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.

******************************

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.

****************************

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.”

… gives you a sense of what it must have been like to sit in your communal apartment in Leningrad in 1956 and read about the anticipated glorious fulfillment of the Soviet Union’s Sixth Five-Year Plan.

ASU Regents Chairman Rick Brezhnev assures a reporter that “To think of sports as something that isn’t an integral part of the university is inappropriate… Sports is part of the life experience we want people to have.” And so comrades we must all sacrifice! To do otherwise would be inappropriate!

At ASU we subsidize pathetic teams no one wants to watch with the people’s tuition. We take millions of the people’s dollars to hire fine upstanding coaches like Todd Graham and to buy out the contracts of all the coaches currently living in the Gulag.

Since 2005, ASU’s total spending on athletics has grown by 44 percent, to $57 million, yet its performances in football and men’s basketball — the only two sports that made money — have been lackluster. ASU’s ticket revenue spiked in fiscal 2008, then began sliding and plunged in 2011. ASU has struggled to raise money from donors.

But it’s about the future! The future is bright! We will fulfill – and more than fulfill – the athletic department’s five year plan with honor!

*************************

Update: UD originally got the new coach wrong. She thanks Doug, a reader, for the correction.

Izvestia, Central Florida.

Lively radio interview with a News and Observer reporter about the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud (scroll down).

As with Thomas Petee at Auburn and Leo Wilton at SUNY Binghamton, it’s crucial to have either the chair of a department (like Chapel Hill’s Julius Nyang’oro, about whom the reporter is talking up there in my headline) or a very high-ranking faculty member running the independent studies that athletes find so attractive.

The wisdom of commenters. This one even knows how to use a semi-colon. UD bows down.

***********************

Speaking of writing, Scathing Online Schoolmarm is relieved to see wordplay starting up on the last name Peppers. It’s taken far too long. Philadelphia Inquirer:

PEEPING AT PEPPERS’ TRANSCRIPT

Alliteration is the obvious first move, though SOS also looks forward to some pun-seepage.

Pepper is of course part of a famous alliterative Mother Goose thingie:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

*********************************

Chapel’s campus posted pickled Peppers’ transcript;
A peek at pickled Peppers’ GPA took place.
It shows how Chapel Hill kept up its pecker
And won the big athletic college race.

… quite gets you there.

The wins get taken away, so where are you? One after another cheater university gets its wins taken away, so what does that make all the effort to play and win the games?

As with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which will almost certainly vacate yet more victories once its slow-moving academic scandal picks up steam, it makes the effort either a sick pathetic joke, or it makes it performance art.

UD thinks it’s more healthy to think of it as performance art, à la Dada. Our football program is shit and then we die. Let’s do the rhumba around a Paterno statue and then blow it up. Let’s turn our victory banners into burqas and wrap them around our labrador retrievers.

Far better to adopt the absurd, says UD, than wallow in the bathos all the boys are in at the moment. The boys need to evolve. They need to see the possibilities.

Take this guy, with his anguished questions, his incredulity, his Blanche Dubois Ah see the world ah wanna see thing:

We tend to believe what we want, and since my sister graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and loved the school so much that she still lives nearby, I didn’t want to believe this school — her school — could be so shameful.

Impeccable reasoning, wouldn’t think of criticizing this way of understanding the world, but it takes him to this grim panicky place:

[This might be] the ugliest academic scandal in NCAA history.

UD would ask him to calm down and recall what the great landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll once said:

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.

Go toward the ugliness; bring to it the same pep and pageantry you used to bring to game day, and you will find that laughter and fellowship will not be far behind.

The hope amongst the Carolina blue is that this thing is isolated and no matter what, it doesn’t involve the mens basketball program. My gut tells me the men who have led this program, the great Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge and Roy Williams would never take part in anything like this, that they are men of honor and the basketball program will remain clean forever. It is my personal belief that, that is true and whatever ends up coming out when everything is out in the open, it will remain true.

You see that he says the North Carolina Chapel Hill basketball program, not football. Football is obviously utterly dirty… Yet it being in the nature of fandom to cling to one’s magic blanket even as it tatters before your eyes, the writer professes his faith in the spotlessness of at least basketball. At least that, for God’s sake. You wouldn’t take that away.

***********************

Meanwhile – the infinite bounty of sport! – the professional organization that represents literature professors may soon be headed by someone who teaches at an unaccredited university.

Researchers at UNC are exploring the question of how a football player’s transcript got reverse engineered in such a way as to appear plastered all over the national press.

The details of the transcript, particularly the fact that [Julius] Peppers took three independent study courses in the now scandal-ridden [African and Afro-American Studies] department, raise troubling questions amidst the unraveling of one of the most damaging scandals in the University’s history.

**************************

If the transcript does, in fact, belong to Peppers, it digs the university deeper into an already damaging scandal. An internal review of the African Studies Department found that the majority of the aberrant courses were administered beginning in 2007, but this development would mean that the trouble began much earlier. It would also add to the growing speculation that athletes have been specifically pointed toward African Studies classes by counselors assigned to the athletic department.

And speaking of counselors:

Peppers’s agent, Carl Carey was also his academic adviser while at UNC and helped him get a re-test on a failing grade that would have ruled him academically ineligible.

Impressed? Impressed that Carey has worn two hats – agent and counselor? Well, hold on to your hat, because that number is three: Carey also taught at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill!

[AF/AM department chair Julius] Nyang’oro reportedly hired Carl Carey Jr. to teach a course this summer without telling Karen Gil, dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, that Carey is a sports agent.

Wow.

*****************

(UD thanks Dave.)

*****************

Oh – apparently there’s a bidding war for Julius Nyang’oro going on between Auburn and Clemson.

It’s always a little upsetting for sports schools when they fail – as they so often do – in their effort to twist privacy laws. The bigger the athletics program, the more it has to hide (recall the legal hysteria about Happy Valley emails), so they scream FERPA whenever newspapers ask for substantive information.

A judge just ruled that this season’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, cannot use the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to keep those of us outside the coaches’ circle from knowing every choice detail about their disgraced football program. Urp!