… is being pioneered at Hamline University, where the coach and a player are simultaneously suspended.

Oh, plus fourteen other players.

This business of disgust – it’s intriguing. Filthy university football and basketball programs can go along for years – decades – and none of the sickening elements ever gather into one, fully realized, disgusting, Thing.

Each season has its gangs, its guns, its gruesome coaches and gutless trustees, its tailgate trash and post-game riots, its homicidal hazers… Each campus has adjacent streets lined with bars that choke freshmen with cheap beer until they stagger up, piss themselves, and go outside to drown … None of it is strong enough to gather to a Thing, to disgust people. Certainly the financial and academic destruction of universities for the sake of a few yearly games in half-empty stadiums fails to rise to disgust.

For disgust to happen, you need a couple of things. You need a sense, as Buzz Bissinger says, that you’re in a culture, that these things are connected, can be gathered into a full reality. You need to consider that your school may be rather like Penn State, where football was more important than the well-being of children.

But no – you’re not like that! And neither, if you talk to Penn State diehards, is Penn State. It was just a few people, a few bad men…

You need, also, to have a rudimentary sense of what a university is. If you have this sense, you know that virtually every aspect of big-time university football represents a direct attack on the institution. Mindless, greedy, booze-fueled, violent, stoking dangerous cult loyalties — we’re describing the compleat anti-university, a weapon aimed directly at calm, humane, rational, independent thought.

In its scathing editorial about the lawsuit Pennsylvania’s governor has brought against the NCAA (a disgusting organization, but there’s nowhere non-disgusting to go here), the New York Times writes:

In his complaints, the governor only confirmed the inquiry finding that the university’s obsession with football predominance helped drive the cover-up of Mr. Sandusky’s crimes. Mr. Corbett extolled football’s “economic engine” and bemoaned the “diminution in value of the Penn State educational and community experience” because it relied, he emphasized, “in part on the prominence of the Penn State football program.”

Let us have it back again! says the governor. We’re not a university; we’re a sports cult, and our bars are hurting.

… knew?

With video.

Yeah, people are staying away from Penn State games not because it’s hard to enjoy a football game while thinking about a storied coach who for decades raped boys in the team’s shower rooms while an even more storied coach looked the other way.

No, it’s those pesky sanctions.

Patching holes is turning into an industry in itself.

This was the smallest Sugar Bowl crowd since 1939 when 44,308 watched TCU beat Carnegie Tech 15-7. Back then, Tulane Stadium only held 49,000. The next year an upper deck was added, expanding capacity to 70,000 and the Sugar Bowl sold out.

If 50,000 people saw this one in person (counting the bands) I’ll eat a fried gator.

Louisville traveled as well as could be expected for a 13-point underdog. More than half the attendees were wearing Cardinal red.

It was the Florida contingent that was embarrassingly small. According to the Orlando Sentinal, Florida sold fewer than 7,000 tickets from its official allotment of 17,500.The Sugar Bowl committee didn’t make up the slack as there were empty seats on the 40-yard line in the Florida section, and an entire upper deck end zone never saw a soul.

Tuberville (background here: scroll down) to lucky University of Cincinnati!

Tommy Tuberville will make $2.2 million next season at the University of Cincinnati… UC will pay up to $931,000 to buy out Tuberville’s Texas Tech contract.

Well, UD‘s been on a tear lately about empty university football stadiums even at many of the big frothing at the mouth schools… But she’s been focused for the most part on student and alumni sections, and it’s useful to take a peek upstairs at the amazing, tax subsidized, luxury suites.

So here’s an email (one of hundreds) to the USM athletic director from a Southern Miss fan (earlier posts here – scroll down) pissed because he’s spending – even with the tax break – an awful lot of money to entice people to join him in controlled atmosphere splendor (UD loves “controlled atmosphere.” If you can be a university football snob, this is the way to do it… I mean, I think by definition you can’t, but if you could, boasting about the absence of shitfaced rednecks in your suite would be the way to go.), and because the team’s losing all of its games he can’t even give these things away.

Now see, that’s good. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to read the newspaper, note disastrous academic scandals that have exactly the same M.O. as stuff going on at your campus, and alert academic authorities.

John Blanchard was a senior associate athletic director at the now-notorious University of Carolina Chapel Hill, and he has said, in an interview with some of the many people reviewing that sorry school’s decades of academic fraud (a fraud only uncovered by a very determined local newspaper), that he did just this. He said look at POS Auburn – do we really want to be like them?

But although Auburn was discussed, nothing came of it. The head of UNC’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies continued proliferating bogus courses for athletes, exactly the way Auburn’s chair of sociology, Thomas Petee, did.

Actually, UNC went further than Auburn. It hired a sports agent, with ties to current players, to teach a course.

Coates warms to his theme:

“If we are going to allow charitable donations, we should think about what the ultimate purpose of those donations happens to be,” Coates said in an interview. “When one thinks of charity, they don’t think of charity flowing to the head football coach of a big state university.”

Coates also questioned muni financing for stadiums. “Using the borrowing power of the state and tax-exempt interest to build stadiums for sporting events isn’t the real purpose of the university, either,” he said.

The state of Washington, which isn’t totally insane, refused to pay through direct taxation for a University of Washington stadium renovation which will sideline and rip off students, but will be wonderful for corporations.

The university will do the deed anyway, taking advantage of indirect tax subsidies.

And here’s the horseshit from the university about how lucrative the new stadium’s going to be.

The Huskies estimate that the new suites and premium seating will raise $16 million a year in donations.

Additionally, the athletic department projects that other stadium-related revenue, such as ticket sales, naming rights and concessions‚ will increase by $17 million, or 57 percent, to $47.5 million annually, according to Assistant Athletic Director Carter Henderson. That will more than cover payments on the stadium debt of $15.9 million, the school says.

That’s absolutely gonna happen.

University basketball: The excitement never stops!

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The trend will deepen.

Sporting-event attendance to drop in 2013: “The confluence of high ticket prices, better at-home media viewing and the desire to share athletic experiences with others via social media will result in more tickets being discounted and more seats being empty,” said Andrew Billings, the Ronald Reagan Endowed Chair in Broadcasting in UA’s College of Communication and Information Sciences’ telecommunication and film department.

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The schools that not long ago dropped immense sums on immense stadiums are the most farcical losers.

The State of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota collaborated to bring us a new stadium that the market could not bear. Now it’s empty.

Another genius scrutinizes attendance at university football games (especially the BCS) and begins to detect a problem.

There’s no there there.

Football’s not – as all of Gump Nation believes – the front porch of the university. It’s a surly back alley, a scholastic Skid Row, a lunar landscape with losers.

Look at these stadiums. Look at this picture of the second half crowd at the Military Bowl. They’re the last human beings on earth, huddled near the field while a glowing UFO prepares to beam them up.

Once everyone’s gone, it’s the players plus the Masturbation Marching Band, tickling its own glockenspiel.

… who doesn’t understand the nature of university football sounds off. This one’s from the University of Michigan. Says he feels like a ripped-off fool. Says a lot of things. Read them all. Here’s a sample:

When Bill Martin reluctantly accepted the job of [University of Michigan] athletic director in 2000, he insisted he be paid a dollar his first year, and his second, before agreeing in his third year to the middling rate of about $300,000. … Martin had become a multi-millionaire businessman, and didn’t want to be a burden to his alma mater. He later turned down the president’s offer to double his salary, and declined all bonuses …

His successor, Dave Brandon, served as the CEO for two Fortune 500 companies, and is worth well over $100 million. His salary at Michigan is fast approaching a million dollars, including bonuses. For the first time in Michigan’s long history, the athletic director makes more than the president.

A local Northern Illinois football booster really lets it rip as he tries to account for poor attendance at the school’s football games — despite a strong record of wins.

He and his fellow boosters dutifully go down the list of established excuses – an ever-lengthening list, given shitty attendance at deficit-ridden programs all over the country.

But when you get down to it, as this guy says, it’s really about morality. Many NIU students are contemptible enough to view the university as a place where they get an education. They enroll, take classes, graduate, and, having educated themselves, get jobs or whatever… You get enough of these a-university-is-a-place-where-you-get-an-education people at your school, and goodbye full stadium.