UD often finds poetry in the comments section of articles about big-time sports. This morsel appears after an article that has Urban Meyer, doting dad of Aaron Hernandez and fellow troubled tots at the University of Florida, sermonizing about how we’re all being terribly judgmental and “irresponsible” to recall Urban’s crime-clogged time at that school. How dare everyone suggest, in light of Hernandez’s murder charges, that Meyer’s recruitment and retention policies at UF somehow enabled Hernandez in his life of crime!
Like Jim Tressel, Urban Meyer is a man of God.
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When cornered, hide behind God.
When truly cornered, hide behind the little women.
… down by the Riverside.
A UC Riverside professor looks at the very simple, very stark numbers and comes to the obvious conclusion. Time to lay your burdens down.
… UCR’s athletic program is costing students $3.3 million dollars (2011), and the university $8.4 million dollars.
Ticket sales? $96,322, or well under 1% of the program’s cost.
Contributions? $623,561, or about 5% of the program’s cost.
In the last five years, UCR has seen large academic budget cuts, furloughs, on-and-off freezes on hiring, a huge rise in temporary faculty, and ongoing cuts in staff. Student advisors, for example, handle 400 to 600, or even more, students each. Yet athletic spending never stopped growing, and the university is now spending over $11m annually of state and student funds, according to the NCAA’s figures, on athletics — and that’s before the costs constructing and operating a new facility.
… [T]he NCAA as a whole is mired in scandal at a time when most universities don’t make back more than a fraction of what they spend on Division I (see Rutgers for examples of both), and big-ticket athletics is getting more and more costly every year. When staff has to ration their services to students, when faculty have to pay for their own office telephone lines, and when students have to pay more and more every year, the ever-rising additional cost of participating in Division I rather than Division II seems like a luxury we simply can’t afford.
That scandal thing is important. It’s rarely mentioned when people talk about what big-time sports are doing to this university or that, when they talk about specific dollar costs here and particular academic frauds there. This professor reminds us that we should never forget, as we focus upon the latest Penn State, that the largest picture here involves a lucrative, fully corrupt, and fully cynical industry centered in the NCAA.
Indeed, Americans are well on their way to fashioning some of their universities after the even more cynical and corrupt professional sports organizations.
Look at the University of Georgia, which will almost certainly choose a new president with the same total-insider commitment to the NCAA as the last one had. The University of Georgia, whose post-tailgate filth routinely destroys the campus and really who gives a shit.
I mean, few people on campus give a shit; when sports is all you care about, the despoiling of an academic institution by gallons of piss left after thousands of drunks careen back into their cars after games is nothing. So what.
Yet there is a larger world out there, watching this; and, of course, every year, as the stakes get higher and things get more corrupt, the scandal-factor grows. UD has predicted that in not too many years coaches will on some campuses be promoted to university president – an obvious move, an obvious acknowledgement of their financial, institutional, and political power. Academics at such places will become even more laughable than they already are; coaching salaries will soar; violent players – now treated not as demi-gods but as gods – will get even more difficult to handle.
Mild warning shots of the sort we’re getting from people like this UCR professor will be ignored, ridiculed, dismissed. It will be interesting to see, as universities sustain far more serious fusillades, whether attention will eventually be paid.
… that you realize just how beautiful life at big-time sports schools like the University of Florida is. Hushing up the beatings that players mete out around campus is of course business as usual at such places, and only when one of your players goes on, a few years later, to be charged with murder (I wonder if that would have happened if instead of hushing up the guy’s early beatings, the university had taken the behavior seriously… But… you know… he was an important part of the team’s winning record, and there’s a lot of money riding on that record…) do you run the risk of news organizations digging up the hushing up…
Tim Tebow attempted to keep Aaron Hernandez out of trouble during a 2007 bar squabble while both were playing at the University of Florida, but not even the mild-mannered, Bible-toting quarterback could keep the hot-headed tight end from slugging a Gainesville, Fla., restaurant manager and puncturing his ear drum.
Still, after Tebow’s efforts failed, it appears the school or football program might have gotten Hernandez off the hook by reaching a settlement with the manager to keep him from pursuing charges, according to a supplemental investigation report on the altercation obtained by USA TODAY Sports.
Once you’ve learned, courtesy of the University of Florida, that you can get away with breaking someone’s ear drum because he asked you to pay for drinks you bought at his bar, I guess you figure you can get away with anything.
One more glorious tale of collegiate life in America.
In the age of technology and mass media, HD televisions are closer to the “real thing” than ever, and more games are available on television than ever before. Some universities, such as Michigan State, Georgia and even Alabama have noticed a disturbing trend of fans leaving games early to renew their “buzz” and watch from the comfort of their own home. The sale of alcohol could be a preventative course of action for this problem.
Read here, reader, of its ivied walls and hallowed halls.
… unusual.
Many are the adjectives used to describe big-time university sports. UD likes “unusual,” as used by Frank Deford:
We in the U.S. think, nostalgically, of athletics as integral to higher education, but perhaps they’re so unusual that they should be entirely separated from the academic and simply turned into an honest commercial adjunct.
In making this increasingly popular proposal, Deford chooses (from dozens and dozens of examples) to talk about the University of North Carolina at Wilmington:
The University of North Carolina, Wilmington provides a typical recent case. The Seahawks field teams in 19 Division One sports, but unfortunately, like many colleges, UNCW athletics are in the red, so the chancellor, Gary L. Miller, assembled a committee, which recommended the elimination of five sports: men’s and women’s swimming, men’s cross country and indoor track and softball.
Well, that produced a firestorm, especially with swimming, which has won the conference 12 years in a row and, which, financially, is about on budget. Now, by contrast, the basketball team has a deficit of a million dollars; the coach himself earns almost a half million a season, notwithstanding that the team lost two-thirds of its games and is academically on probation.
UD is aware that the only problem in this scenario, from the point of view of millions of Americans, is that the coach only makes half a million. But Deford is arguing that he could make ever so much more than most of us could even imagine if we freed him from the pointless restraints of universities.
“Let alumni and local businesses pay for sports,” says Deford. Do that, and the sky’s the limit.
(Put football colorado in my search engine.)
But at least now it’s bankrupting the school.
Excerpts from editorial commentaries at the Daily Camera:
If we think of football as a business, as we should, we should expect the campus CEO to tender his resignation.
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CU entered a new stage of crisis when it fired [AD] Mike Bohn. That event was more cumulative than singular, a headstone on twenty years of embarrassment… Now we learn, thanks to Camera digging, that the athletic department ran a $7.5 million loss last year, including $2.9 million in one-time buyouts and a $3.3 million collapse in ticket sales.
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Interim Athletic Director Ceal Barry stated, “We need to look at efficiencies”. Current inefficiencies include $9.8 million in football coach’s severance packages, the $1.3 million overrun in “miscellaneous expenses” and the $1 million in renovation of football coaching offices! There are 23 football coaches and directors. Men and women’s basketball has six coaching posts each, skiing five and women’s tennis two.
The farcical University of Southern Mississippi is being helmed by a bunch of big strong men who know exactly what they’re doing. The school’s very president turns out to be a major jocksman who – now that he’s prez – is gonna jigger things so that that pesky ol’ million plus athletics deficit is gonna be gone with the wind just you wait and see. He’s hired a really expensive search firm (for the fourth athletic director) and he’s paying coach Vince Dooley to advise and … well, all this extra expenditure and personnel turnover is gonna make the deficit disappear!
How degrading is it to be a professor at West Virginia University?
Well two of the school’s, er, troubled coaches (the predecessor of one of them was Rick Rodriguez of sainted memory) are getting enormous raises on top of their enormous salaries, while because of “a $13 million cut in state funding to the school … tuition [will] be raised and no pay raises [will] be forthcoming for university employees.”
This writer suggests that these wildly overcompensated coaches (neither has won many games lately) “could donate [their raises] for pay raises to university employees,” but you know how that goes. Greed has no limit in the lovely world of big-time university athletics. Reread the Wikipedia page on Rodriguez if you’re in any doubt.
The writer concludes:
The point is, that we have reached a point in time where some independent outside panel should look into the finances of the school and the athletic department, a thorough and comprehensive study that includes all financial areas, including [AD Oliver] Luck’s travel and the dealings over the athletic department’s Tier 3 negotiations, the reseating within the Coliseum and the raise in the required donations for football seats, all of which has stirred up what had been a loyal public.
This entire mess has grown to such proportions and entangles both the university’s finances and the athletic department’s finances, creating a situation where a soccer coach finds a way to get a new locker room built, where a football coach gets a new weight room to go with a raise and a $300,000 retention bonus next year but a math professor can’t get a three percent raise that someone has to come in and work it out.
Well, but you have to keep in mind the nature of the institution. You’re talking about America’s number one party school. Number one! So who’s that someone gonna come in and work it out? A public university doesn’t get to the top of that list without a concerted, statewide effort.
No, as that ridiculous thing, a professor at West Virginia University, you’re in a hopeless situation. UD‘s advice: Seek respectable employment.
Yet another Pravda (this one The Coloradan) pumps out propaganda about a university’s athletic program. What a wonderful world it will be when the Colorado State University football team makes us an intellectually great, financially profitable institution! Comrade Jack (the article refers to the latest AD by his first name – ‘Under Jack’s Watch’ – because he is your friend, your buddy, one of you…) and his vast new $250 million stadium (that’s the cost estimate — we know how that goes) and plentiful new administrative assistants will make everything better. Although our attendance figures are pretty pathetic, he will make them perfect by increasing the number of available seats and raising ticket prices. He will bring a “new way of looking at college athletics,” in which athletics is the front porch of the university (you’ve never heard that one before!) and the AD spends the university’s money like a drunken sailor (also unprecedented!).