the national press to fuck itself. Yes, there are these, and many things like these.
Yet all are small separate clips that don’t capture in a meaningful, artful, way the full reality of university football — neither the way it impoverishes and degrades intellectual institutions, nor the way campus officials from the president on down smilingly and excitedly assure us that things are great, or they will be great in a minute.
So UD looked for an extended, precise, visual evocation of the situation of university football in America.
As she thought about it, she remembered a favorite film of her mother’s – Bread and Chocolate – which featured a scene of Italian guest workers in Switzerland living in a chicken coop.
What my mother loved about the scene was the smiling, proud, and excited way the covered-with-feathers proprietor of this shelter welcomed the film’s hero to it.
You don’t need to understand Italian to understand 1:17:00 to 1:25:00 in this film. These few minutes from this film capture the proud coach welcoming you to his excellent university, where football is, as everyone says, the “front porch” of the institution. Are things less than totally ideal? Less than perfect according to some impossible standard? But of course!
But look at the beautiful campus big-time football has given us! What better proof of the way football unites us all in school pride! How lucky we are to live in this sports paradise.
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The analogy falls short in this way: The guest worker paid for his dwelling by working on the chicken farm. All of us, one way or another, pay real money, through the nose, to maintain America’s system of university football.
… has done it again.
Brainless, amusing, and bizarre, like some beyond-woebegone character in Evelyn Waugh, FSU (follow its tales-of-the-weird history by typing FSU into my search engine) has now generated a healthy trade in t-shirts depicting its quarterback as Jesus Christ.
Look for the crucifixion scene t-shirt once the NCAA gets wind of this.
All four [Vanderbilt University football players] await trial on Oct. 16 and are free on bond. [Jaborian] McKenzie even transferred to Alcorn State University in Mississippi and played in the team’s season opener. However, the university president said he was removed from the team Thursday night and the school had made a mistake allowing him on.
Well excuuuuuuuuse me!
197
Reported instances of players on BCS teams who were arrested in 2012 — an average of 16 per month. The SEC led all conferences in arrests with 42, followed by the Big 12 with 37. Fewer than a quarter of the 197 arrests resulted in players being kicked off their teams. Only one player was arrested more than once and wasn’t dismissed from his team or suspended for at least a game. Florida State running back James Wilder Jr. Wilder has been arrested three times, and has yet to miss a game. He has played in both Florida State games this season.
Here’s the photo I want you to have in mind as you read the following summary of the Scott Eaton story at Northern Kentucky University. I want you to see how dressed for success the guy is, how he’s doing the Number One thing that Joe Paterno’s statue does (did), how next to him on a presentation board there’s the slogan BUILDING WINNERS FOR LIFE rather than, say, STEALING FROM YOUR SCHOOL AND FUCKING EVERY FEMALE IN SIGHT. I want you to think about how many American universities, as they sport up, fervently embrace and abundantly pay and abundantly esteem douchebags like Scott Eaton.
Smiling sweet-smelling Scott Eaton who came to pathetic NKU knowing he couldn’t do anything for it but that it could do plenty for him, and immediately began his sex and money extravaganza.
He did it for years, too, and that’s onaccounta no one cared, no one understood, some people were being cut in on the deal, some people were too scared to speak up about The Athletic Director, etc.
Dumb, pathetic, desperate schools like Northern Kentucky University are sitting ducks, and their desperate athletic programs are set up to attract people like Scott Eaton, who know losers for life when they see them.
During the Dominique Strauss-Kahn business, a writer for the New Yorker noted the anxiety with which “many in Paris” are witnessing “the ‘Italianization’ of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…” Their country after all had not long ago produced (just like Italy) an accused rapist as a leading candidate for political office. Strauss-Kahn came close to being president; Silvio Berlusconi, convicted of tax fraud and sex with an under-age prostitute, was Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister.
UD has always been intrigued by the ways in which states fall into depravity, and the way they care about that (the French care, according to the New Yorker writer) and don’t care about that (the Italians don’t care). Italy is so depraved, and so indifferent to its depravity, that Italianization has become a globally portable noun, toted around to designate a national culture’s relaxed descent into moral turpitude.
Richard Rorty, in his philosophical essays about postmodernism, expressed anxiety about the Italianization of the United States. He routinely described us as “rich, fat, tired North Americans,” cynical about all of our institutions, and sinking back, in the absence of belief in the possibility of social improvement, into our comforting consumer goods (Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise, is the best fictional evocation of this cultural mood).
But that was only our high culture, Rorty was quick to caution; our elites – financial, intellectual – are Italianizing, as in figures like Lawrence Summers, who despite his remarkable moral grubbiness, seems set to become our next federal reserve chair. (Hm. Not so fast, UD.)
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One way to understand the Oklahoma State University story is to suggest that Italianization has now invaded our great plains states, the country’s symbolic center of rectitude.
Look at Iowa’s long-serving senatorial scold, Charles Grassley, and tell me whether, when you look at him, you can think of anything but rigidly upright stands of wheat. Then look at this dude. The expression on President Obama’s face says it all.
So traditionally America – especially America’s heartland – was the exception, the clean place, the corny, cock-eyed optimist of nations, with the corniest locale the plains of Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. “Blondie and his frau out of the plain states came!” says cruel sophisticated George, mocking the newly arrived wholesome faculty couple in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Now that the plains states are epicenters of football scandal (yes, given structural corruption, there are plenty of other football scandal locations), you see the beginnings of Paris-style anxiety about Italianization even on the plains.
From Penn State to the Miami scandal to Johnny Manziel’s autograph saga to alleged violations at top college football programs across the country, the NCAA has never faced more “culture” issues than it does today.
“Culture” here designates not merely the corruption itself (everyone knows college football is rancid), but indifference to it, everyone’s fine Italian hand waving away any embarrassment or shock over the fact that Nick Saban, recipient of $5.3 million a year from one of the poorest states in the union, routinely tells journalists to shut up when they ask about his dirty program. (“Nick Saban, the Alabama coach, stamped out of one news conference last week like a petulant child, all because reporters dared to do their jobs. He would talk about the football game, not the system of big-time college football, the system that made him rich and famous. Never that.”) Just like Joe Paterno, this guy’s got a fucking statue! These guys are our heroes!
UD’s pretty confident that Saban’s statue will meet the same fate as Paterno’s… But maybe not. Maybe by the time the massive Alabama scandal hits, the process of Italianization will have advanced to the point where no one gives a shit.
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Anyway, my point is that the plains were our last bastion. Now it’s pomo meh. Meh. Rape at Montana, rape at Colorado, pimping at Oklahoma, drugs at Iowa, meh. The plain-spoken plains have spoken. They’re on board. Benvenuto!
Sucky splashy particles are about to fall on Kansas State University as a result of the Oklahoma State explosion.
