Just because Ellis Johnson has landed on his feet with an $800,000 per-year contract at Auburn University doesn’t mean that Southern Miss is off the hook for any of his $2.1 million buyout.

… [At a faculty meeting, Aubrey] Lucas affirmed that contracts are being examined more carefully, though he did not elaborate in what ways. He also stated that he intends to put a better payout clause in the contract of the next head football coach.

Thanks to a report on a national sports website called Deadspin, it has become commonplace to assume that Johnson’s buyout will be paid with the $2.125 million that Southern Miss will receive for its football game in 2013 with the University of Nebraska.

In fact, Lucas said school officials aren’t planning to pay any of it with the game revenue, stating that other pressing issues will require the money, such as the ongoing athletic department debt and the loss of revenue from the steep decline in ticket sales throughout the year.

As for the buyout, it’s actually greater than $2.1 million when you take into account the assistant coaches that will need to be bought out once a new coach brings in his staff.

Lucas said that school is on the hook for $1.1 million for this fiscal year (ending July 1, 2013) for the contracts of Johnson and his assistant coaches…

Then the school will have to foot an additional $1.95 million for the next three fiscal years for Johnson and the assistants that remain under contract.

… What’s really surprising me are those who believe as I do that two players on the [football] team have committed serious criminal acts – sexual assault in one case, and rape in another — but assumed that I’d support the team anyway, just as they are.

[A]s a thought exercise, how many predators would have to be on the team before you’d no longer feel like cheering?

… [T]he man Lizzy accused had a history of behavior that should have kept him from being recruited in the first place.

… “I’ve watched almost every game this season and there’s not a single time that I don’t feel extreme anger when I see [the accused] on the field,” said Kaliegh Fields, a Saint Mary’s junior who went with Lizzy to the police station. “Once I start thinking about the people who put the school’s success in a sport over the life of a young woman, I can’t help but feel disgust. Everyone’s always saying how God’s on Notre Dame’s side,” she added. “And I think, ‘How could he be?’”

Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post

… a tragic saga of violence, fraud, loss, and birtherism, now draws to a close.

Having been abandoned by its dark lover, who now for America’s pain slut university? Who will not only coach the imminent Meineke Car Care Bowl, but keep Texas Tech University in the golden shackles it loves so well? The school has gone through Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie (the last two in basketball) and Tommy Tuberville. Who’s left?

Who’s left to slap the coaching staff, concuss players, force the team into illegal practice hours? You can get trash-talking coaches – trash-talking coaches are a dime a dozen – but TTU’s standard of torture is higher than that. TTU never forgets that

Football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television, yes, but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock. But we’ve changed, which is why white middle- and upper-middle-class fans recoil at the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel…

TTU doesn’t recoil. They go for it, man!

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

UD proposes Rocco Siffredi. Has any Texas Tech coach forced a player’s head down a toilet while sodomizing him? It’s time.

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

UD thanks John.

Having spent years at the University of Chicago, I can confirm this University of Rochester student’s observation. Chicago’s lack of serious sports teams means a lack of school spirit, which means, well, dudsville.

Pretty much the only thing Ada Yonath, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Gary Becker, Saul Bellow, and eighty or so other Chicago faculty and alumni have been able to rouse themselves to do over the last few decades is win Nobel prizes.

True, and a new study suggests that changing coaches constantly does no good in terms of your win/loss record.

But that’s the thing about university sports. Decisions aren’t made with deliberation. They’re made according to the Baying Hounds Principle. When the hounds start baying so loudly it scares you, get another coach.

“He hasn’t felt the need for our advice,” Allan Stam, a political science professor and [University of Michigan Advisory Board on Intercollegiate Athletics] committee member, said of [UM athletics director Dave] Brandon. “We don’t have a role, in that if our role is simply to provide advice for the athletic director when he chooses to ask for it.”

Well, it’s a tricky formulation as expressed, but you can understand Stam’s difficulty. He sits on an advisory committee that does nothing and knows nothing. Its function is to give institutional legitimacy to Michigan’s rancid sports program. And most of the committee members are happy to play along:

“It’s not our job to micromanage the athletic department,” offered Michael Imperiale, a microbiology professor and committee member. “Really, this is an athletic department. It’s not an academic unit.”

I mean, it doesn’t have students or anything; it has no impact on the academic life or reputation of the university… It’s just, you know, an athletic department.

That being the case, though, why is Imperiale on the committee? Shouldn’t he be working to abolish it?

It’s official: Big-time sports are the most corrupt, most expensive, and most stupid division of the American university.

No one goes to the games. The team teems with miscreants. Tons and tons and tons of them, so that the coach just presses this template each time shit goes down — really, always says pretty much verbatim the same thing: We are aware of the charges against X and Y and Z and A and we’ll you know handle it appropriately don’t worry…

So last night two of the guys got drunk and stood in the street shouting fuck this shit and getting arrested and all…

It’s really odd. I mean, maybe UD isn’t getting something here, but — the coach gets millions of dollars to stage games without spectators and, increasingly, without players.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm reads the sports news.

… steal!

In its small way, Hofstra exemplifies the glory of university basketball and football (Well, they recently dropped football, since no one went to the games. This has allowed them to concentrate all their attention on fantastic basketball!). A recent coach, minutes after he was hired, was found drunk out of his mind, asleep in his car at a traffic light. Last month two players were suspended; the university didn’t say why. Now four players are accused of extensive campus thefts. For weeks they’ve apparently been taking money, electronics, you name it.

And according to this, they stole from the coach. LOL.

So who recruited these guys? You never hear about that, oddly. You never hear from the recruiting coach, and the recruiting coach never seems to take a fall, even when part of his team turns out to be a criminal conspiracy aimed directly at the fan base.

I guess if they also stole from the recruiting coach… well, that’s a kind of funny thing too… Like, the guy went to a lot of trouble to invite his thieves to his goods… Bent over backward to recruit the guys who lifted his credit cards and all his Apple products.

As UD is fond of saying, you can’t put a price tag on the good university sports does for a school’s reputation.

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

I wonder what student attendance is like at the games. I bet it’d go up if the university guaranteed that students could make direct appeals to the players to return their stuff.

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

As always, and again hilariously, the sports press only cares about what this means for win/loss.

The team is off to a 3-4 start and is no doubt trying to come together for some semblance of harmony and turn the season around. Before the season gets going, the head coach is robbed and a good portion of the team is arrested for the crime.

LMAO.

… someone resigns and it’s not because of a scandal.

This just in — In NON-scandal related news….

… when a University of Southern Mississippi professor working on a lesson plan learned real quick that living near football players meant fights and gun play in the neighborhood.

That was 2009. Since, then USM’s budget has collapsed (here’s the school in 2010, defending continued use of a private jet and continued stoking of the football program at the expense of academics) (here – also 2010 – it’s defending cutting faculty while giving the coach a big raise) (and here’s a 2012 piece about how their totally losing team will not even hold games on campus – USM makes a bit more money having them take place hundreds of miles away in different venues, and, as the faculty senate president says, “We need to think about solvency, rather than the fan base.”).

Now, as the team finishes its winless season and fires the coach, those students and faculty who have been missing fights and guns can take heart that that USM sports tradition is alive and kicking: Its freshman quarterback has been charged with aggravated assault, and another student, brandishing a handgun at the scene, has also been arrested, after a fight on campus involving at least four people.

This article says two guns were recovered at the scene.

Drop in the bucket don’t worry about it!

The NCAA’s investigating the program. Don’t worry about it!

… to compete on the football field.”

James Duderstadt, once president of the University of Michigan, talks with UD’s buddy Scott Jaschik about forms of competition among public universities.

[Morehead State football coach Sean] Woods shoved senior point guard Devon Atkinson in the back and then repeatedly got in the kid’s face after walking away from him several times. Atkinson was nearly reduced to tears, his teammates on the bench looked on in horror, as did people sitting in the rows immediately behind the bench.

… If Morehead State doesn’t fire Coach Woods by the end of the weekend, it is yet another sad example of the win-at-all-cost mentality that permeates today’s world of intercollegiate athletics.

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

Patrick Rishe, Forbes.