Well ain’t that great. What a fucking profile in courage. Hawaii runs the scummiest losingest football program out there, but look out world here we come!
On Thursday afternoon, former UH quarterback Colt Brennan was released from jail. And in separate incidents, three current football players were arrested for DUI’s. The school is also investigating the canceled Stevie Wonder benefit concert.
A football whorehouse is a football whorehouse, and you can get all Southern about it and hem and haw about tradition and shit but whether you’re Chapel Hill or Penn State you’re a whorehouse.
The particular stink from Penn State having become over-familiar from 24/7 coverage, the country’s moving on to Chapel Hill for a fresher stench.
America is on one long summer college athletics tour this year. After Chapel Hill, it’s going to be the University of Michigan.
“Generally, (faculty) call for an external review of athletic advising, independent of the Athletic Department, as well as more forthright statements from the administration about the compromises made to host Division I athletics at UNC,” the report said.
That’s a wee UNC faculty committee commenting on an entire academic department run by and for athletics. The external review will be a stunner (look what Louis Freeh did) in which, to the astonishment of the university’s president and trustees, it will turn out that massive academic fraud at the school was organized not by one or two well-meaning misguided people, but a whole whorehouse of characters, but that of course we shouldn’t hold the trustees or the president responsible.
Tragic enough that Southern Methodist University football got the death penalty and never recovered; now it emerges that three of their players have been robbed of all their electronic toys by a prostitute one of them refused to pay.
The tragic flaw this time was leaving her alone in their house after refusing payment:
The three football players went to their end-of-year football banquet and left the escort in the home, according to a police report obtained by Channel 11.
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UD thanks Dave.
It’s another when good universities like the University of Michigan spin out of control. Off they go, one after another expensive (to Michigan taxpayers) football player… And the players get that all-important incredibly condescending send-off from the coach:
“Fitz made a poor decision and has been suspended indefinitely because of that action,” Michigan coach Brady Hoke said in a statement released Monday afternoon. “There are expectations that come with being a football student-athlete at the University of Michigan and those responsibilities were not met in this instance.
“We will use this as an opportunity to educate Fitz and make sure he understands the high standards that we have established within our program.”
As if this asshole didn’t recruit the guy. More becoming would be the coach saying something like The pattern of university-destroying misbehavior on the part of so many members of our most high-profile teams means that something is wrong with our recruiting strategy. We will try to do a better job. But no – he has to lecture the player on how he’s going to get educated blah blah. Better to educate the coach in avoiding cynical recruitment decisions.
But anyway. Doesn’t matter. UM’s disgusting and expensive hiring and firing of the likes of Rick Rodriguez… I mean, we’re supposed to forget about all that… Put it aside the way Penn State people put aside one unsettling event after another over decades. North Carolina Chapel Hill is already a laughingstock; U Mich is probably next. On with the farce.
Yes, well said, and this we all know.
The writer insists that cold hard cash, rather than any “abstraction,” accounts for college football’s disgusting culture:
Culture sounds like an abstraction, but it’s really not. Money is driving the culture.
Yet UD would argue that culture is driving the money. Indeed, when the writer tries to get at the culture, he’s vague, clearly inadequate:
College sports remain an intoxicating spectacle, rich with custom and a young, loyal, emotional audience. It sweeps us into the moment, thrills us, suspends our common sense. The forces behind college sports know we won’t turn away, even as coaches skip out on teams and superstar athletes (quite understandably) depart school early. They know we are hooked, and they can count on our cognitive dissonance.
This descriptive language fails to distinguish the sick giant (compellingly embodied by hulking affectless Sandusky) of big-time university football and basketball from amateur campus athletics – from all good sports spectacles, for that matter. The writer is also wrong about the nature of the audience. It is neither particularly young nor particularly loyal. The moneyed fans (and they’re all that count for the purposes of the money argument) are older guys – forties, fifties, sixties… T. Boone Pickens is around 500… And the reason so many big programs are in deep financial shit is because fans abandon teams in droves when they start on a losing streak. Some fans are loyal, sure. Many fans flee the stadium when the team sucks. Plus when the economy’s in the dumpster they abandon their season tickets and luxury boxes. In response, the university ups the price of everyone’s ticket (gotta pay for the 300 million stadium upgrade and the new incredibly expensive coach who will turn the team around and the incredibly expensive severance pay for the exiting coach who by the way is also talking about suing the school), making matters worse.
And why are so many universities dominated by a culture that “sweeps us into the moment, thrills us, suspends our common sense”? Do these sounds like intellectual values? I mean, thrills us, okay. The rest of it?
No, the writer needs to disentangle some of what he’s written and think about sports factories as places where people have eagerly betrayed the life of the mind.
Penn State football was hit with a four-year postseason ban, the loss of 40 scholarships over four years and a $60 million fine as a result of the cover up in the Jerry Sandusky scandal.
In addition, all Penn State wins from 1998-2011 will be vacated. The fine is equal to one year’s gross revenue…
The penalties cripple Penn State football, putting it as close to the death penalty without the NCAA actually applying the rarely-used sanction. The program will be limited to 15 scholarships beginning for the next four years beginning in 2013. The normal limit is 25 per year.
If you want to see a bunch of guys in suits talk to a bunch of other guys in suits, go here.
In August 2011, a panel of 54 university presidents — personally selected by [NCAA head Mark] Emmert — assembled in Indianapolis for a two-day retreat. Fed up with scandals that had overwhelmed college sports, they resolved to take action. So, in rapid fashion, they pushed forward a number of dramatic reforms. These included raising the graduation-rate standards to be eligible for postseason play, rewriting the NCAA rulebook, revamping the NCAA penalty process, allowing schools to offer multiyear athletic scholarships and allowing schools to give up to a $2,000 stipend to help move scholarships toward the actual cost of attendance.
The lead quote the NCAA used in its news release from the event is quite telling.
“What stands out, above everything else, is the unanimity of thinking among university presidents who were assembled,” a president said. “There is an unwavering determination to change a number of things about intercollegiate athletics today. Presidents are fed up with the rule breaking that is out there.”
Which president said those words? Spanier, who, at the time, knew he was allowing an accused child rapist on his campus.
… of America’s multiple university football scandals is touched on in this letter to the editor:
The juxtaposition of a cartoon about the Penn State scandal and Steve Ford’s column July 15 on the [University of North Carolina] athletics/academic mess caused me to think that, in a perverse way, UNC-Chapel Hill should thank Penn State. If the national media were not caught up in Penn State’s football-related criminality, they might be focused on UNC’s mendacity instead.
It’s like – how far back does your football scandal memory go? Isn’t the University of Miami already gone? Everybody was mega-fretting over that one so recently… And the letter writer’s right – Chapel Hill’s beyond-grotesque academic scandal (and unlike Penn State and U Miami, Chapel Hill has until recently been seen as a serious university) has evaporated in the Penn State shower-mist.
It’s an American thing. UD’s married to a Pole who comes from an old accomplished family. He remembers everything and everyone from the fourteenth century on. UD’s a typical American. Comes from nuthin and can’t remember – doesn’t know – anything from more than a couple of generations back.
In the case of football scandals, Americans can’t remember anything from more than a month back.
While the death penalty is not believed to be in effect here, some think that the [NCAA] penalty [against Penn State] might actually be longer and considered more harmful than the death penalty, and [it has] been labeled as “unprecedented.”
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What could be worse than death itself?
A long arid life in which without football scholarships your university devolves into…
… dear God, into a university.
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Try to imagine the president’s official response:
These are uncharted waters.
Already the Princeton Review is scrutinizing our perennial top placement among party schools.
Some have likened this punishment to having been given life imprisonment instead of death. Who can say which of those two is the more excruciating?
In the short term, the university is doing what it can. We have set up a carnival in the stadium where you can watch a freak show.
But this is no substitute, as we are keenly aware. Some of you may want to visit the student counseling office. Others may want to visit the library and its resources.
Most of you, we trust, will want to hit the bottle. Penn State has lost its competitive football program, but it has not lost its proud array of bars. Go to it.
Like Vice President Cheney in the aftermath of 9/11, Joe Paterno’s statue is being escorted to a secure location.
I have decided that it is in the best interest of our university and public safety to remove the statue and store it in a secure location.
Gotta be secure because Penn State risks a breakaway group of partisans stealing it and reestablishing the cult.
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UD thanks Phiala.
[In today’s] college football world… football is the big rat that keeps the university wheel turning.
It’s clear, vivid, a beaut.
That’s a Southern Methodist University professor waxing nostalgic about the few precious non-football-dominated years the place got after its program was shut down for massive corruption.
Note his language: SMU got a breather. A welcome breather.
Football at a place like today’s bad boy, Penn State (there are tons of identical locations in the US), is a total environment, a macroculture, a ship of fools, a village idiotocracy, a cretin collective, a deeply settled dunciad. If you give it the death penalty, if you shut it down, you’re going to create a situation of collective psychic numbing (the term comes from Robert Jay Lifton’s groundbreaking work on traumatized cultures).
If you want to know what post-death penalty Happy Valley will look like on the ground, go here, to the Jim Morrison grave/pilgrimage site in Paris. After Paterno’s official statue is taken down, his followers will construct their own and will, like Morrison’s people, camp out there. As they give way to despair, they will place more and more Jim Beam bottles along the statue’s surfaces until it, like Morrison’s memorial, becomes a famous object d’art, a gawker magnet. Happy Valley will become a curiosity, its revenue now derived from tourists who come to stare.
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… at Penn State, and what to do about it. The institution has been stained by so many and so much, the question of whether its former president should retain his faculty tenure is a small one. But given how much the taxpayers of Pennsylvania are about to chalk up in lawsuit awards against the university, the school probably would prefer not making them even angrier when they realize they’re paying Graham’s salary for as long as he feels like hanging around.
Given Sandusky’s conviction and the Freeh report, Donald Heller, dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, predicted Penn State would rather negotiate with Spanier for his resignation than revoke his tenure.
“I don’t think they’re going to want to fight that battle with everything else that’s going on,” said Heller, who was director of the study of higher education at Penn State for 10 years until he left in January.
Throw a lot of money at him to make him go away. That comes out of the taxpayers too, but at least it’s a one-shot deal.
Moral indignation, university football style.