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.

Here’s an athletic director, from Washington State University, who has led his program to a $6.6 million deficit. Some of that deficit is because they had to hire the incredibly spectacular, incredibly expensive Mike Leach (details here).

Year before they only lost about a million. They’ve now lost over six million. Oh, and under Leach this year the team bit the big one.

So what can Bill Moos say?

He can explain to the idiots – and I’m sure they’ll buy it – that he’s a visionary. He sees into the future. He makes plans for the ages. The multimillion dollar coach with the very bad reputation; all the new athletic buildings the school can’t afford?

Moos said he has based many financial decisions on a massive increase in future television revenue resulting from the creation of the Pac-12 Networks this year.

Moos has estimated each Pac-12 school could eventually bring in more than $20 million a year from the Pac-12 Networks. For the coming fiscal year, however, Moos estimates schools could net anywhere from “zero” to several million dollars, due to start-up costs and the failure to reach agreement on contracts with some carriers (most notably DirecTV).

Asked about the status of negotiations with DirecTV, Moos said, “I think both sides are standing pretty firm. We’ve got to be patient, and we are.”

Moos said it will take “at least two or three years” before the Cougars might turn a profit again. The Cougars plan to reduce debt during the current fiscal year, Moos said, with the aid of increased income from football season ticket sales, Cougar Athletic Fund donations and the suites and other premium seating areas added to Martin Stadium.

You do wonder whether the Washington State folks have ever met a huckster before, the sort of person who promises massive returns if they’ll just wait a bit, but while they’re waiting they’re going to need to give him all their money.

Of course the academic scandal at the University of North Carolina – in which, in the tradition of Auburn’s Thomas Petee, the corrupt chair of an entire department designed a vast system of totally bogus, basically non-existent courses for athletes – will damage that school very badly for a very long time.

But with the final independent report on the matter – released today – you see the inner workings here, the way the hilarious Faculty Athletic Committee (its chair is a woman who describes herself as having been appointed to lead the committee even though she had “No previous contact with athletics other than occasional attendance at events … I possessed a limited understanding of the breadth of athletics, both its contributions to higher education and its effects on higher education”) said hey forget your concerns; they’re professors, and professors can do whatever the hell they want with their courses.

And that is possibly the most damaging thing of all for UNC — as an academic institution, that is, rather than the jockshop it’s on its way to becoming. Because now all UNC faculty will be subject to serious oversight. The independence (and of course that independence is never absolute in the way the FAC suggested – or it shouldn’t be) the FAC cynically invoked to distract attention from the rot in a corrupt department can no longer be taken for granted among that school’s faculty.

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Update: The Charlotte Observer is correct that this report fails to answer some important questions.

Those findings leave significant unanswered questions about academic fraud. What was the impetus for the no-show classes if there was no personal gain? How did the no-show courses grow to an astounding 216 over the last 15 years, and how and why were they sustained?

On the second question: I’m assuming the chair just executed ye olde Independent Study maneuver, assigning himself twenty or so a semester… Maybe putting the names of other faculty on yet more… I mean, it was all pretend, and he was chair, so he could do pretty much anything he wanted… Including hiring a sports agent professionally involved with a couple of UNC players to teach a course! Whatever genius put together the inept, indifferent Faculty Athletic Committee must have been proud of her work.

On the first question: But there was personal gain for the department chair. In so many ways. Here’s the most obvious:

Last summer, UNC-Chapel Hill professor Julius Nyang’oro received $12,000 to teach AFAM 280 – Blacks in North Carolina. The 19 students enrolled in the course were to learn about the state’s legacy of slavery and racism, and how blacks fought to overcome it.

It is a course that typically involved classroom lectures, research papers and exams, according to syllabi from other UNC-CH professors who taught it. Nyang’oro, the department’s chairman, was expected to teach it that way as well, university officials said.

But Nyang’oro did not hold classes or require any exams. His one-page syllabus said that because of the “compact nature” of the summer schedule, the students would spend that time largely on their own to find one or two black leaders in North Carolina to be the subject of a research paper due at the end of the session.

Nyang’oro taught multiple summer courses, and got more money for being a ‘summer administrator,’ and in all of this he seems to have done nothing at all. Raking it in for doing nothing at all is extreme personal gain.

His secretary, also in on the scheme, continued to get a low salary; but UD‘s going to speculate a bit here about her motives. First, there’s the possibility that Nyang’oro or someone else gave her money under the table, or found a way to give her other benefits (free tickets to games, social access to players). It’s possible that Nyang’oro – a charismatic man by all accounts – charmed her into it. It’s also simply possible that as a loyal, long-serving person (the problem goes back to 1997, if not before), she saw this completely non-controversially as the way things worked. For her, “personal gain” presumably meant keeping her job, since administering bogus courses for athletes was her job.

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UPDATE: The secretary:

Crowder had close ties to the basketball team. She has been in a longtime relationship with a former basketball player, and Martin’s investigation found that in 2008, she had received $100,000 and some Hummel figurines from the estate of the father of a close friend who was the former academic adviser to basketball players until shortly before her death in 2004.

What your tax and tuition money is paying for.

What your tax and tuition money is paying for.

What your tax and tuition money is paying for.

What your tax and tuition money is paying for.

What your tax and tuition money is paying for.

What your tax and tuition money is paying for.

For all of the upheaval and veiled threats from the power conferences, Emmert’s NCAA will almost certainly hold together. It’s awfully hard to walk away from a legally sanctioned price-fixing scheme — even when it’s in your own best interests to do so.

A University of North Alabama student reminds us where our priorities truly lie.

Because they (theoretically) serve a charitable educational mission with their respective schools, college athletic departments … are considered nonprofits — a major reason the NCAA clings to the outdated, immoral concept of amateurism, and that big-time football coaches such as Texas’s Mack Brown earn $5 million-plus per season. (When you don’t pay the workforce because you’re technically not a business, all that television money has to go somewhere.) Postseason bowl games enjoy the same hands-off treatment from the IRS, with predictable results: Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan earns $645,000 in total yearly compensation; Outback Bowl — Outback Bowl! — CEO Jim McVay eared $808,000 in 2009; former Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker collected a $592,000 annual salary before the fallout from a scandal involving a $33,188 self-celebrating birthday party, a $95,000 round of golf with Jack Nicklaus and $1,200 strip club visits on the company’s (tax-deductible!) tab led to his firing.

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UD thanks Daniel.

Neither of these activities has anything to do with going to football games.

U Mass drinkers long ago abandoned the middle man, if you will, and went directly at the alcohol poisoning.

It’s logical. Drinking in a stadium is expensive. Your team will probably lose, and alcohol is already a depressant. Stadiums have no cars to tip.

So why did anyone think U Mass students would haul ass across the state and attend their school’s football games?

Many U Mass alumni (who live closer to the stadium) have exactly the same profile as the students they used to be. Why would they go?

Here are two articles rehearsing these well-known facts and wondering why the taxpayers of Massachusetts let the people who run U Mass do such stupid, stupid things.

But what’s wonderful about these articles is that they make the connection between the new U Mass law school and the stadium fiasco.

UMass spending millions on an unprofitable and pricey venture is nothing new. The launch of the UMass law school a couple of years ago harkens [SOS alert: Harkens is awkward. Actually, it’s wrong. Harken is a verb meaning pay attention. Perhaps the writer had the idiom “harks back to” in mind – the law school puts one in mind of the football fiasco. I’d simply say demonstrates.] the same fiscal irresponsibility. With an overabundance of lawyer[s] graduating law school facing a historically anemic job market for attorneys, the idea was a waste of resources.

(The writer doesn’t even mention that the first president of the new law school was fired for credit card misuse.)

It’s important to grasp the synergy here, as these writers do. Taxachusetts indeed.

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UD thanks Andre.

… places like Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and of course Montana, where the University of Montana’s football team seems to have a wee rape problem.

The ongoing controversy began in late 2010 when several sexual assault allegations, including two women who said they were drugged and gang raped by members of the football team, spurred a local investigation of the school. Last month, University President Royce Engstrom fired the football team’s head coach and athletic director. One member of the team, Beau Donaldson, was charged with rape and has pleaded not guilty.

It’s so bad, the feds have come in to investigate; and you know how much they appreciate the federal government in those parts. They don’t need some guy from Washington to tell them how to handle the fact that players on their football team – including the quarterback – keep getting accused of rape. But the Justice Department points out that it’s not “the number of allegations,” but precisely “the response” on the part of the university that has drawn its attention. When you’ve got so many people charging rape, perhaps something’s wrong internally. Perhaps your school doesn’t take rape seriously enough.

Anyway, I’m just moseying toward my main point here, about the coverage of another problem at UM – a massive budget deficit.

The University of Montana is facing budget cuts across campus because of a significant drop in enrollment, and most departments are being asked to help shore up a $5.7 million deficit.

726 fewer students than last year have enrolled this year, and plenty of people think it has something to do with all the bad publicity. Parents might not, for instance, want their kids to go to a school which seems to be the main reason Missoula is called the The Rape Capital of America.

That deficit isn’t just about the students who aren’t there to pay tuition. Ask Penn State how much money athletic scandals cost.

So… What’s UM’s athletic department doing to help out with the deficit it almost certainly had a great deal to do with creating?

A local reporter, who breathes not a word of the rape scandal, explains:

Athletic director Kent Haslam told us that his department will curtail some maintenance on facilities to help with the cost-cutting, saving about $150,000.

They’re on the case!