Mike MacIntyre doesn’t care that University of Colorado athletics has a $7.5 million deficit, much of it buyouts — buyouts, you know? totally totally wasted payments to former coaches who didn’t win enough games and pull in enough fans.

Mike’s heavily into interior design, so along with his own obscene salary (including buyouts for when he’s the next loser coach) he’s insisting — and the university’s fellatial president has said yesssssirrrr mr mac!!!! — on shiny new offices for him and the boys.

The interim athletic director (at Boulder you’re interim, fired, or making interior design demands before being fired) is on top of the situation.

“We need to look at efficiencies,” [she] said.

“[S]tudent fees and direct university support of the [Marshall University] athletic department’s budget nearly doubled since 2006.” “[T]he athletic budget has increased by almost $13 million, or nearly 75 percent, since 2005… [F]rom 2006 to 2012, the biggest growth in money to shore up the [athletic] budget was in direct university support, going from about $3 million in 2006 to $7.44 million last year.”

The faculty – compensated way below market, and in some cases up to thirty percent below market – have made bold to complain a little. That complaint has revealed something about Marshall that UD‘s not seen before at any American university. For significant segments of the Marshall community, professors as such represent a politically offensive barrier to the school’s true, exclusively athletic, identity. One of the highest profile local columnists ridicules and excoriates the professors and concludes

The radicals … just want a raise.

Much of the commentary on his column (and related columns) similarly dismisses professors as liberal scum, etc.

Reading around in the local press on the issue, UD thinks she has for the first time identified an American university willing to be honest about itself: Marshall sees no reason to sustain a faculty. A close look at the place points to the possibility that West Virginians are not educable. They can, however, be kept comfortable at large sports events. We can see Marshall, year by year, acting more decisively on this knowledge.

A combination of sports events and rocket-shot-out-of-anus lawsuits will keep the Marshall University administration rolling along nicely.

… relentlessly unmasks that university’s sports lies (background here). Like Reed Olsen at Missouri State University, Killingsworth is part of a special breed of university professor: A smart economist able to detect all of the bs universities put out about how lucrative big-time sports on campus are (or will be; it’s almost always got to be will be). So for instance, in a recent opinion piece, Killingsworth writes:

Its report to the NCAA shows that the subsidy to [Rutgers] athletics is $28 million: $18.5 million from discretionary university funds and another $9.5 million from student fees. None of these funds are earmarked for athletics — the university is free to spend those dollars on anything it wants, or even hand them back to students and their families as tuition reductions. All told, the subsidy amounts to almost $1,000 for each undergraduate. The student fees alone work out to almost $330 per undergraduate.

Nevertheless, Rutgers officials from [President] Barchi on down repeatedly refer only to the $18.5 million in discretionary funds as a subsidy. They never mention student fees. Sayonara! $9.5 million in subsidies conveniently disappear.

Killingsworth barely touches on the reputational costs to Rutgers of its absolutely endless athletics scandal. He doesn’t need to.

I’m sure next season will be much, much better.

And if it’s not, fire the latest coach and coordinators and hire another new batch.

Keep doing this long enough, and you’re gonna start to win!

The school’s governing body for athletics, the University Athletics Committee, voted in favor of a $12.5 million budget increase from the $91.9 million in 2012-13, a number the department actually exceeded by $4.2 million due largely to capital projects such as new track, softball and soccer complexes. Most notable in the new budget: projected football expenses are up 32.6 percent, from about $9.5 million last year to $12.6 million for ’13-14.

Roughly $2.4 million of that $3.1 million increase is to cover the higher salaries of the new football staff. Just counting head coach Mark Stoops and his two coordinators, that trio makes a combined $874,000 a year more than predecessor Joker Phillips and his coordinators. At Tuesday’s meeting, athletic director Mitch Barnhart said those numbers reflect the school’s strong commitment to a football program that last year suffered through a 2-10 season before firing Phillips.

And wow. As always, a big-time athletics program benefits the university academically. UK’s US News and World Report ranking has gone from 112 in 2007 to 125 today. With those numbers, no wonder UK is devoting hugely increased resources to sports.

University of Richmond luminary and all-around first-rate researcher, teacher, and human being Rick Mayes has proposed that the university end its football program.

What? What? Are you fucking kidding me?

Well, you know, this sort of thing will happen when you choose a reflective, principled person to be your faculty athletics representative. That and that alone is where UR went wrong. The faculty athletics representative is supposed to be an old jock desperate for free game tickets and occasional face time with the players. Rick Mayes is all wrong for faculty athletics representative.

Gory details, from his recent email to faculty:

I have come to the conclusion that it’s hard-to-impossible to consistently make DI-level sports conform and submit to the primary institutional focus on academics, because there’s just too much money and ambition involved… [A]fter three years of watching and studying sports up close, I believe UR’s long-term academic interests lie with D3-level sports and football being phased out over time due to legal, liability, and safety reasons. [Given the likelihood of concussion lawsuits,] this big-team sport and significant financial commitment could conceivably become extinct within the next two to three decades. Might it not be desirable to get out ahead of that potential outcome for the sake of our student athletes’ health and our institution’s financial long-term interests, not to mention our consciences?

Consciences the guy is talking about! And jeez – Watch his Last Lecture! He’s all about Dietrich Bonhoffer and shit! Who appointed this character??

Still – don’t sweat it. UR’s prez and athletic director and everybody else has come down on Mayes like a ton of offensive linemen. Of course we’re keepin’ football! Are you kidding me? Pay no attention to the man behind the conscience.

Veteran UD readers know of her fascination with nihilism nada nothingness (“Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”) (“No-one is anything.“). She is particularly fascinated by the very expensive nothingness of certain American universities.

In the comment I’ve quoted in the headline to this post, a citizen of North Carolina grapples with the fact that her taxes pay for the University of North Carolina, a location she’s watching shrink into nothing. Entire instructorless, contentless, and evaluationless departments! By definition nothing should cost nothing. It’s an unimpeachable tautology: Nothing comes from nothing. Yet here she’s dishing out dough to underwrite nada nada nada. She feels like an idiot, a fool, a dupe. Shouldn’t a university be… something? Yet here’s the fuck-up ex-chancellor of UNC proclaiming that the most important job of the school’s leader, the thing that takes up virtually all of his time, is sports — sports, which has nothing to do with academics, and the ceaseless scandals that sports generates – the nothingness classes, the $500,000 to coach university leaders in scandal-talk… Where, she wonders, did the university go?

Here it is.

Here’s her university – one
robed figure clinging to the
book that’s survived
the nothingness.

Expect, in a few years,
to see this image on the
cover of UNC’s course catalog.

Nice ambiguity there, huh? To what does “they,” in Joe Nocera’s sentence refer? The teams or the universities?

I guess he means it to refer to the teams; but, if so, should he not at least have reversed the order – between the universities and the teams, and stop pretending they have any ‘educational’ value (and why put educational in quotation marks?)? Nocera presumably believes some universities have either educational or ‘educational’ value…

Consider too the content of his claim. Nocera’s one of many writers who, faced with the superscummy world big-time athletics has brought to America’s universities, urges that we “create some real separation” between athletics and universities.

Easy to say, Joe. What the fuck, pray tell, might you mean? When two people who can’t stand each other but find themselves married decide to really deal with that, they separate. Real separation means you live in different places and have little to nothing to do with one another. But I doubt Joe has in mind this clean a break.

I mean, plenty of people are calling for universities whose campuses are routinely trashed — literally and figuratively — by their sports programs to spin them off, to have a merely symbolic association with a local professional team that continues to carry the name of the university. That’s one way to go. But there are many more people, like Nocera, who seem to think that universities and big-time sports can be separated and yet reconciled, can have broken up and still live together under the same roof.

There are many reasons why this is impossible, prominent among them the simple dynamism of the phenomenon itself: Every year, unstoppably, scandals get more lurid, more expensive, more absolutely disgusting. Every year, coaches and players get more out of control, gain more power. Every year, the shreds of academic integrity these schools have managed to maintain shred yet more. Every year, more and more classes are cancelled to make way for games and for the dictates of the media conglomerates that now run the university show. Etc. Nocera’s column happens to be about university presidents destroyed by their athletic programs, but that’s only one of countless corruptions intrinsic to the decision to import professional sports — whose even more repulsive scandals (the latest being baseball boys and their steroids) Americans really seem to get off on — to universities. So you can put the smell over there, as it were, but it’s always going to work its way deep into your nostrils.

And I’m afraid absolute separation won’t fly either. I mean the idea of spinning off the teams, professionalizing them, but keeping University of Georgia in their name. Let me explain why.

Think of alum fandom as a delicate and nuanced perfume. It has a note of nostalgia, a bouquet of beer, a hint of hazing… studded about with the scent of sorority and the fragrance of frat. Alum fans are connected to their team through memories of sadistic initiation rituals, drunken stumbles into lakes, and other cherished keepsakes. Pack up the team and send it across town and you rip those memories from their moorings. Won’t work.

Seriousness and tax exemption – the two essentials of our universities – are closely aligned. If the first (the philosophical foundation) vanishes, the second (the financial foundation) will be imperiled. If any particular enterprise with university in its name loses its seriousness, as expressed in a scholarly atmosphere, a liberal arts curriculum, and the training of students for higher study and for jobs, state legislatures and citizens will begin to question the special forms of financial support (there are many besides tax exemption, of course; tax exemption is shorthand for them all) they are providing. Politicians will appropriate less and less money; alumni will offer fewer and fewer donations. Eventually, for the worst among our universities, students will stop applying, which is already happening at South Carolina State University and elsewhere.

Simply put, if it’s impossible to detect more than a token amount of academic activity on a university campus – if the place is not serious – people are eventually going to withhold the designation university from that campus, and the money benefits that sustain it are also going to be withheld.

Thus when Holden Thorp, sports-battered ex-chancellor of the University of North Carolina, says

“Either we put the ADs back in charge and hold them accountable if things don’t work […] or let’s be honest and tell everyone when we select (presidents) to run institutions that run big-time sports that athletics is the most important part of their job.”

he is warning American universities that they are running out of seriousness. He is signalling to all of our schools that the management of sports events – and the management of their attendant activities (crimes committed by athletes; destruction caused by drunken tailgaters; constant buyout and other lawsuits running into the hundreds of millions of dollars; endemic cheating; deals with distilleries for the sale of alcohol to students; ceaseless scandals costing the school millions in damage control and personnel replacement, etc.) – has become virtually the entire job of the university president. But this group of activities does not describe a university president. It describes an athletic director. The person who manages the dispensing of fifty million dollars – the amount of money the Sandusky scandal has so far cost Penn State – to lawyers and public relations people is not – and, as Thorp makes clear, should not be – a university president.

This person should, of course, be an athletic director. Eventually, many American universities will have athletic director presidents – people who manage sports, and also manage, in their spare time, whatever few academic issues crop up.

Having athletic directors as university presidents makes all kind of sense. The UNC scandal wouldn’t have happened at all if an AD had been president, since academic misconduct from the point of view of an AD is… what? What is that? The AD doesn’t even know what it is, so whatever happened in the Afro-American Studies department at Chapel Hill is … whatever. Price of doing business. Way to stay in the game. Once the AD has real control over what goes on in the school, scandals won’t surface because they won’t be scandals.

Under the President Athletic Director regime everyone will be happy.

But this bliss cannot last. Eventually more and more people will realize you’re not a university, and you’ll have to take that word out of your name and get your funding from ticket sales.

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

Meanwhile more and more schools at the moment have a Gordon Gee situation on their hands. Gee was a puppet intellectual (bow ties, spectacles) trotted out to mouth serious things, to keep the seriousness ball in the air.

Ever wonder why Gordon says such crazy shit? Babe, you don’t need a Freudian to know which way the wind blows. This is an angry puppet, a self-hating hypocrite, a man who used to have intellectual self-respect and now trades it every day for football money. Gordon Gee is a stage in the devolution of the American university president, a halfway point between mind and body, seriousness and play. His extinction will pave the way for President Nick Saban.

Ah, once again all good flows from big-time university athletics. Here it’s the University of Montana, some of whose professors wonder why the school has a devastating $8.6 million deficit.

The deficit may have something to do with all the rape in Missoula, some of it apparently committed by football players. When your city is known as the Rape Capital of America, people might be reluctant to spend much time there; and indeed the main reason for UM’s deficit involves a sharp downturn in enrolled students.

The UM professors who signed the opinion piece note a looming event sure to make UM as unattractive to new faculty as it is to new students.

Most recently, the university attempted to put a positive spin on the investigation conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice into how the university handled allegations of sexual assault. The administration claimed it had achieved a great victory by reaching an agreement with this federal agency. A closer look, however, reveals that UM, in a desperate effort to avoid another embarrassment, negotiated a legal settlement that forced it to accept all the recommendations and demands made by the federal government. Among these were a series of mandatory training programs which the administration promised to implement across campus. UM leadership must understand that training of faculty should be limited to procedural matters and cannot be used as a pretext to alter the curriculum, impose ideological positions, and threaten the fundamental academic freedoms of the faculty.

You see, because athletes at the university were sexually abusive, faculty will be forced to take Don’t Rape Your Students training sessions.

As I say, great and manifold is the goodness flowing from big-time university athletics.

… to reveal all the petty inept mini-scandalous acts that may accompany anything bureaucracies do.

This is the real reason big scandals tend to grow, tend to be so difficult to tamp down. Bureaucracies are hydra-headed.

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

Just as plagiarism scandals break out with one instance of copying, but almost always, on examination, yield tons of other instances of copying (they also, typically, yield related forms of bad behavior on the part of the plagiarist), so any given big-time athletics scandal on an American university campus will almost certainly – having drawn public and press scrutiny – bring to light routine subsidiary idiocies.

When the shit hits the fan in this big way, you can count on some big name on campus blaming journalists for it all — but of course this move (especially if made by someone in part responsible for the debacle) — simply becomes another hydra-head.

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

And so it is in rattled rutted Rutgers, stuck in the deepening slough of its own despond. It started with an outrageously abusive coach, moved briskly to negligent administrators, and now has positively zoomed onward to useless, expensive search firms (the national scandal of often useless, always expensive search firms is what I mean by hydra-heads that lurk in almost all bureaucracies); an also-scandalous replacement appointment; a hectoring professor on a university committee.

UD‘s point is that all of these microbursts are routine aspects of any university. All universities have fanatic ideologues. All have presidents who don’t wanna know from sicko athletics. Almost all are robbed blind by search firms.

It’s only when the big scandal hits that all of these routine scandals come bursting out.

Alors, if you want to avoid the hydra-head deal, avoid the big scandal, right?

Should have thought of that before you spent all of your students’ money on that big ol’ dirty ol’ sports program.

You start at the beginning, and as you scan one sentence after another, your smile grows. At certain points, your smile goes way wide. Follow UD as she smiles through this article, in the Times-Picayune, New Orleans.

The headline at first looks disturbing, not smile-making.

LSU FALLS IN LOWER HALF
OF SEC IN PLAYER ARRESTS
DURING PAST THREE YEARS

Louisiana State University is trailing other SEC schools, which is… bad?

But wait! In arrests. LSU ranks somewhat lower than some other schools in the number of players arrested over the last three years. So – let’s see how it breaks down.

The arrest of LSU running back Jeremy Hill recently has made for negative headlines for LSU. But when it comes to that subject, LSU is in the lower half of the SEC going back to 2010.

According to an unofficial count tallied by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune in that span, four programs are in double figures [SMILE], led by newcomer Missouri [SMILE.  WELCOME, MISSOURI, AND THANKS FOR BURNISHING, RIGHT AWAY, THE SEC’S FANTASTIC REP!]  with 18, not counting two coaches’ arrest for DWI [BIG SMILE ON THE NOT COUNTING THE COACHES THING. ACTUALLY, LAUGH OUT LOUD.]. Vanderbilt has the fewest with only one in that span.

In between is Florida (17), Georgia (15), Arkansas (12), Ole Miss (11), Auburn and , Kentucky (nine each), Alabama (seven), LSU (six) and Mississippi State, South Carolina, Texas A&M and Tennessee (five each).

LSU fans were divided on whether there was a problem at LSU or if it was more of a universal issue, according to this poll we posted.  [KIND OF AN UNCERTAIN SMILE AS I TRY TO FIGURE OUT THAT EITHER/OR… IS IT A PROBLEM THAT THE ONLY ELEMENT OF YOUR UNIVERSITY ANYONE KNOWS OR CARES ABOUT ROUTINELY FEATURES CRIMINALS?  NAH!  AND SINCE OTHER SCHOOLS ALSO FEATURE CRIMINALS ON THEIR TEAMS, DOES THAT MEAN IT’S UNIVERSAL AND THEREFORE NOT A PROBLEM BUT AN ‘ISSUE’?  IF IT’S UNIVERSAL IS IT LIKE SUN SPOTS OR DECREASED COGNITIVE SKILLS AS YOU MOVE TOWARD YOUR EIGHTIES AND THEREFORE NOT A PROBLEM SO MUCH AS A PERMANENT UNFORTUNATE FEATURE OF EXISTENCE?]

 

 

 

 

UD‘s smile persisted as she scrolled through the comments made by New Orleans locals. She’s particularly fond of the comparative approach many SEC fans take to the problem or issue or universe. Frinstance:

[A]t least the arrests are for fighting, and not for mostly robbery (Alabama). I’d rather have problems for bar brawls, [than] people who were dishonest.

You said it! Bar brawls are nice clean man-on-man violence, not like sneaky robbery. There’s a dignity to bar brawls.

The other day, Iowa Hawkeyes head coach Kirk Ferentz decried the spreading influence of money in college athletics. This is funny for several reasons, but you don’t really need to go past the fact that Ferentz is paid $3.8 million a year to coach Iowa’s football team, and does so while providing a comically small return on investment. In situations like this, schools would normally cut bait and fire the coach, but Ferentz is protected by a buyout that makes his contract look downright reasonable.

… If Iowa were to fire Ferentz today, the school would have to pay a buyout of $17,531,360.

$17,531,360. For Kirk Ferentz. To not coach.

When that’s the context, $918,000 is nothing.

… violent and prevaricating coach , direct your attention away from Rutgers for a moment and take a look at the University of Alaska.

The larger picture for Alaska involves spectacular statewide corruption. Our two far-flung states – Alaska and Hawaii – are among America’s most filthy, and their substandard universities, and corrupt university sports programs, reflect that. Of course one of the reasons these programs can be so corrupt is that no one outside Hawaii and Alaska pays any attention. We look at big urban states like New Jersey.

But UA has its own sports scandal going, and it precisely echoes the Rutgers story. College Hockey News reports:

Former Alaska-Anchorage forward Mickey Spencer alleges that former coach Dave Shyiak hit a player with his stick during a practice in 2011, then told players to keep quiet about it. Spencer made his allegations in a letter written to the school president and Board of Regents, it was reported in the Anchorage Daily News.

According to the letter, Shyiak violently struck forward Nick Haddad during a drill because the coach got angry that Haddad didn’t stop in front of the net as instructed.

The Daily News obtained the letter. In it, Spencer said, “He tomahawked, lumber-jacked — whatever you want to call it — him across the thigh on his (hockey) pants. We knew this wasn’t a small deal, it’s kind of a big deal. I’ve seen a coach break a stick over a goalpost or the glass because he’s pissed about something, but I’ve never seen one take out his anger on a player.”

You can understand why Shyiak was frustrated; he had eight losing seasons in a row at UAA. Anyone would have attacked a player.

As at Rutgers, after the violent coach went, the UAA athletic director who oversaw the coach was also forced out. There’s a suggestion that the university didn’t take the players’ report of the coach’s violence seriously; there’s also the fact that the university announced nothing of all of this to the media. And now, for unknown reasons, the search for a new hockey coach has been called off.

UAA athletics is also, by the way, under NCAA investigation for an undisclosed something or other.

The Sarah Palin appointees making up this university’s regents have called a special meeting to discuss all of this. That should help.

… whenever a university sports scandal gets truly nationally and internationally bad, we’re always treated to the semi-literate self-important pointless maundering of the Designated Faculty Hitter.

The DFH teaches sports management or something; he’s a team booster whose job it is to cover the sports shit on campus with academic roses — to make the crime and abuse and cheating and sleaze look as though they’re activities that can be understood as part of the daily life of an organization recognizable as a university, rather than a syndicate or a gang or whatever.

The DFH for the country’s latest scandal-plagued darling, Rutgers, has just done his thing, and it’s time for SOS to take a good long look at it.

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

Dear Rutgers University, [He’s written it in the form of a letter to Rutgers.]

“It is no coincidence that we all bleed scarlet”.

That familiar saying among those that call themselves “Rutgers Men” is also the very ethos of my being.

[Strange opening line. To whom – among the readers of Forbes magazine – is that line familiar? And Rutgers Men? SOS had no idea Rutgers was a single-sex school. But she can certainly confirm that already in the writer’s first sentence he has dismissed any female readers his letter might have had. And – the very ethos of my being. Wow. If a team motto is the very ethos of your being, I’m being not very interested in what you have to say about anything. The very ethos of my being is laughing at you.]

As a Rutgers College and Law School alumus, a former student-athlete and current faculty member of the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University has been a major part of my life for over a decade. [Why? Since Rutgers didn’t even teach you about dangling modifiers, so now you’ve embarrassed yourself again, right after that ethos thing?] My blood is forever scarlet, and I am proud of it.

During my time on the banks of the Raritan, I have had the opportunity to observe the exceptional growth and evolution of our university from a number of perspectives. While we have made tremendous strides [Did Rutgers tell you about cliches?] over the last decade, we have also managed to inhibit our own success due to an alarming string of organizational failures. While the majority of the media and public [You could have written most observers, but that wouldn’t have been as pretentious.] have been quick to point fingers of blame at our leadership for much of the turmoil, they too easily neglect that leaders of great organizations do not make decisions in a vacuum. Between students, faculty and staff, [That should be among.] the Rutgers community is made up of more than 70,000 individuals, [Again, you could have said people, but individuals is far more pretentious, with more syllables.] all of which [whom] play some role in the direction of the university. Large organizations, whether they are state universities or multinational conglomerates, operate in such a way that blaming any one individual for the failures of the entire entity is simply naive and unfair. [Totally untrue statement. It’s often the case that one person is significantly responsible for a large institution’s failure. That’s why the president of Rutgers will be resigning soon.]

Our President Robert Barchi is a brilliant neuroscientist. [Irrelevant.] Our former athletic director Tim Pernetti is a tremendously successful entrepreneur [So? We know that athletic directors and their agents are capable of negotiating obscene, institution-destroying contracts, but this isn’t really why they are at the university.] and his successor, Julie Hermann, is a accomplished athletic administrator. [Who says? Isn’t it rather naive of you simply to assert this?] While each of them has shown great stewardship throughout their careers, there is no such thing as a perfect leader. [SOS says: This sort of condescending, statement-of-the-obvious, pat-the-reader-on-the-head phrase — no such thing as a perfect leader, I’ll have you know! — is a real winner when it comes to regaining all those readers your writing has already alienated.] That is why every organization creates levels of redundancy within their decision making structures to prevent any one individual from having to [too] much influence. While this might lead to red tape and bureaucracy, it also insures that [the] healthy functioning of the corporate ecosystem. [As at Rutgers?]

… The controversy that has struck our great university over the last few months is not due to the shortcomings of our leadership, but rather a result of a culture in which accountability and communication are misaligned. In any large organization, particularly one as complex as a major state university, there are so many moving parts, competing interests and differences of opinion that unless there is a concerted effort to have total transparency and debate, bad decisions are are all but guaranteed to be made. [Note the jargon and passive voice and general tone of haughty lecturing to the unwashed masses who don’t know anything about the complex mysterious intricacies of organizations. This is what UD calls going cosmic. The disaster – not controversy – at Rutgers is not about the all too familiar corruption of universities by mindless boosterism and greed. No, no, it’s some case study in organizational blahblah.]

At Rutgers, there has long been a movement by many faculty and alumni against big time athletics. While their voice might be that of the minority, those that believe that academic and athletic progress are not mutually inclusive have succeeded at creating a juxtaposition that has become endemic to the culture of our university. [Do you have any idea what the fuck he’s saying? This reads like a letter from Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Vacuous. Comically pretentious.] As both a professor who values academic progress and an entrepreneur who makes a living off of college athletics, I am equally guilty of helping promote these conflicting ideals. [What conflicting ideals? What’s the juxtaposition? What is he talking about?]

Instead of creating an environment based on accountability, where critical issues are brought out into the open and decision makers are held responsible for their actions, the university community has seemingly refused to learn from its past mistakes and has become seemingly forever mired in the morass of its own self-sabotage. [Morass and self-sabotage… weird mixed metaphor.  Deadly repetition of mousy seemingly.  And what is he talking about? He seems to want to attack critics of crushingly expensive and corrupt sports at Rutgers – it’s the fault of the critics; they’re not on board with everyone else, etc. That’s fine. Go after the nay-sayers. But go after them cleanly and directly.] Great organizations have culture, and culture only comes from a set of shared attitudes, goals, and values that every individual within that organization believes in. [Huh? This unanimity is certainly true of great cultures like North Korea. In the United States, especially in our universities, it’s just the opposite.] If those of us who owe so much to Rutgers cannot agree to bring our goals into sync, than how can we expect our University to do the same?

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

There’s more, but – to quote Mr Bennet on one of the letters he receives from Mr Collins – I won’t sport with your intelligence further. A painstaking analysis of this writer’s appalling prose does seem to reveal an attack on those pesky dissenters whose efforts to keep sports from destroying Rutgers turn out to be responsible for this catastrophe. If only Rutgers had been as united as the folks in Paterno’s Happy Valley, the outcome would have been so much better.

… schools.

*****

Update: LOL.

UD has started timing the appearance of these articles. How soon after the body has, as it were, begun to go cold, does this get written?

For the purpose of this blog, let’s assume the worst here and examine the landscape of the defensive line with Martin not being a part of it.

I mean yes yes of course he was arrested only a few hours ago for using a gun in the commission of a crime, and he already had a record of bad behavior, but put that aside. How will this affect our win/loss ratio?

The comments at the end of article are, as always, worth reading. They run the familiar gamut: Total denial (he was set up); shocked outraged disgust, and an insistence that he be kicked off the team immediately (I have never seen such behavior from a player on a big-time university football team!); a reminder that even with thugs the team eats shit; polite, tentative questioning of the coach’s recruitment strategies; an admission that a fan had noticed some, er, violent tendencies on the part of the player; immediate shouting down of the fan by other fans who tell him/her that if you don’t like violence don’t watch football…

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

Another Update:   SPIN IT, BABY! SPIN IT!

Wow. It’s rare that you read such pure unadulterated bathetic shameless spin. All praise to this writer for churning it out so fast and thick and pure.