… has these sports teams, see, and some of them are ever so slightly at odds with that ethos… UD has already told you about their hiring as assistant basketball coach Kevin Broadus, a major player in the disgusting SUNY Binghamton scandal… AND that on his official Georgetown page the school has allowed him to expunge all reference to that history.

Add to that Georgetown’s own Mike Rice, as in the current allegations that the school’s women’s basketball coach has a propensity to bully his players.

All utterly typical big-time university sports shit, except that Georgetown thinks it’s better than that.

… (see background here), we are going to need armories and we are going to need shooting ranges, by way of preparing campus police for crowd control.

Crowd control, in the current context of big-time university sports (start at 1:56), increasingly means keeping people inside the stadium or arena until the game is over.

One way to do this would be to use your tanks and guns to intimidate people into staying. Occasionally, you might have to fire (non-lethal) materials.

Ideally, these armories/shooting ranges would themselves be arenas and stadiums, so that university security personnel could get a realistic sense of crowd, uh, containment.

One central location UD proposes for a national armory of this sort would be Cleveland State University’s Wolstein Center. Like many excitedly built university stadiums (CSU was excited because one of its teams did well one year, and the trustees decided that before you knew it CSU would be king of the world, so they needed a new stadium), this one is an empty, money hemorrhaging mess.

After getting the latest year-end financial report, which again showed a $1 million loss, [CSU] trustees today said the university has to examine all options, even those as improbable as demolishing it.

But whoa! How about renting it out to universities all over the country (world?) for practice? With Berkeley having recently rejected an eight-ton armored truck as “not the best choice for a university setting,” we can anticipate industry offering a line of university-appropriate heavy weaponry – tanks in soft shades, with quotations from Virginia Woolf on them… Some of these could be gathered at Wolstein for use by any university interested in learning how to keep students in their seats.

CSU’s big competition is Florida Atlantic University. FAU is not only located in Florida rather than Ohio, but has a much bigger empty stadium (30,000 vs. 13,000 seats). CSU will have to act fast to secure market share.

OSU can see the trend as well as anyone else. When you’ve given everything your university has to football, it’s pretty important that people go to the games.

But people aren’t going to the games.

Which makes you, a university, a school, really, rather than a playing field, look pretty fucking stupid.

What to do?

Current stop-gap measures are incentive-based (see post below): Give students who stay in the stands two thousand dollars. If students promise to stay at least until halftime give them free drinks, free burgers, a stuffed toy, Legos.

But people tend to resent, after awhile, being infantilized. They tend to catch on to what’s happening.

This is where the Ambush vehicle comes in. The moment students start pouring out of a stupid pointless game, just roll that baby to the middle of the field and slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, revolve her turret… Give fans a good view of the big guy (one of the players?) up there on her “roof-mounted shielded traversing gun turret able to fit a 7.62 mm medium or 12.7mm heavy class machine gun.” They’ll get the message without your having to fire one shot!

Wussy little Berkeley ain’t biting yet.

Last year, when University of California-Berkeley campus police tried to buy an 8-ton armored truck, university officials canceled the order, saying such a vehicle was “not the best choice for a university setting.”

But give it time. You know how guys are when it comes to having the best toys.

Students don’t go to football games; or they go and then leave after twenty minutes. Some universities burger and booze students to make them stay put; New Mexico State University pays them.

… ESPN host Keith Olbermann lambasted NMSU President Carruthers as the worst person in the sports world.

“In NCAA college football you can pay the coaches, you can pay the ADs, you can pay the announcers, yet you can’t pay the players, but now you can pay the fans too!” an outraged Olbermann told his ESPN audience. “New Mexico State University’s Garrey ‘We-will-bribe-you-to-sit-through-this-garbage’ Carruthers. Today’s worst person in the sports world.”

What glorious things our universities have turned into.

… is upon us, which is why, you might notice, UD‘s been covering one story after another about spectacular turnouts at these all-important early games. Georgia State University, for instance, has 32,000 students.

A few minutes before the start of the game, there were less than 70. Overall, I would estimate less than 300 showed up.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Fewer than, not less than.

But that’s but a trifle here.

… but it’s just the latest effort on the part of New Mexico State University to get someone to sit through one of their football games.

[U]niversity President Garrey Carruthers and others have raised money to counter the often dismal student attendance at Aggies (0-4) games.

Among the prizes are $2,000, $250 and a VIP parking pass.

The winner of the $2,000 will be selected from all main campus NMSU students who are taking at least one credit at the school. If the student is there during the fourth quarter, he or she will collect the reward. If not, the prize money will be saved for the next game.

The Aggies have lost 15 straight games and have been beaten by a combined 201-62 this season.

Can you collect if you’re just, like, there? Do you have to be conscious?

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.

To review.