Hell it’s just pourin’ out … Slopping over the sides… Sheeit!
… For winning 15 games and losing 21 times over the past three seasons, Derek Dooley walks away from Vol Ball with $5 million in parting gifts. In January, Dooley will start collecting monthly installments of $104,166.66 through 2016.
… [Assuming] Jim Chaney is not retained by the next head coach, he is owed about $645,000. Seven other current assistants are working under multiyear contracts and would be owed a combined $3.71 million…
… When Dooley canned [wide receiver coach Charlie Baggett] after last season, Baggett walked away with $425,000, which is being paid in 24 equal installments.
… The school still owes Phillip Fulmer one more installment on the $6 million exit fee he got after being fired in 2008…
… Despite the fact that he was fired after lying to NCAA investigators, ex-Vols basketball coach Bruce Pearl kept getting $50,000 a month from UT until the pipeline ran dry in July.
… The man who hired those coaches and brokered those deals, former Athletics Director Mike Hamilton, walked away with $1.335 million after what was termed a “negotiated resignation.”
… When Buzz Peterson was fired as Vols basketball coach after the 2005 season, UT had to take out a loan to cover the $1.39 million it owed him within 29 days of his ouster. Why? Because UT was still on the hook to Peterson’s predecessor, Jerry Green, for $200,000 at the time. The short-term loan cost UT almost $80,000 in interest.
… All told, the extreme makeover of UT athletics during the past five years could wind up costing more than $20 million in buyouts.
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David Climer, The Tennessean
… a University of Tennessee-based sports writer touches on the larger madness at tetched in the head UT:
[The UT athletic director] referred Sunday to UT going through 12 presidents since 2000. It’s only six, but the point is valid.
They go through presidents as fast as they go through coaches! It’s Ka-RAAAAAZY!
And it’s mainly because the rat finks and the squealers and the stoolies are suddenly crawling out of the woodwork and describing what actually goes on at schools that have long since whored themselves to sports but continue telling themselves they’re legitimate universities. One of the tutors at North Carolina Chapel Hill has decided to speak to the press, and you can read details of Nyang’oro Nation here. One of the football players at the University of Minnesota has written a long letter explaining that he’s transferring because he’s tired of being savaged by Coach Jerry Kill. A Washington State player spills the beans about our old friend Coach Mike Leach.
When people start talking, they encourage other people. Things could get… ugly? Ugly is what big-time university sports has been for decades.
Things could get really ugly.
Now that the University of Tennessee done chugged Coach Dooley’s butt clear out of the football program, consider the words in my post’s title. They were written not long ago by a Tennessee person who, given Dooley’s string of losses and that big ol’ empty expensive football stadium he and the guys were playing in, was anticipating his firing and reviewing UT’s situation.
It is not a good situation. It’s possible that even the constantly shifting gaggles of good old boys running UT are capable of grasping this.
The university’s athletic department posted a $3.98 million budget deficit for the 2011-12 fiscal year in part because of buyouts it was paying to [Phil] Fulmer, former athletic director Mike Hamilton, former men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl and former baseball coach Todd Raleigh.
The football program is on probation until August 2015. The NCAA handed Tennessee a two-year extension of its probation Friday after ruling former assistant Willie Mack Garza provided impermissible travel and lodging for an unofficial visit by former prospect Lache Seastrunk…
Dooley’s buyout will cost UT an additional five million dollars. Other millionaires on his staff will almost certainly also be fired, and they too will get million-dollar buyouts.
One of their hotly recruited players has been named as a suspect in the theft of objects from campus. Dooley knew he was a thief when he recruited him; he had a record.
The eyes of the world have been riveted to UT’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and its wine-enema-loving brothers.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things. Blog posts are supposed to be relatively short, and I haven’t yet gotten to why Knoxville is an attractive tourist destination.
So let’s take up the statement in this post’s headline. Although UT has a long history of filthy coaches and a filthy program; although its football program is on probation; although it has impoverished whatever academic value it had by continuing to give money to its filthy sports programs; although its sports programs recruit criminals; although the frat system that comprises the core of its football fans is currently a national laughingstock; although it will have to take millions and millions more from the school’s academic mission to hire a big-time coach (if it doesn’t, not only all of its investments in sports facilities — like its “eye-popping new athletic facility, a virtual Taj Mahal with cascading waterfalls, state-of-the-art technology, and workout areas that rival the U.S. Olympic training facility in Colorado Springs” — implode, but UT students almost certainly stage riots) — despite all of this, the culture of UT sports is a real fine drawing card for Knoxville. People want to be part of this picture.
And talk about generation of revenue! Football season lasts “up to eight weekends” a year!
Yes! For the sake of those few precious autumn days, a public university in the United States of America has turned itself into a tattered stinking whore.
Once they find the veteran cheater-coach they think will save their lives, the stench from UT will rise even higher.
UD will be there to sniff it — every aroma of the way.
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UD thanks Mike.
… it can be a kind of a brain-twister, can’t it? If that one, who put a player with a concussion in a shed, got in trouble, shouldn’t this one, who slapped a junior coach so hard “his headset went flying,” get in trouble too? Or is a slap less serious than negligence? That shed bit? Hm. Hmm…
Even if the Big 12 isn’t interested in setting a proper example, […] then [Texas Tech] should. After all, they were quick to pass judgement on their last coach, Mike Leach, for allegedly putting a player in a shed when he had a concussion. Now they need to practice what they preach. Stay consistent. If that was enough for Leach to be canned, then this is surely enough for Tuberville to be.
Imagine yourself – or someone you know – being forty million dollars in debt. Forty million! Can you imagine that?
Well, they can at the University of Arkansas! The football coach at the University of Arkansas is forty million dollars in debt.
He’s got a really big salary from Arkansas, of course, because Arkansas can tell a winner when it sees one.
But lately he’s been doing some funny stuff with his salary in his bankruptcy proceedings.
[O]ne week before he filed for bankruptcy, Smith arranged to have 71 percent of his $850,000 salary at Arkansas deferred until after the football season – a move that has raised legal questions about whether he was trying to shield that money from his creditors.
Smith claims “on his bankruptcy filing to have a net monthly income of just $107.66.”
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UPDATE: I should not have told Mr UD about this. He spent all of dinner anxiously figuring out how Smith can possibly be making ends meet. Numbers, numbers numbers — he was trying to do the math to make it possible for Smith to eat, commute, find shelter.
I reminded him that Smith lives in Arkansas, not Bethesda. “We pay five dollars for a loaf of Black Russian bread at Whole Foods. I’m thinking a cheap loaf of bread in Arkansas is like seventy cents.”
“Okay. Say seventy cents. And after all you don’t eat a whole loaf of bread every day… But there’s still rent! A car! Could he even afford a tv?”
“Soyez tranquille. He lives in his plush coaching quarters on campus, where you don’t have to be Jerry Sandusky to know they have showers and all. Plenty of tv screens available there too. And since he lives where he works, no need for a car!”
“Whew,” said Mr UD.
… — by far —” has really hit the ground running.
But then when you hire Mike Leach you should expect your money to be paying for more than coaching. When you take on at vast expense a person just fired – because of allegations of player abuse – by Texas Tech, pain slut … Texas Tech, a school that never saw a sadist it didn’t like… You should probably expect a little roughing up in exchange for all that cash.
You should also expect Leach to sue your ass and everybody else’s. Even though he always loses. After costing you millions of dollars in legal fees.
Yes, Mike Leach was quite the hot prospect when Washington State eagerly took him on board and gave him all its money. How utterly unexpected that just after he’s begun coaching there a prominent player has left the school, charging abuse by Leach’s staff. How totally shocked Washington State will be when Leach’s lawsuits against it start coming in.
UD long ago failed to be amazed by the criminal stupidity of certain American football factories. She does continue to be amazed that no responsible adults – faculty, trustees – exist at those schools.
… showing up for games. It’s such becoming behavior for a university, harassing your undergraduates out of the library and into the stands.
As at Michigan State, where the little buggers persist in showing minds of their own. The basketball coach is really angry with them.
“I don’t want to hear about it being too cold,” [Tom] Izzo said. “If it is, we’ve got a bunch of wimpy students, you know?
“I love our students. I think students have got to hold students accountable… We’ve got to self-evaluate.”
HEY. WATCH ME EARN MY 3.5 MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR BY CALLING THE STUDENT BODY AT MSU WIMPS.
“The comparison is night and day,” Yarabeck said. “When I first got here, you’d almost see as many other school shirts as you did Sam Houston shirts. To be honest, everything was kind of revolving around people going to class — which they need to do — but there wasn’t that sense of pride that there certainly is now. Now you go and it’s hard not to see people in orange shirts.
“The whole school coming together and generating spirit feeds on everything. It’s like momentum, when you start winning games; the players learn how to win. When you start having spirit, like when the Kat Krazies were created about five years ago, that puts it up a notch too. Guys painted out in orange banging on a metal sign … that kind of unnerves the opposition.
“All these things worked together and generated positive feeling for our sports teams and a real pride in SHSU. What’s not to be proud of? Look at how the student body has grown – the word is getting out. It all fits together for the betterment of our university.”
The great thing about big-time university sports, we’re told, is how much excitement and esprit de corps it brings to campus…
Or, uh, to 750 miles from campus.
Once you get into the sort of sports debt the University of Southern Mississippi is in – they’re draining academics to deal with their majorly in the red program – you “need to think about solvency, rather than the fan base,” says the head of the faculty senate. Whatever the most lucrative venue for the game, you’ve got to go there, so forget about actual students and alumni attending.
Strange, ain’t it? UD doesn’t associate post-modernism with places like Hattiesburg, but the simulacrum’s alive and well in Dixie Land.
Really? UD spends quite a bit of time chronicling university coaches who hit people – players, staff – when they get angry. Those of us who follow campus football and basketball can easily reel off five or so names of coaches who keep getting fired because they’re verbally and/or physically abusive to students.
And hell, most of them come from the same school!
That would be good ol’ Texas Tech, a school so masochistic UD calls it America’s university as pain slut. The latest thing is that cameras have caught good ol’ Tommy Tuberville hitting one of his coaches. Like right out there sose everybody can see!
… with this rather baffling story about a high-ranking athletics adviser kept on staff for years and years although plenty of evidence of his sexual misconduct was apparently out there. Lots of news outlets are picking up the story as we speak, even though so far Paul Gray’s misbehavior doesn’t approach Jerry Sandusky’s. Among other things, “an unnamed UI student told investigators that Gray had exchanged money and football tickets in return for sexual favors from another person who was not affiliated with the university.” He made inappropriate sexual comments pretty routinely; he reportedly on occasion offered to perform oral sex on students.
All bad stuff; but without Penn State in the background, it wouldn’t get as much attention as it’s now getting.