It is – and always has been – curious to UD, as an observer of universities, that the most violent and mindless game out there totally dominates America’s universities. Universities, where the main thing, you figure, is the mind, get positively orgasmic about, and spend themselves into bankruptcy over, a game which we now know pummels the mind to mush.

Forget the body. Of course we know – quoting John Kass again here –

The game is not just a contact sport — it’s a high-impact collision sport. It is about exploding into your opponent, refusing to break, while breaking others to your will and knocking them senseless.

But Kass also notes that “football scrambles the human brain.” He notes the massive and growing numbers of lawsuits coming from high school, college, and professional teams, as players literally lose their minds. Kass predicts football itself will die in the next few decades.

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UD, however, doubts it. Why? Here’s Kass again:

Make no mistake. I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…

Universities, at least according to this guy, can’t survive without a foundation of violent tribal ritual:

It is irrational and tribal love. It is intense emotion, not a vague sense of obligation or philanthropy. [Students and alumni] want to beat State.

Read his heavy-breathing about “shirtless boys” and ask yourself whether passions like these can ever be tamed. Whether the American university can survive without them. Already – in coach buyouts alone – university football is destroying the financial foundation of many schools. Those same schools will not hesitate to pay out hundreds of millions more in personal injury claims.

The model here will be big pharma. As a corporate endeavor, pharma cheats and injures, but as long as it can afford to pay out billions every year in legal settlements and still make a big profit, it will continue to do so. Universities will hit up students for higher and higher athletic fees, and students – even more subject to these passions than alumni, it seems – will willingly give.

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UD thanks mwm.

It’s like this — Imagine that someone comes along today and accuses Silvio Berlusconi of bribery, fraud, abuse of office, and solicitation of minors for sex. Although he may be totally innocent of these particular charges, Silvio has a decades-long record of allegations, trials, and convictions on just these categories of charges.

Similarly, Auburn University, one of America’s scummiest sports factories, has been in the grade-changing, fake-independent-study, cash-for-athletes game for decades. As the writer for MrSEC.com notes (I quote him in my headline), that school can do all the internal investigations it wants. You and I know that Auburn smells, and always will. So we figure – probably rightly – that it’s guilty of this most recent batch of charges.

News flash from this year’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina.

Who knew?

It’s hard to know what to do with university newspaper columns that start in this way. I guess the best thing to do is stop reading.

You’re up!

You don’t want well-written and well-reasoned letters like this one fucking with your core business.

… to an American problem.

The frustration is all too evident in this editorial, written by the head of Youngstown State’s student government. Recent statements by the associate director of athletics about where and how athletic money is spent anger him. Scholarship money doesn’t come out of ticket sales, as the associate director implies; it comes from students:

All of the scholarship money is paid for out of the $810 per student (roughly 10 percent of overall tuition) that goes from our tuition through the general fund to athletics.

The associate director also talks as if the budget is in good enough shape to fund capital projects, etc. The SGA president notes:

Athletics brings in $2.9 million in revenue and spends $11.96 million, resulting in a deficit of more than $9 million.

Youngstown State athletics boasts a 300 percent deficit.

No, YSU athletics isn’t dramatically awful, like Rutgers. It’s just typically cheesy.

… They comfort thee.

Division I Rutgers University gets the sort of attention about which other universities can only dream.

… on the subject of the Rutgers University basketball scandal – is now up at Inside Higher Education.

…news story.

That didn’t take long. Plus:

According to a source, John B. Wolf, Rutgers’ interim senior vice president and general counsel who is believed to have recommended against firing Rice in December, was forced to resign from his position late Wednesday night and it’s not clear whether he will remain at the university in some capacity.

I guess the president of Rutgers figures that if he dumps a lot of people he can save his own ass by saying see how seriously I took this? I dismantled half the university!

Won’t work.

… for revealing the university’s disgusting corruption.

Of the thousands of articles that have appeared in the last two days about Mike Rice, Rutgers, and the imperiled president of Rutgers, this, UD reckons, is the best so far, since it stresses not so much the fate of one or two miscreants, but the fate of Rutgers University.

Repeatedly, expert observers are quoted comparing Rutgers to Penn State (“This is a minor league version of Penn State.” “Rice should’ve been gone right away, and especially in the context of [Joe] Paterno and Penn State, neglecting to act is stunning.”), and they are right to do so, because it will probably take around a decade for most Americans to stop thinking Paterno/Sandusky when they think of Penn State. Rutgers is in the same place now.

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It’s quite possible that instead of thinking those two names, they’ll think instead of the names associated with new scandals at Penn State that have overtaken the Paterno/Sandusky scandal. Look at Miami U and Auburn (“Lies, I tell you! It’s all been lies!”) and the University of Tennessee and Ohio State and all. There’s a reason UD has always called big-time university sports the gift that keeps on giving. You’re given a toy with many moving parts when you’re given a big multi million dollar sports enterprise on a small university campus. Your marching band can haze a band member to death. Criminals on your team can rape people. Fans can riot, or constantly trash your campus beyond recognition. Your sadistic coach can appear on film being sadistic. You can’t, like Penn State, replace an academic culture with a corrupt sports culture for decades and then turn around when that absurdity implodes – as it always will – and say no, no, no, we’re a university, we’re doing all these great things. You are doing great things. But it doesn’t matter.

Like Graham Spanier and the rest of the pathetic crew, Rutgers’ Robert Barchi will probably be forced out of a job soon. He has already been outed as an enabler of depravity — which is virtually the job description of a Division I university president.