Pushed by primal instincts. Such a strange way of being for a university. You’d think even a wretched university would at the very least understand its identity in terms of the civilizing of primal instincts. NASCAR – that’s primal instincts. But a university? A university allows itself to be “overshadowed” by the “unassailable fortress” of football?

What are those instincts? Can we be precise about the nature of the basic instinctual energies that Americans think belong on college campuses? That they think are the center of campuses, so that coaches get statues and millions of dollars and pretty much unsupervised power?

Here’s one paean to big-time university sports. And here’s an excerpt from it.

If you want your alumni to give, you first have to make them fall in love with your school. This is not about having better chemistry programs or more faculty with higher name recognition than the school up the road. It is not about scoring higher on world indices of university quality. It is about competition, drama, intensity, about hope and fear, collective celebrations or collective disasters, seared into young and impressionable hearts where they will never be forgotten — and where they will be annually renewed as each sport in its season produces new highs and lows, new hopes and fears.

Note the Wide World of Sports script: competition, drama, intensity, hope, fear… But these aren’t really primal, are they? Fear – maybe fear’s primal. But hope? Drama?

What is the primal instinct that doesn’t appear on this list?

Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.

Oh right! This guy forgot… violence! He overlooked all the ancillary sports stuff on campus – hazing that kills, players killing each other with guns, coaches beating up players… He overlooked the fact that people like football because it’s incredibly violent.

Rich Cohen, in the New Republic, talks about “the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel.” Now that’s primal, baby! Watching men get all torn up and concussed on the field!

Just the thing for the university.

Western Kentucky University basks in the academic splendor of the most important person on campus, Coach Bobby Petrino.

Petrino may well be the least ethically whole man in the, ahem, ethically whole-deprived world of Division I collegiate sports… Western Kentucky, a school with mediocre athletics and apparently, sub-mediocre standards, has turned to a person who lied to his last employer about the nature of an accident involving the mistress he allegedly hired to a university position she was unqualified to hold. Please, if you must, take a second to read that again. And again. And again.

Bobby Petrino, holder of a Ph.D. in the Deceptive Arts (he also ditched the University of Louisville shortly after signing a long-term extension in 2007, and quit as coach of the Atlanta Falcons 13 game into his first season later that year. He informed his players via a note atop their lockers), will be the one charged with teaching the 17- and 18-year-old boys who decide to come to Bowling Green about not merely football, but life. He will be their guide. Their compass. Their role model.

UD’s heart goes out to Robert Dietel. Though here’s hoping that in the years since he tried to stop WKU from turning into a sewer he’s found a respectable place to work.

The nitty-gritty at the University of Massachusetts.

[I]n some instances our academic standards are higher than Vanderbilts. That’s right[: We] had a player be ineligible to play this year that would have been good to go at 13 other SEC schools and I know of at least one more who was cleared to play by the NCAA but not by [the] academic arsehole[s] at Tennessee.

… I’ve wanted the University of Southern Mississippi (you owe it to yourself to read the entire article, plus the letter at the end) to be stupider than the University of Massachusetts. I’ve assumed that that deep south school would obviously be dumber than a school in my enlightened part of the country.

Yet they’re actually neck and neck. They’re actually destroying themselves at the same rate, for the same reason. They’re both sports fuck-ups.

6,385 people showed up for U Mass’s most recent football game — played far from campus in Gillette Stadium (where the big boys play!), which offers 68,756 seats.

So let’s see. UD stinks at math, but… 6,385 / 68,756… That’s, uh (pause for phone call to Mr UD) … 9.3%!!!

OR (pause for visit to Percentage Calculator) … that’s 9.2864622723835%!!!!

Of course, “students and taxpayers [are] picking up the tab.”

General Subbaswamy has announced from his bunker that “we haven’t completely mobilized the alumni yet.” His last job was at the University of Kentucky, so he knows university sports.

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UD thanks Andre.

“I don’t know if it approaches crisis [with the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide]; perhaps it does, but it’s at a crossroads because there’s an issue about the fundamental nature of the game. It’s so popular and so profitable, but it takes a tremendous toll on many of those who play it. Not just body, but as we’re now learning, mind and emotions,” Costas said on “Piers Morgan Tonight.”

“And it’s a legitimate question to ask whether, for some players at least, the toll that the game takes, brain trauma, medications that they may take, enhance performance or deal with pain, all those things. The culture of the league increases the likelihood of abhorrent behavior. It’s possible.”

It’s a comfort to know that the same culture pertains at quite a few of our university football and basketball programs.

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!

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

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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.