… whoa-woo-woo-way-whacked-out Western Kentucky University go totally trailer trash via its decision in ’06 to join Division I-A football. One of their professors, Robert Dietel, begged them at the time to reconsider, and got shat on thusly by the board of trustees:
Western Kentucky University’s board ran roughshod over faculty regent Robert Dietel last week, as it rushed to embrace Division I-A football…. WKU’s board told Dietel to shut up. Contempt dripped from [one board member]: ‘People on this board dedicate their time for free. They have better things to do than let some university professor just keep talking.’
In 2009, WKU was the only winless team in the country. Moving briskly to 2011, things looked just as bleak. 2012 was all about hiring major gross-out Bobby Petrino as coach, a move hailed as “slime time” by the nation’s sports journalists.
Can you top that???
Yes. For 2013, I give you…
FIVE TOPPERS HAVE BEEN ARRESTED THIS OFFSEASON
And that’s just offseason! Damn season hasn’t even started yet!
And who’s the good ol’ boy gets to talk to the press ’bout how serious he takes moral and legal hoohaw?
Yeah! Billy Bob Bobby!
Div I-A. SCORE!
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UPDATE: Bobby Petrino makes a small appearance in this helpful pre-season rundown of notable plays on SEC teams. UD knows we can expect more of the same this year!
Season of fists and ripe concussedness!
— To alter Keats slightly as UD shares with you her excitement at the prospect of the return of university football… Those who scoff at the notion of student-athletes forget the contribution players make to the philosophy and physiology of violence. If our schools somewhat neglect their players’ brains while they live, this is amply recompensed by the postmortem attention lavished on their cerebral tissue. And the remarkable human wastage on-field prompts high-level discourse on violence. Dan Le Batard writes:
The gladiators who choose this particular career path are often shaped by broken backgrounds that help them arrive at football … with some sharpened and rewarded character traits that might not serve them as much away from the game. It is not a coincidence that the majority of football arrests occur during the offseason, when players have too much free energy and free time away from the [game’s] more disciplined violence …
This is not to suggest all angry, violent men would be good football players; it is to suggest you’ll find a lot of angry, violent ones in some of your best huddles. And football does a hell of a job of not only finding men who live on the edge of acceptable behavior but also feeding and needing them.
Or, as the words emblazoned on a cafeteria wall at the University of Oregon’s just-completed Ministry of War have it: EAT YOUR ENEMIES. Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, the University of Oregon boasts a special room where it fattens its young; but UO goes those stories one better by plastering the room with propaganda. Kill! Kill! Kill!
Le Batard points out the traditional conundrum of university football: You can’t win without significant numbers of unstable violent people on your team; but tip over into too many violent people and you’re going to be in legal trouble.
The last time Colorado was championship good at football, Sports Illustrated reported that one-third of the roster had been arrested. Ohio State went more than four decades without a national championship … until Maurice Clarett. Nebraska went without a national championship for almost a quarter of a century … until Lawrence Phillips. You can find links between arrests and compromised standards and winning all over college football, from those notorious University of Miami champions to the University of Florida ones who had 31 arrests in the brief time Meyer was there.
You can point to outliers, but it is much harder to find big winners without criminal complications than with them. Heck, in 122 years of football, Vanderbilt has been to only four bowl games but two of them have been the past two seasons … as their coach now uses a helicopter to find recruits in the Southeastern Conference . . . and last month had to kick four players off the team for alleged sex crimes.
You begin to understand the symbolic importance of spindly idiots in spectacles and bow ties at the level of the presidency. And cutesy quoters of scripture at the level of coach.
Le Batard concludes that we want “the gladiators [to] be more civil.” But how can that be? We want to watch them eat their enemies. We want them and their enemies to grow bigger and bigger and bigger so that the spectacle of the meal will be bigger and bigger and bigger.
Because something is happening
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones ?
This blog, written in the voice of Emory University’s president, shows you what a well-written satirical blog can do. UD selects the excerpt in her headline because over the years she’s heard variants of this statement from a host of overpaid university heads. I didn’t ask for this salary; the trustees set my salary; they insist on it…
These are people who spend their days and nights telling students to be independent thinkers, to become morally autonomous… Yet when it comes to the symbolically and practically important matter of their own compensation they’re suddenly sucklings. These tend to be same people who say ol’ T. Boone and Phil Knight insist that most of their billions go toward football, dammit, and there’s nothing we can do.
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UD thanks Carl.
A fascinating letter exchange is going on in the pages of the Roanoke Times about America’s Number Four party school.
It started innocently enough, with a caution to Virginia Tech fans as football season starts up.
West Virginia University has done nothing to curb the violent behavior of their fans and Virginia Tech has been warned of the violence.
Now UD has proposed that West Virginia University – smack dab in the heart of pillbilly territory – stop serving alcohol in the stadium and start unloading Lortabs. But so far no one in Morgantown is listening, so they’ve still got this violence problem.
Anyway, here’s the cascade of refutations. VT’s just as bad. VT fans wear VT gear to WVU games so they’re asking for it. It happens, it’s part of the game I think it makes the game fun (quoting this post’s headline).
It continues, more or less along the same lines, here. Violence, violence, everywhere.
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The War Room. Eat Your Enemies. I mean – hyuk! – don’t take no genius to know why this shit’s happening.
Congratulations, you have an opportunity to become an educated man and play great college football. A University of Virginia degree is one of the most prestigious in America. As the head football coach at this University, I want to formerly extend a scholarship offer to you.
Over the last decade, local debt in the Lone Star State has more than doubled, growing at twice the rate of inflation plus population growth. At the moment, Texas localities owe $63 billion for education funding — 155 percent more than they did a decade ago, though student enrollment and inflation during that period grew less than one-third as quickly. The borrowing has also paid for a host of expensive new athletic facilities, such as a $60 million high school football stadium, complete with video scoreboard, in the Dallas suburb of Allen.
… Grambling State University?
“The athletics department runs at a $1 million-plus deficit on an annual basis. In the past we’ve taken those funds from the academic side and directed it toward athletics. This year (2012-13), we had to take it from auxiliary services — that’s student dining, the bookstore and dorms. We can’t do that again.”
In a separate case also filed last week, [former Midland University athletic director Jason] Dannelly is accused of giving a 20-year-old student athlete $300 to have sex with him. An affidavit in that case said that Dannelly was empowered to arrange work study jobs for student athletes.
… The Nation. A Summer Institute of Civic Studies participant, Jim Scheibel, sent it to Mr UD. Excerpts:
…We hike the fees and we re-prioritize.
It’s what you do in a race to the bottom.
We lay on handmaidens and academic tutors and personal chefs for our MVPs –
everything ,and the great lunks still pass out at traffic lights…
… We award our sports coaches ius primae noctis (for wins only)
Plus 40,000 square foot pasteboard-and-marble mansions on prime lakeside real estate,
with green lights at the end of their private piers.
Throw in a motorboat and some stables or else we’re uncompetitive…
“The biggest suggestion from me, for the 125 Division I football programs, let’s all invest in NCAA infractions and compliance and let’s have an officer on every campus,” [University of Miami coach Al] Golden said. “You’ll find then that there’s a lot of coaches that want to coach life skills, want to teach leadership, want to teach kids what they need to be successful in every facet of their life, that want education, that are teaching it the right way.
“It doesn’t mean we’re less competitive and that’s a part of the fabric of the United States of America, to be competitive. We’re trying to teach life skills and learning in every endeavor. And I think they would see our mission and our value and our goals are commiserate with theirs.”
It was 2009, and UD was so disgusted by what he said that she transcribed the gist of it and put it on her blog. Here it is.
College athletics is today the healthiest I’ve ever seen it. Everything’s looking great. Everyone here should be celebrating the positive values of university sports. We’ve learned we can be the great success we are and at the same time we can govern ourselves. We don’t need to be governed by outsiders. We’ve made incredible progress on all fronts. Enthusiasm and excitement and participation and profit is at an all-time high. Yes, escalating salaries stress the system. Yes, we continue to be challenged with our expenses. But these things are out of our control. Every one of these expenditures is necessary. We live in a market society, and we have to respond to market conditions.
Curley was then athletic director at Penn State. Things were just peachy at Penn State, said Curley. Tomorrow Curley will try telling that to a judge. Peachy! Far as he knew.
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If you go to my original Knight Commission blog post, you will see that right after Curley spoke, Robert Zemsky gave him hell. This is what Zemsky, an historian, said:
Trying to describe the place of athletics in the larger context of higher education is like trying to describe a burnt-out desert. You see, this discussion today — it isn’t going anywhere. We came here to talk about cost-containment, and it isn’t going anywhere. And that’s because any sense of values is missing.
Since you people don’t have any values, you put the marketplace up as the only thing that matters. That’s why you’re not ever going to reform at all. You’re part of the general loss of aura, loss of particularity, at our universities in America. Football on your campus is just like the NFL, you say, and, see, you’re proud of it. So what makes you a college? Absolutely nothing.
Used to be universities were supposed to be like churches — separate, special places, dedicated to higher things. They’re not special anymore. They’re just like any other business. So why tenure? Why tax exemptions? Look at Harvard and places like that. University endowments aren’t charitable donations; they’re hedge funds. University presidents make million dollar salaries, just like other CEOs.
It all tears at the fabric of the specialness of the university. You’ve all helped make that happen. Since you’ve been in business, things have gotten a whole lot worse. The university athletics engine will certainly stop running. But it will never reform itself. It’ll just run out of gas.
UD knows why he was so scathing. Like UD, like anyone in that room with even a bit of brain activity, a bit of decency, something short of total cynical venality, he was angry, insulted, and, having been given the floor, he was going to use it.
After Zemsky spoke, the president of the worst university in America stood up.
I resent this negativity. Why, at the University of Georgia we’ve got a heck of a program…
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It was an event UD will never forget. Of course Zemsky was numerically overwhelmed by the jockmeisters. The Knight Commission is where the jockmeisters get jiggy, all team spirit and tommyrot. Those of us in attendance who cared about the rot rolled our eyes and groaned as Curley delivered his pep talk. We had been invited to witness the bright-eyed depravity of American university football and basketball, and here it was, in the aspect of this trim elegantly suited man with his Happy Valley patter.
Of course the crucial figure at this event was not this clown, but University of Georgia president Michael Adams. Here after all was an academic figure, the academic figure, the equivalent of Penn State’s president Graham Spanier — Spanier, who will also be doing a song and dance in front of a judge tomorrow. Adams – chief academic officer, gravitas-man, Big Think defender of the athletic status quo.