Most scandal-befouled sports factories – North Carolina, Penn State – are embarrassed by how far they’ve let themselves go. They seem to retain a sense of what they once were, or could have been, before they dissolved.
But UD will give this to Auburn University: It is what it is — the sports and leisure sewer of the American collegiate landscape — and it’s proud of it. No hiding its head in shame for Auburn after its countless athletic scandals; it has a belligerent insistence on total squalor, total contempt for the concept “university,” that one can’t help but admire.
Now it’s building an amusement park for everyone there, featuring
a 50-foot rock climbing wall with an auto-belaying system, four bordering caves for lateral climbing, a a 20-foot wet rock climbing wall in the 20,000 gallon leisure activity pool, a 45-person hot tub in the shape of a tiger paw and a third of a mile indoor track with a corkscrew formation and 10 feet of altitude.
Tiger paw because that’s the mascot, dummy. Here’s a photograph of forty-five people or so (doing something they’d never be caught dead doing at Auburn), in case you want to start picturing the hot tub.
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UD thanks a reader from Auburn.
FAU, also known as Find Another University, is enjoying the kind of global publicity you can’t put a price on. Its new stadium, named after a notorious prison, has been inaugurated by none other than Stephen Colbert:
http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2013/2/22/4017374/stephen-colbert-fau-football-stadium-geo-group
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UD thanks Daniel.
When you’re a dying jock school, the last thing to go is your sports program.
South Carolina State will probably be shut down or absorbed into another institution in a few years. Few people enroll. It’s totally corrupt. It has almost no money. It’s such a boringly absolute fiasco that people don’t even pay attention to it anymore.
Its sports teams are also in the toilet; but in a recent interview the school’s athletics director put it all in perspective:
[The AD] said it is important to the athletics department and to the university for the football and men’s basketball programs to experience success. At a school in financial crisis with dwindling enrollment, athletics accomplishments can provide a morale boost for the student body.
Let’s spend the few dollars we were able to free from the grip of thieving trustees and administrators on games! Let’s go out with a smile.
This article about Boise State University captures – in a truly unsettling way – the sordid, delusional nature of the American jock school.
The main point of the piece is the financial hemorrhaging of the sports program. No surprise there. Fewer and fewer people go to university games, so ticket sales at many schools are in the toilet.
But along the way, the writer notes that Boise – a not very impressive university, which might want to spend a bit on its educational offerings – is building a $22 million dollar football stadium. That the stadium will be named after a coach who presided over a program so filthy that even the NCAA noticed is in no way awkward, assures Boise’s president. The people who gave the money liked the guy (now coaching for another school), and they get to call the shots.
In fact the article is full of blithe reassurances from the Blanche DuBois running Boise: The fans will be back; the stadium’s name, honoring a miscreant, is way cool; athletics is going to be a big moneymaker any day now. So it goes.
… Southern Methodist University today, shall we? There are scads of colleges and universities in this country, but only a few – Florida A&M, Penn State, University of Miami, University of North Carolina – get to hog the spotlight. So profound is our ‘radically present’ orientation (to quote the theorists of postmodernity) that we tend to miss precisely those schools with the deepest histories of squalor.
In the case of SMU, which adds piquancy to its sordidness by including a religious denomination in its name, it’s been notably vile ever since its long-ago death penalty, a signal distinction within a national landscape of dirty sports programs. SMU has not let the fact that the program remains moribund stop it from accumulating – last year – a one hundred million dollar athletic deficit.
Nor has the fantastic campus culture of the sports factory faltered in the wake of SMU’s misfortune. Secrecy about the budget even as they soak the students for higher and higher athletics fees? Check. Sodden frat boys befouling all they touch? Check. Violent hazing? Check. I mean, that last one – hazing – hit the news today, but it got lost, since hazing and sexual assault and all that seem de rigueur, comme il faut and la chose normale at SMU. I just thought I’d draw your attention to it for a moment.
The University of Central Florida is full of students like Jackie Fulco, who think academics is more important than athletics. That just isn’t right. It’s “crazy,” it’s pitiful, “it just doesn’t add up,” writes a UCF reporter in the school newspaper. Why is the football stadium half empty?
It must be bad marketing. Word’s not getting out about the games. The student looks forward to a full stadium once word gets out. That will set things right, and UCF will start to look like a real university.
When the name of the game in big-time American university football is thug-management, it’s all about comparisons. Who recruits the most criminals? How bad – man to man offense speaking – are they? Do they steal laptops, or do they, like national champ Alabama’s crew, beat people senseless and pack heat?
Then there’s all the chatter about consequences. Ignore it? Suspend them for awhile? Suspend them indefinitely? Dismiss them?
These guys – these Alabama guys – are second stringers, so we’re being spared long articles ignoring what they’ve done and agonizing instead about how their being in jail is going to hurt the defensive line…
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UD thanks several readers for linking her to this story.
A scurrilous voice of dissent in South Carolina dares to suggest that university coaches using state planes for recruitment may not be an appropriate use of taxes!
This is an example of the corrosive skepticism undermining the American university’s greatest asset.
Why sure. You might have noticed that football – and hockey – are extremely violent. Most of the people who play them aren’t violent off-field, but some are.
On-field brawls are common, as at the Super Bowl, when officials had to keep breaking up fights.
Fans and viewers barely notice. It’s structural to the game, college and professional.
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You don’t have to be the University of Miami – America’s best-known Thug U – to have thuggish people on your team, and it shouldn’t be a big deal when this or that commentator notices the thug-factor, especially when it begins to produce a crime-wave in your community.
As it has at the University of Montana, where for years now its football team has really been acting up. The latest thing is a lot of rape cases, and when a member of the board of trustees stated the obvious about them –
“The university has recruited thugs for its football team and this thuggery has got to stop.”
– he got in all kinds of trouble, with the school and fans issuing indignant denials that the team is thuggish.
But – you know – a lot of football teams are thuggish. Some of the best – the winningest – are on the thuggish side.
What do we gain by denying that even well-bred university lacrosse players can be thuggish? A lot of these university sports guys drink and drug too much, are treated like royalty, etc., etc. It’s just not a good situation. It’s a situation that can create mayhem.
Rather than attacking messengers like Pat Williams, communities like Missoula should look a bit more squarely at how they recruit and treat athletes. That they have created an ongoing problem is a (you should excuse the term, given what we’re finding out about long-term health outcomes for football players) no-brainer.
[A University of Notre Dame hockey player] was asked to leave Brothers Bar and Grill Sunday night after patrons accused him of taking beer from their tables. [Police say the player] punched the [restaurant’s] 35-year-old manager in the face and stepped on her head when she fell.
The governor of the state of Tennessee has said it as directly as possible: The university itself is imperiled unless UT’s football team wins games and fills its stadium.
“If you want to be bottom line about it, it shows why UT-Knoxville has to be good in football,” Haslam said. “You have a whole program that’s set up with a 100,000-seat Neyland Stadium, and it’s a program that supports all the other sports other than basketball and provides scholarships back to the university.”
And – he didn’t need to add since everyone knows it – the school, entirely because of sports, currently carries TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in debt. Yeah baby you read that right. So there have to be bodies in UT’s big new incredibly expensive stadium; the team has to win…
Only it’s losing, see, so the stadium’s kind of empty and all the coaches that doomed the team and the school have to be paid off in the millions of dollars to go away and WOW! Where can the rest of America sign up? What a great way to run a university!
Nice way of sayin’ it jest don’t get no dumber than the University of Tennessee.
No wonder America’s highest-profile student athletes are such campus heroes. Brain and brawn! Plus, these guys do what they have to do to win. At Donna Shalala’s AMAZING University of Miami, there’s yet another corruption scandal, with the baseball team caught up in the scummy world of steroids.