Which gambit? The gamut gambit?
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Update: The writer corrected the error.
Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)
Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.
This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:
[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.
Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”
A number of wise observers comment on the sublime and seductive FBS.
There’s some glamor. Arguably, there’s some payback. But the culture you’re inviting into your organization is problematic at best.
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[It has] the capacity to hurt a university’s hard-earned reputation in the blink of an eye.
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[M]ajor college football [is like] the credit-default swaps that wrecked the economy four years ago – risky and little understood investments that can blow up and hurt owners and innocent bystanders alike.
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FBS football is like a cancer cell implanted inside an institution – innocuous at first but growing into something destructive. Schools struggle to win initially and throw money at the team, alienating faculty whose own salaries are frozen. Gradually, the university loses control of the athletic program, and student-athletes suffer.
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“What do you think (new president) Rod Erickson is spending his time on at Penn State, any of those guys?” said John Burness, a former head of public affairs at several major universities, including Duke, where he saw a good year of work spent almost entirely dealing with the lacrosse case there.
“When you get involved in the negatives, the scandals, it’s such an enormous sinkhole of the time of the institutional leadership they almost can’t deal with anything else,” he said. “When schools start out no one is assuming there will be a problem. But there’s so much money involved in this, there are inevitably going to be problems.”
… Anything Atall.
Imagine the absurdity of a university with a serious obesity problem that pledges to promote healthier lifestyles on campus by jumping into bed with, say, Burger King. Even if every Whopper advertisement in the country were plastered with the words “Eat a Salad,” the relationship would still be inherently problematic because Burger King’s behavior is motivated not by a vested interest in collective health but by the existential corporate necessity to sell more fast food.
A University of Iowa student lays down some nice prose about his university’s deal with Anheuser-Busch.
Gayle Saunders, Ohio State University assistant vice president of media relations, wrote in an email, “This is not a University sanctioned T-shirt, and we have no knowledge of where it originated. It is unacceptable and appalling that someone would make light of a tragedy in this manner.”
As we get in the fall arrest swing, a local columnist writes an update.
A University of Florida student takes the Football Shouldn’t Control the University side in the debate.
Bruce Pearl, the former basketball coach, received a $950,000 buyout, just one of many the school was paying. [Jimmy] Hyams reports “two football coaches, three basketball coaches, two athletic directors and two baseball coaches” were on the books last year because of a series of personnel changes.
Also:
[T]he school amassed $200 million in debt for construction costs to build multiple athletic facilities and is spending on average $21 million a year.
A little background on why UT athletics has a four million dollar deficit.
UT: UTmost dipshits.
One day in the near future, [Andrew] Zimbalist says everyone will wake up and realize what is obvious: There is an excess of college football on TV, a surfeit of networks to show it and even more obscure networks launching.
The market could become oversaturated and the multitude of games would attract smaller, niche audiences that won’t command as much in advertising dollars. Rights fees would either plateau or peak and fall.
“College athletics would have to adjust to that reality,” Zimbalist said.
They would have to scale back, not to pre-’84 levels, a drastic and likely impossible turn away from commercialism.
Okay, so that’s one North Carolina taxpayer unhappy to be subsidizing a diploma mill.
We’ll keep count here at University Diaries.
This account from a new biography of Paterno is so icky in so many ways. Paterno tells Penn State’s castrated-by-coaches president he’s not retiring, and he makes clear what the Best Party School lists make clear year after year: At Penn State, it’s all about playgrounds.
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From another review of the same book:
[E]ven leaving the scandal aside, the coach comes across as a self-mythologizing monster, consumed by his legacy of winning on the football field.
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UD thanks David for the second link.
Oh my. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is going to have to do a much better job of talking about its latest national scandal if it wants to avoid a significantly worse outcome than its preceding scandals.
Here, for instance, in my headline, you have the athletic director candidly pointing out that his athletes, many of whom were admitted to Chapel Hill academically unprepared for it, get to have full-time jobs plus academic work. How do you think that’s going to work out? How ready are you to believe everyone’s protestation of shock – the president is shocked; the faculty is shocked; everyone is shocked – that an entire department (and probably others – wait for that development) corrupted itself on their behalf?
And given that outrageous corruption, isn’t it striking that, as the university newspaper puts it, the department chair behind it all was “asked to retire”?
Asked to retire? Oh Julius sorry to bother you but now that you’ve destroyed us as a serious university (“Every single UNC degree will now be questioned and doubted by potential employers and other universities throughout the nation.” “Every degree earned here is less valuable now than it was a year ago.”) could you please retire? Here’s a spectacular buyout to help you along…
No, UD doesn’t know anything about a buyout. But shouldn’t she? Shouldn’t we all know the conditions under which this man, who along with his assistant (what were her retirement details?), helped destroy the academic reputation of Chapel Hill (as a sports factory with a bit of academic legitimacy, Chapel Hill was already well on its way toward a national joke; after all, Chapel Hill spawned the AFAM department under Julius Nyang’oro), was asked to retire?
Of course if they were paid big bucks to go away, we know, more or less, where that money came from. Big-time sports at Chapel Hill generate so much cash. Can’t have your football players jeopardizing that money by taking classes. You didn’t admit them to educate them.
Once again a commenter on an article captures the essence of a situation. Central Michigan’s lousy football team drives people away.
Students stay away, and they don’t even pay for tickets. So the problem is the desolation of the empty stadium.
Like a lot of other universities with this problem, CMU is now trying to solve it by dousing the students with drink. There used to be a limit on how much you could put away, but now —
For the upcoming fall tailgating season, the university released a new policy that changed some of those former guidelines, including the limit on alcoholic beverages per person and mandating students stay in a specific lot.
Students can now reel from tailgate to tailgate, and they can drink all they want.
CMU is spinning this desperate strategem as a great advance in safety … or something… UD‘s having a little trouble understanding the athletic director’s statement about it.
“If you look at this policy compared to the previous policy, there are no significant changes, but there are a series of very very important changes,” Deputy Director of Athletics Derek van der Merwe told Central Michigan Life. “Every aspect is stressing responsible behavior and defining acceptable behavior. We want responsibility, and that’s left to the individuals.”