… the Oklahoma State University newspaper’s front page to get a sense of the rich culture of university football.

A student at UD’s alma mater discusses America’s sleaze-positive culture.

… this morning from Phil Knight. Feast your eyes. Don’t bother with the last couple of paragraphs.

John, John, John.

Do you know how often UD has been lectured on the subject of the athletic marketplace? “We can’t control the marketplace,” says David Boren, president of the University of Oklahoma. We just can’t! We can’t control the market! Whatever we have to pay, we have to pay!

Absolutely everyone thinks that way.

So now you say – under pressure of Penn State – you just say, you just state it like oh obviously – they shouldn’t give coaches multimillion-dollar contracts.

Tell me in what way that’s not a cheap throwaway line.

Like Auburn and other all-balls-no-brains schools, Penn State packs its board of trustees with witless jocks, guys who played for the university back when. Garban (scan his bio if you have the stomach) was until recently chair, baby. Penn State doesn’t fool around. Penn State leaves nothing to chance.

Of course, if Penn State had any sense – intellectual, moral, whatever – the entire board of trustees would have resigned months ago. But even the trustees themselves know that Garban – Grade A Paterno beef – has to go. Garban, who knew a lot about the Sandusky situation but told virtually no one – certainly not his fellow trustees – is refusing to leave the board. And no one can make him leave.

Why not?

It wouldn’t be the Penn State Way.

David, a UD reader, sends UD this opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. It’s strong-minded and well-written, but it’s up against the same problem everyone writing about Penn State is up against.

The entire complicated, powerful, wildly popular, and unimaginably lucrative system of university football is corrupt — morally degenerate, criminally sordid. Forget academic fraud and university-specific stuff like that. Academic fraud is endemic, of course, but that’s a trifle here. When people like the WSJ guy talk about “shining a harsh light, and building the whole thing over, the right way,” they’re talking about revolutionizing a culture – a culture of massive university-sponsored alcohol sales to students, routine post-game riots and campus-trashing after tailgates, Mondo Cane-style coach-deification (after Penn State pulls down Uncle Joe’s statue, you can worship at Saint Saban’s), total subordination to television stations and naming-rights banks…

En effet, mes petites, it can’t be changed. That’s why the harshest critics of it resort to comedy, as in the hilarious yearly Fulmer Awards for the team with the most arrests among its players. A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling, said Nietzsche, and all the smartest critics of college football and basketball are jokesters. They’re way past feeling anything about it. Do you think Italians at this point do anything other than tell each other jokes about the mafia? University football and basketball have settled in, and if you don’t believe me, look at the guy running the biggest joke of them all – the NCAA. Scroll down for the skinny on Mark Emmert, aka “top stooge.”

No, look. J’adore Barack Obama, but he’s a mad jock. Say we get Romney next — Mr Olympics. Ahnold’s trying to repair his marriage to Maria so he can run. (I know – citizenship problems there.) Look at the Senate, for chrissake. We can’t even remove the tax exemptions these educational activities enjoy. Luxury boxes are exempt.

From the little freshman fan in the cheap seats to the President of these United States, everyone’s slobbering and panting for grander Godzillatrons and stronger steroids. Everybody’s hyped up. School spirit. When you feel it, you give money to the sports program so the school can be even more of a jock joke.

The WSJ guy is right – it’s a culture. It has many, many moving parts, and they mesh wonderfully. It’s way past anybody fucking with it in any serious way.

A woman who worked at Penn State and witnessed “the culture that allowed Jerry Sandusky to exist,” recalls her time there.

Back in 2005, she wrote to the university’s president about Saint Joe:

“I am very troubled by the manipulative, disrespectful, uncivil and abusive behavior of our football coach,” she wrote. “It is quite shocking what this man — who is idolized by people everywhere — is teaching our students.”

… [President] Spanier came to her home and sat in her living room after Paterno lost his temper at [a] meeting about the players involved in [a] brawl. She said he told her, “Well, Vicky, you are one of a handful of people, four or five people, who have seen the dark side of Joe Paterno. We’re going to have to do something about it.”

She shakes her head, recalling that conversation now. “‘Doing something about it,'” she says, “ended with me being gone.”

And for those readers who continue to believe Penn State isn’t a cult, there’s this:

She received threatening phone calls at home when her husband was traveling and was savaged on student message boards. Her house was vandalized and “For Sale” signs were staked in her front yard. By the time police installed surveillance cameras, she was already on her way out.

… She stopped going to Wegman’s, a favorite upscale supermarket outside State College, because “the Penn State people went there.” They recognized her and without fail turned their backs and walked away, she recalled.

Former colleagues who did want to reach out held back. Later, they explained that they were afraid of losing their jobs, too.

… about professors at football factories. Seems a good time to recycle the piece.

… President-for-Life (scroll down), Penn State’s God-for-Life-and-Afterlife, or any number of the world’s tinpot Dictators-for-Life, daily existence always eventually devolves into farce under the Beloved Leader.

Quickly, it became clear that Mr. Paterno … had failed to go to the authorities or even to confront Mr. Sandusky after he had been told in person of the episode. The prospect that Mr. Paterno, a revered figure, might be fired by the board of trustees was suddenly real.

Mr. Paterno quickly issued a statement saying, in effect, that the board need not act, that he would resign at the end of the season. Neither he nor the university revealed that he had effectively agreed to do so already, in return for an expensive financial package.

The board fired him anyway, a decision that caused rioting and led to an angry and often very personal backlash against the trustees, but it agreed to honor his contract. It was then that the full board came to find out what the university was obligated to pay Mr. Paterno.

You see all the familiar elements. The pathetic ignorant violent mob (“During a conference call, one board member worried aloud that failure to make good on what was owed to the Paterno estate could lead to another “reign of terror” by Mr. Paterno’s supporters …”); the pathetic, useless, out of it, trustees; the snarling Leader and his snarling family, brandishing lawsuits and demanding entitlements and pots of cash.

Think of the on-field violence of football as the ceremonial violence of this country’s Happy Valleys; behind the headbutts and quarterback sacks lie boosters, coaches, and fans ready to riot and issue fatwas.

La vie est une farce à mener par tous said Rimbaud. Take a comfy seat. This particular farce has only just begun.

Why is the argument here —

There is demand for minor league basketball and football, but there’s no need for it to be tied to universities, or for the leagues to abuse their workers. By spinning off these profit centers, universities could return to their educational missions, and treat athletics the way the NCAA’s Division III does: as an amateur activity to complement students’ education.

— so totally appalling to everyone? Just return to amateur, complementary football at universities, and if Americans seem to need more professional football teams so badly, form them. Why will this idea never fly?

It will never fly because it’s much more titillating to get your professional-level violence pure. It thrills you more, you’re more willing to pay for it, when you’re doing it, as it were, with a virgin. Not a wage-slave, exclusively-on-field, businessman, but – the heart begins to pound with the phrase – a student-athlete.

There’s an irresistible attraction here. You’re seeing the very first concussion, the initiation of the body into its brokenness. College is beautifully, irresistibly, caught up with youth, innocence, and bonding (the players aren’t individual, commercially transacting, agents; they’re unpaid members of a team), and those values – along with big-time football violence – can only enter the field with the big-time college team.

Why are luxury boxes full of excited businessmen in their fifties the real money-center of university football? Why are the mega-boosters with tens of millions of dollars in football donations, from T. Boone Pickens on down, old guys who’ve devoted their lives to the acquisition of wealth? Couldn’t they content themselves with the New England Patriots, etc? Indeed, why do people like Pickens and Nike’s Phil Knight get so involved with the team? Why couldn’t they get involved with the Patriots?

Because they love their alma mater? What a weird way of showing your love for your university. But like the latest football booster financial criminal – see this post – they all say the same thing. I want to show my gratitude to my university for giving me the academic skills to be a big success. Therefore, I’m giving my money to… the football team! Why not the library, if it’s about what the school gave you academically?

Because the library’s abstract, and anyway no one uses the library anymore. With the team, it’s all out there, a screaming brightly colored physically intense televised spectacle in which people not only pay attention to you but maybe even worship you, the way Oklahoma State worships Pickens and Oregon worships Phil Knight.

These motives go so deep that the reality of significant portions of some of these teams being composed not only of non-students, but criminals, doesn’t faze these men in the slightest. When they look at them play, they see deeply committed members of the student body who love the school as much as the old guys do. Students in the stands seem to see the same thing, strangely enough, even though the players tend to be totally isolated from the rest of the campus, living in their own dorms, taking their own special classes, and working out in their own gyms.

None of it matters – the corruption of the whole big-time university football enterprise, the high-profile bullies on the teams (and among some of the coaches, from Bobby Knight to Mike Leach), the university president and the board of trustees playing with themselves while their university gets shot to hell by the boosters and the coaches… None of it dims the peculiar fantasy the university football enthusiast is after.

So it’s got to be the university, and it’s got to be big. Until the age for entry into professional football is lowered and serious players don’t bother with universities, you’re going to watch the process whereby universities become Penn State or the University of Miami or Florida A&M happen over and over again.

“Football and the university melded at Penn State,” says Charles Yesalis, emeritus professor of health policy and administration at Penn State, who lived and taught in State College, Pa. for 25 years before moving to Virginia a few months ago. “The sports program and the university are one, in part because Paterno was the most powerful person on campus, by far. That’s what was problematic here, what made Penn State different. I don’t know of another place where that’s been allowed to happen. There was no firewall. Other universities have sustained that firewall.”

Penn State’s perspective got warped. “When these people decided to ruin their lives to keep the reputation of Penn State and Penn State football, I wasn’t surprised,” says Yesalis, who has also co-written a new book, The Fundamentals of U.S. Health Care: Perspectives and Principles. “Very much of the behavior was cult-like. There is this arrogance that ‘we are Penn State, we are above the law.’” When he chaired a committee on athletic compliance over a decade ago, Yesalis remembers suggesting that the university hire an outside auditor to make sure Penn State was following the rules. “I hate when people talk about body language and everything,” says Yesalis. “I’m a scientist, I think it’s total bullshit. Having said that, I looked around the table, and these people thought I had antlers coming out of my goddam head, because I questioned the integrity of Penn State.”

Skeptics have been peeling back the Penn State onion for several years now. In 2008, ESPN calculated that in the previous six years, 46 Penn State football players had faced a total of 163 criminal charges; 27 had been convicted or had pleaded guilty.

… [E]specially for a school of its size and budget — it has the largest campus in the Northeast and the 10th largest in the country — Penn State doesn’t match its football team’s prominence in very many of its myriad classrooms.

I took a look at the U.S. News & World Report rankings to see where the school stood. Its professional schools are barely mediocre: Business ranks 44th, law ranks 76th, medicine is so obscure that I couldn’t find it on the published list. The school is in the top rank nationally in only a handful of disciplines: earth sciences, criminology, and industrial and nuclear engineering.

Penn State’s other major strength, at least until now, was in several sub-specialties of education: administration and supervision, counseling and personnel, educational psychology, and higher education administration.

The sad irony of these rankings is unbearable.

His last sentence is a little strange. Because it scores well in counseling we shouldn’t expect its leadership to cover up child rape in order to protect its football program?

… which Deadspin calls, correctly, “full of shit.”

Joe Paterno spent the last interview of his life lying to a journalist to protect his legacy.

But not just any journalist. This blog has followed with amazement Jenkins’ (scroll down) worship of university sports and coaches, and her excited proposal that universities make football an academic major and coaches professors. Jenkins was one more Paterno patsy, one more idiot-audience for his integrity act. The Washington Post should be ashamed.

De-romancing the stone.

A lot of people are saying this about Penn State football.

But pause.

Reflect.

What is left of Penn State without football? It’s the same question you’d need to ask about the University of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and a host of others. A few scattered academic departments; a demoralized student body transferring out in search of a tailgate; yawning stadia assuming the aspect of meteor craters.

The silence alone will kill most of the stragglers. Campus will come on all scholarly-like, and drinking will go from post-game debauch to post-Soviet despair. Here and there amid the twilight-of-the-superheroes vastation, crazed, tattered philosophy faculty will wail like Diogenes while enflamed remnant-students throw stones at them.