… 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.

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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.

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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.

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Patrick Rishe, Forbes.

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

… for Miami.

College football.

… 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.