Central Michigan University (go here – scroll down – if you have the stomach) is a Division I unibrewery with a losing team. The only fiscal solution to this problem is full-throttle student bacchanalia in the parking lots of games no one attends. The presidents of div I unibreweries spend most their time tweaking alcohol policies with an eye to two things:

1. maximum consumption; and

2. the mobilization of personal responsibility rhetoric.

It’s an unavoidable task of a blog like University Diaries to go to where the big-time university sports fans are, and to listen to them with care.

I read this sort of thing on a regular basis.

I re-read it. I circle around it. I pore over it.

It’s always the same: A halting recital of the current top rung of university sports scandals. A few forced laughs along the way. A final pledge to do all one can to deny that they happened.

It’s a guy thing.

UD‘s not a guy.

UD likes guys.

She knows that guys power the billion dollar tv contracts that have killed any number of universities as serious institutions. But she still likes guys. She likes this guy.

Like all guys, he’s basically Blanche Dubois: Ah see the world ah wanna see. Like her, he deserves our effort to understand, and our pity.

… is that any particular revelation of corruption threatens to set off a chain reaction.

Take your typical southern university system — a crony dumping-ground, a favor-repayment franchise, a post-tailgate barrens of the blitzed and bilious. As with the 2009 Mary Easley scandal at North Carolina State (scroll down for several posts), one fallen crony begats another which begats another yea to everlasting. More recently, the unpleasantness in the University of North Carolina’s Afro-American Studies department has touched off a spate of panic-auditing which has begat more fallen cronies, among them a sporty, well-compensated couple that travels about hither and yon on the taxpayer’s dime.

… that I ignore most of them and only feature the very worst. The Florida A&M hazing death definitely rates inclusion. The family of the student beaten to death on the marching band’s bus has sued, and FAMU has argued that the kid brought it on himself.

This ignores the fact that FAMU has spent decades ignoring a hazing culture that anyone could see was spinning out of control. UD thinks the school should take the fall – might knock some sense into all the other sports factories that do the same sort of thing.

The full weight of the tragedy is finally felt.

A writer at Jezebel uses really hurtful language to describe Boston University’s fun-loving hockey players. In the tradition of George Huguely, they call their sexual conquests “kills.” As at the University of Montana, a campus so rape-positive that students must now watch don’t rape, don’t get raped films and then pass a test about them before they can register, it’s all about the athletes.

I mean, it’s also about the bars, boosters, and coaches.

There is a widespread belief that behavior by the [Montana] football team has been tolerated by the program’s infrastructure. Three of the lawyers representing players, for example, are on the National Advisory Board for Grizzly Athletics…

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[O]ne [Boston] team member said [the hockey coach] “cares too much about hurting the important players’ feelings… He’ll criticize, then apologize.”

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[A] shady student-athlete-friendly sports bar … T’s Pub [has been cited as] “part of the problem,” since hockey players could (until recently) drink there for free without showing IDs. [Athletes bring in business.]

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Yes, it takes a village. And why is the village the way it is?

Mayor John Engen of Missoula said the city was cooperating and would make any needed changes. He said he believed the scandal would pass if the public and the students felt the issues had been addressed, but in the meantime, with the football team under a cloud, “it’s hard to know what people are going to pin their hopes and dreams on.”

What else are people going to pin their hopes and dreams on?

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UD proposes that big-time sports universities set aside some part of their enormous athletic budgets to establish Comfort Women dormitories, safe and supervised havens for the teams.

… right off!

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.