This phrase appears in an angry editorial written by a Florida International University student. The student is embarrassed that since “2006, the football, men’s basketball, soccer and track and field teams, as well as the women’s cross-country and indoor and outdoor track teams have been sanctioned by the NCAA for poor academic performance at least once.” The basketball team’s APR score is so low, it “received a ban from next year’s postseason and a reduction in practice time.”

The writer, however, goes on to call schools like FIU (he also mentions Duke, Ohio State, and the University of Miami) “sports-accomplished.”

I’m familiar with derogatory terms, like jock shop and football factory. I’m impressed that someone has now come up with this positive term.

Ohio State, University of Miami… these schools have accomplished so much…

A school that’s been little other than a school for scandal for as long as UD can remember. Here’s a recent recap of only its very latest scandals.

UNC currently is on probation for wide-ranging major violations in football, including impermissible benefits from agents to players. The football program was given a postseason ban and other serious sanctions, and the scandal led to the firing of football coach Butch Davis, the retirement of athletic director Dick Baddour and ultimately played a role in the resignation of chancellor Holden Thorp.

In addition, the school has been rocked by an academic scandal that centered around bogus classes in the African-American Studies Department. A significant number of athletes – including many football and men’s basketball players – were enrolled in the classes…

With that as context, the timing of a potential legal and NCAA issue involving the leading scorer on the 2012-13 Tar Heels basketball team is hardly ideal.

As another observer puts it:

UNC has become the butt of jokes and the home of collegiate scandals, inquests, NCAA penalties, disgraced university employees, fired professors and departed football coaches, athletics directors and chancellors.

Yet this same observer claims that before this, UNC boasted

centuries of clean living, academic propriety and athletic purity.

Really? Are you prepared to go with that description? I mean, all grody sports schools do this – they all lament a golden age of propriety and purity, now sadly temporarily tarnished… Penn State was amazing on the subject…

Eh. Let ’em.

Let ’em sit in the local bar bawling into their beer about how great and true it used to be.

… Brazilian soccer.

Or, as a commenter on an article about New Mexico State University’s football team puts it, “I will never understand fans from these terrible academic/athletic schools that need to have their teams competing on the highest level just to have their brains beat in.”

Let NMSU stand for dozens of American universities allowing themselves to bleed out as institutions for the sake of big-time football.

Let us once more, on this blog, attempt to understand the masochism that insists – against the simple sanity of one’s own university president, and a state senator – that hurling your expensive team against opponents who will always beat you by ten, twenty, thirty, forty points is a good thing.

I don’t want you to think that anyone from NMSU actually goes to these games. I mean, a few people do, but for most in the NMSU community, group psychosis apparently has its limits. Most people there prefer not to purchase pricey tickets in order to watch the players for their school get their brains bashed in.

At the same time, though, enough NMSU people want to get seasonally excited about new coaches and paradigms and shit that they refuse to let the president and the state senator divert football money toward, uh, education. An anti-intellectual school in an anti-intellectual state, NMSU’s thing is to sit on its ass being stupid while its team gets brained. Our purpose is to figure out why this is.

It’s not the spectacle of the brain bashing itself, since few attend the games. If attendance were good, our problem would be solved: We love gore, and the NMSU football team guarantees it. But people avert their eyes.

Since total massive loss is equally guaranteed, could a campy delectation of failure itself have set in? Are the denizens of NMSU Wildean rascals…?

No. They are sincere, ever-hopeful, dog-like fans.

Here’s the best I can do. The Buddha speaks always of compassion, and what’s going on at NMSU is a communal exemplification of this primary virtue. The hopelessly broken – ever freshly broken – body of this football team exteriorizes for an entire community the first noble truth of human suffering. The team is a precious sacrificial vessel through which, ritualistically, NMSU attains not intellectual but spiritual enlightenment.

No, there are no alternatives; none at all. The outgoing president of obscure Nicholls University (big-time athletics was going to put it on the map, but …) reviews the athletics-generated academic fraud plus APR-score penalties that marked his term in office. (The article is behind a paywall.)

Hulbert complains that “it is hard to fight battles with a state government that takes money away from higher education.” But Hulbert doesn’t mean higher education; he means athletics facilities. He’s upset with the state because it won’t fund athletics facilities.

President Hulbert does not grasp the distinction between athletic facilities and educational facilities.

… admissions standards.

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.

********************

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.

… UD reflects on the concept “reputation” at her branch campus at Inside Higher Education.

Vanderbilt très SEC.

… of the way we were…

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.