Well, it’s a beautiful match-up. This year’s scandal-plagued darling, North Carolina Chapel Hill, and comical, pathetic Minnesota with its $800,000 bill not to play football.

Right here in Tubby City!

It’s really been the year of the coaches, hasn’t it? These incredibly well compensated university employees (at public universities they tend to have the highest state salary) can accumulate all the losses, scandals, and lawsuits they like – there’s always another school begging for them to take millions of dollars and be the most powerful person on campus.

Take Mike Kramer, fired by Montana State, where he didn’t notice or whatever a sophisticated drug market run by a bunch of his players. The drug scandal and a nasty lawsuit behind him, Kramer was pantingly courted by Idaho State, which knew a winner when it saw one.

So now the police are investigating Kramer because he shoved a player a mite too hard (he’s been accused of this sort of thing in the past), and the player is hurt, angry, and suing. Plus there’s a videotape of the incident.

I know what you’re saying. But UD, it’s not as though he forced him to have sex in a shower! Point taken. Still, it’s kind of disturbing…

From Mile High Sports:

A long-time donor to the University of Colorado athletics department entered Folsom Field prior to Thursday night’s latest embarrassment on national television, as the Buffs fell 51-17 to Arizona State.

It just so happened he and his group ran into Phil DiStefano, the chancellor of the University of Colorado-Boulder.

The donor asked DiStefano about [rumored new] facilities.

[The chancellor] asked the long-time supporter if he “[had] $50 million to donate to make it happen.”

When the donor admitted that he would fall significantly short of the absurd total that flew out of the chancellor’s mouth, he [the donor] reminded him that he had donated significantly over the years.

“Donors need to donate to make it happen; if you can get $50 million, we can get the facilities,” he said over his shoulder as he stormed away.

The donor stood in shock, but not before yelling back out to the campus’ leader that his days of donating to the university were now over.

Spending most of your time deciding whether to sell booze in arenas; screaming back and forth about money in public — the august vocation of the American university leader.

Occasionally, as in the recent University of Virginia trustees rebellion, you get a glimpse of what matters most to some of the people entrusted with the integrity of an intellectual institution.

For the chair of the University of South Florida trustees, the win/loss record of the football team is paramount. Minutes after the team’s latest loss, he fired off an email to the president’s chief of staff.

Disgusting and unacceptable.

Imagine the roiling emotions that set going the email now heard ’round the world. Imagine the Boone Pickens-like intensity of this man’s desire. Imagine what he’ll write to Judy Genshaft when the team finally wins one.

Oh Judy Judy Judy! I can hardly catch my breath! We’ll be topping the Shanghai Ranking this year!

As sophomore Ryan Gall of Grosse Point, Mich., said of Ole Miss, “I understand why people fail out. I don’t understand why people transfer. If [coach] Hugh Freeze starts winning more games, this place will become the No. 1 destination of the SEC.”

Kaleigh Robins, a 21-year-old [Indiana University] student, said the atmosphere at tailgates has changed — in part because of an increased police presence.

“I’ve never been ID’d before at a tailgate before now,” Robins said.

Students also are banned from playing music at the tailgates, and she said there are no longer any “handles” — half-gallon bottles of liquor that are staples at college parties.

“It’s kind of sad,” she said.

Kristi Tan, a 23-year-old recent IU graduate, agreed.

“It’s like old glory died down…”

The Harry Potter language suggests that the most outrageously scandalous loser among American universities – SUNY Binghamton – got that way due to evil visited upon it by outside forces. But SUNY was the architect of its own doom, having waged a cynical and greedy campaign for Division I glory. Now it gets to enjoy years of pathetic budgets and vile publicity.

We’ve got it all – the article written before the stabbing (one of several fights) at our first basketball event of the season (“We have the best fans in college basketball!”), and the article written after the place was evacuated and the stabbed guy was taken to the hospital (“We were saddened to learn…”).

Students and administration at Syracuse seem to be taking a lot of comfort from the fact that the guy who was stabbed, and the guys in all the other fights (“[The police] received multiple reports of fights breaking out in the concourse areas near the concession stands prior to receiving a report of the stabbing…”), weren’t students, but so what? If your university has created perfect conditions for riots (the event is free and open to the public and being shitfaced is de rigueur), you’re not going to be impervious to the weaponry by virtue of having a student i.d.

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The solution won’t be to change the nature of the event. The event recruits fans who will purchase tickets, and the school needs the money. The solution – a familiar one, adding delight to these free-spirited celebrations – will be to turn the arena into a police state.

More on Cardale Jones the truth-teller:

His tweet, if inartful and perhaps ill-advised, was actually correct on the merits: he was not given a scholarship to play school.

For background, go here.

Football brings so many obvious gifts to universities – broken budgets, academic fraud, a chance to become intimate on a daily basis not only with the local police, but often with the FBI… But there’s a more nuanced sort of gift football offers academic institutions, and this has to do with the atmosphere, the ethos, the gestalt, of these intellectual settings. It involves bringing coaches to campus and giving them the highest salary in the state and allowing them and their staff to impose Stalinist standards on student journalists.

Here are two of many examples of authoritarian coaches trying to shut down a free press at American universities. I mean, of course we know that virtually all university football programs refuse to discuss – or only very selectively discuss – their budgets (Penn State, before it was forced by circumstance to disclose all sorts of things to the world, was notoriously paranoid about any form of disclosure); but here we’re talking about the actual bullying of a free press.

The latest case of this activity – ever so slightly at odds with the nature of universities – has occurred at the University of Kansas, whose football coach is touchy about the fact that he’s doing a wretched job, and who considers campus journalists the functional equivalent of cheerleaders. This post’s title quotes a commenter on an article about the coach’s efforts to intimidate a staffer on the KU newspaper, and indeed the situation is very simple and very familiar from other big-time sports schools: You bully people on the field, you bully people off the field. Name of the game.

The coach tweets his incredulity:

Team slammed by our own school newspaper. Amazing!

Whoever heard of a university newspaper criticizing its own football team?? Amazing! So the coach had his staff tell the reporter he’d better shut up if he wants continued access.

As Deadspin puts it:

Weis is off to a 1-4 start in his first season at KU. Here’s a change in tone, Kansas: The shitty, incompetent coach of your shitty, incompetent football program had his pwecious fweewings hurt by the fucking school newspaper, and in response, your idiot factotum—instead of telling Weis to shut the fuck up and to concentrate on not losing by 40 to State next time—decided to be a smarmy, bullying little PR shit. Way to go, assholes.

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UD thanks Dave.

Poor fellows keep taking gambles.

And damned if they didn’t just take another bad gamble.

I know we’re all supposed to have shifted our filthy-university-sports attention from Binghamton to the University of North Carolina, but Binghamton keeps hogging the limelight.

The most criminalized university in America.

And we haven’t even started talking about the medical school.

Hoo boy. That’ll be the day. Talk about a jockstravaganza! Let’s see… Whoever the president is, we know he’ll be a jock who couldn’t care less about how corrupt and mercenary the relationship is between the NCAA and sports schools. Or hey maybe we want the vice-president to get involved! There’s Paul Bionic Man Ryan… Joe Weight Lifter Biden… They’re all physical fitness freaks, and they’re all mad sports fans… So forget the executive branch.

Senators and congressmen… yeah, they’re going to want to fuck up the comfy relationship between the NCAA and their home teams… They’re going to want to uncover decades of academic fraud back home and berate the NCAA for overlooking it…

… telling the truth. In a student-athlete variation on the Kinsley Gaffe (“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”), Jones, an Ohio State football player, tweeted:

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.

Cardale Jones is my hero. He alone speaks the truth through the bullshit of APR scores, and Sociology and Sports Management departments bursting with jockshop courses, and sweet kindly academic counselor ladies who take the boys by the arm and lead them to the courses the ladies will take for them. It’s degrading – to the school, the players, to other students, to everybody. Cardale breaks through the lies and asks an admirably rational question: Why are you making me play school?

It’s why, if you’ve read this blog any length of time, you know that I refer to sports factory personnel as Blanche DuBoises. It’s their job to live in a gaudy gauzy unreality… To lie and lie and lie and even try to believe it all…

When someone firmly based in the reality principle – like Cardale here – comes along, all the Blanches, with a sharp scandalized intake of breath, say Ah declare ah’ve never heard such manner of thing… Lord, lord, lord have mercy…

UD says: Let the Blanches blanch. We know what’s right.

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UD thanks Doug.