… this two million dollars a year?

Because they’re worth every penny. A university can’t put a price tag on this sort of international publicity.

… is Southern Methodist University, which, despite its beyond-notorious sports past (people keep talking about its death penalty in relation to Penn State), seems determined to get right back up on that particular horse and ride itself into oblivion again. Their athletic deficit is over a hundred million dollars, and they just fired – in an act of obvious desperation – the swaggering bigmouth athletic director in charge of making that deficit much, much bigger.

Read the background here, if you can stomach it.

Like the University of Georgia (which UD has long designated the Worst University in America), SMU has a president who seems a wholly owned subsidiary of the NCAA, a jocko di tutti jocki who will do absolutely anything to get SMU back on track toward another death penalty, either via the NCAA or via institutional bankruptcy.

Gerald Gurney (UD sat on a panel with him at a sports conference a few years ago) and Richard Southall examine the latest NCAA bullshit: Academic Progress Rate scores. Since APR is all about a sports school having the money to play the system by coming up with phony courses, elaborate waivers, etc., etc., the only universities that end up getting to be the dummies eliminated from competition are the non-rich ones.

The writers feature “the recent academic scandal at the University of North Carolina,” a well-heeled school with notorious jock doc Julius Nyang’oro. Rather than suffer any institutional penalty – even a mild verbal put-down – Nyang’oro has been rewarded for years of outrageous academic fraud by a retirement with full honors. For a job well done.

That scene from An Officer and a Gentleman captures what happens when a sports factory loses its assembly line — when all the investments and efficiencies fail and the place begins to shut down.

The University of Kentucky’s football team – the only game in town except for its basketball team, coached by the amazingly corrupt Calipari – is faltering, and customers are fleeing.

Recently, the University of Kentucky Athletics Department announced that season ticket sales for the 2012 UK Football team was down nearly 30% from last year’s totals. And, on top of that, roughly 2,000 unsold tickets were returned to the University of Louisville for the September 2 matchup. Needless to say, the apathy amongst the Big Blue faithful toward this year’s team is high. The question in most fans’ minds: How do we fix UK Football?

The writer is a fan. He proposes spending much more money on the team. The school just bought an incredibly expensive upgraded Adzillatron for the stadium, and there’s no doubt that UK will continue to spend every penny it has on sports. But what if all the money in the world can’t make the football team win? Meanwhile Calipari will probably play fewer and fewer games on the UK campus…

You see where this is going. Soon there will be no reason for the University of Kentucky to exist at all.

A coach talks about why Americans go to college.

… why the NCAA could care less about the rampant academic corruption at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (some background here). Both consider it odd that this year’s most extensive, most comically brazen case of intellectual prostitution at a sports school holds no interest at all for that organization.

[A]s an offshoot of [yet another] NCAA investigation [into corruption at Chapel Hill], a UNC internal probe found that 54 AFAM classes were either “aberrant” or “irregularly” taught from summer 2007 to summer 2011. That included unauthorized grade changes, forged faculty signatures on grade rolls and limited or no class time.

But did the athletics department put pressure on players or the instructor? If not, the NCAA isn’t interested.

[W]hen it comes to the legitimacy of classwork done on a college campus, where technically the NC(as in collegiate)AA has some sway, it lets the individual institutions police themselves… Essentially, the hook in this case is that there is no proof that a coach or athletic department official coerced Nyang’oro [chair of African American Studies] to make lunch meat out of his curriculum for the benefit of the athletes enrolled.

… Pushing athletes to particular majors or even classes — clustering, if you will — while perhaps distasteful, isn’t in and of itself fraudulent. Pushing athletes to classes that were deemed “aberrant” by an internal university probe due to grade changes and forgeries is an entirely different matter.

So I guess this is the NCAA’s philosophy: If you’re simply a cruddy school that doesn’t care about educating your athletes, that’s your business.

… one of the Penn State movers and shakers: Tim Curley. His remarks at a 2009 Knight Commission meeting UD attended so struck her that she transcribed them here.

Looked at in the context of subsequent events, these comments can really… I dunno… make you… a little cynical?

College athletics is today the healthiest I’ve ever seen it. Everything’s looking great. Everyone here should be celebrating the positive values of university sports. We’ve learned we can be the great success we are and at the same time we can govern ourselves. We don’t need to be governed by outsiders. We’ve made incredible progress on all fronts. Enthusiasm and excitement and participation and profit is at an all-time high. Yes, escalating salaries stress the system. Yes, we continue to be challenged with our expenses. But these things are out of our control. Every one of these expenditures is necessary. We live in a market society, and we have to respond to market conditions.

… these are some of the little extrees he has in mind. These fixins are not typically listed on your typical university sports budget menu. Like the second sprig of mint on your crème brûlée or the little side of chutney with your chicken madras, these are the things that add up to make your program the humiliating mess it is.

The state of Iowa will pay $30,500 in legal fees accumulated by a newspaper in a lawsuit over access to records from the University of Iowa.

… The $30,500 payment was formally approved Monday by the State Appeal Board, the panel responsible for reviewing and signing off on the state’s legal settlements.

The open records case centered on documents relating to an alleged sexual assault committed by Iowa football players in a university dorm room. The court found some of the university’s records concerning the case were protected by the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, while others were available for disclosure.

This writer to Colorado’s Daily Camera points out that football is bankrupting the University of Colorado:

[B]etween 2006 and 2011 the university, students and the state subsidized roughly 25 percent ($15 million) of the Athletic Department’s annual operating costs. The Athletic Department has also taken $18 million in loans from the university system over the past several years. These investments are particularly troublesome considering that Colorado is 48th in the country in funding for its universities.

Who knows how this troublesome state of affairs happened? The point is, I mean, whatever, the point is there’s a solution!

Alcohol sales would help to make the Athletic Department more financially self-sufficient…

I mean, we got into this mess who the fuck knows how but now that we’re in it let’s hit the kids up for booze and solve it dammit. And anyway the students are victims of the current policy!

[P]atrons are forced to get their fill prior to games…

The current policy forces students to get so drunk they become “a danger to themselves and a danger and nuisance to others.”

This state-sponsored coercion must end. Sic semper tyrannis!

Oh really you little fool. Where do you think you are? A university?

… different?

Many of America’s most grotesquely twisted football factory schools have a Lewis Margolis, a faculty member who from the start – before Penn State becomes Pederasty Central; before sick jocks become a sick joke – speaks out strongly and eloquently against the corruption of his or her campus by big-time sports.

Margolis has become the go-to person as journalists crowd around the next university to lose much of its reputation because of its sports program – the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Watch for his name as the UNC academic fraud scandal heats up. We know from interviews that he speaks well; this terrific Inside Higher Education piece reveals him also to be an excellent writer.

Courtside with Oklahoma State basketball!

… to make things look not quite as sordid as they are. Note how this article, about two University of Texas San Antonio players just arrested for drug-related armed robbery, begins:

Two former University of Texas at San Antonio football players have been released from the program after their alleged involvement in an armed robbery Tuesday.

Not a problem! Former! Years ago they were on the team!

… What? … They were on the team when they did the deal? They were dumped minutes ago, shortly after their incarceration?

Well, that makes them former…

Post-Penn State, everyone’s talking about sports culture and how we have to understand it and control it and all. The beginning of my tutorial on the subject (this whole blog can be seen as a tutorial on the subject, but let’s go with our most recent stuff) is here.

Drawing upon the growing University of North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud scandal (which this blog is following closely), we take our next step:

Joy Renner, [UNC] athletics committee chairwoman and associate professor and director in the Department of Allied Health Sciences, does not believe the [athletes’ academic] advisors had ill-natured intentions.

“I don’t think there was anything malicious,” Renner said. “I don’t think there was any surreptitious types of activities going on. I think it was truly people trying to help our athletes be able to compete on the field and also in the classroom.”

… The findings [of a university report on the situation] present a continued sense of secrecy coming out of the athletics department and the subcommittee’s report calls for more transparency throughout the university. Renner said that must happen if UNC is going to move forward.

“I’ve not gotten one shred of feeling of someone not being transparent or wanting to get to the bottom of this,” Renner said. “Trust me, is there anyone on this campus that doesn’t want this to go away? Things don’t go away until you get to the bottom of it, until you know what actually happened and didn’t happen.”

Confused? The report describes “a sense of secrecy” and “calls for more transparency throughout the university.”

But Renner says nothing “surreptitious” was going on.

But Renner says more transparency “must happen.”

But Renner says the advisors and professors were “truly people trying to help our athletes be able to compete on the field and also in the classroom.”

But Renner says we need to “get to the bottom of it.”

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

Joy Renners abound at all sports factories; they are the joy of sports factories. Without people on the faculty, and on important committees, willing to say the shit you just read, the culture couldn’t thrive.

Joy chairs the athletics committee and so there’s a lot of press attention coming her way. UD recommends that Joy get her story straight or do the no comment thing.

Meanwhile, as we build our knowledge of university sports culture, we keep front and center the pivotal value of the useful idiot.