As the University of North Carolina sport scandal begins to take off, pay attention to the details. People use phrases like sports culture all the time (Penn State, we are told, has to confront its sports culture) but until you look at things like the background of the trustees at Auburn or the background of the people who run the academic support program for athletes at North Carolina, you don’t grasp the reality.

UD attended a university sports conference a couple of years ago, here in Washington, where a high-ranking administrator at a local university demanded to know why coaches and coaching staff were not professors. They are teaching, after all; and erasing the line between coaches and professors will heal the rift between athletics and academics, making the university one big happy family.

If it seems a grotesque idea, it shouldn’t. It’s already being implemented, in a way, at a lot of universities, where the president is little more than a sports nut with impressive corporate or political ties, several of the trustees played football or basketball for the school, and plenty of professors sit on sports-oversight committees and don’t do anything other than enjoy the free tickets and other perks they get to make sure they don’t do anything.

“The athletic enterprise has grown so large and so remunerative that it may not be appropriate at universities anymore,” said Lew Margolis, a [University of North Carolina] public health professor.

Yes, it has grown into the university, to the point where we’re supposed to shed tears because Penn State and its surrounding towns and villages will go bankrupt because of football sanctions. Penn State created and sustained a happy seamless valley where children got fucked in its showers by one of its coaches and now just because of that you’re going to remove the very basis of our economy and indeed of our valley life itself?

Take it out of universities. It’s of course fully appropriate for the larger culture, which laps up the much viler world of professional football. But it is really rather inappropriate at universities.

This is America.

Nice summary of the situation in the comments section of yet another article anticipating the next big gross college sports story – academic fraud at the once-respectable University of North Carolina.

If not for Penn State, you would be sick of hearing about North Carolina by now.

As the details emerge, you’ll get sick of hearing about it right quick.

We’re conditioned by misguided loyalty to rationalize the same routine corruption in our programs we relentlessly condemn in our rivals. Now rot has been exposed in a supposedly “elite” football program that can’t be glossed over.

Get ready, Texas State! Get ready!!

Following the massive academic fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is essentially following the entire leadership of a school – president, deans, high-ranking faculty – attempting to convince people that this leadership saw no difference between a department flagrantly run for the convenience of its athletics program and all other departments.

These people are attempting to convince us that despite well-established fraudulent procedures along these lines at many big-time sports schools – clustering of players into certain majors, department chairs who are nothing more than tools of the athletic program, tutors who cheat on behalf of players, the use of the designation “independent study” to create rafts of bogus courses – all signs of sports-sponsored academic fraudulence on their campus “escaped attention,” in the words of a dean.

No wonder they are having difficulties persuading us to believe that – despite SUNY Binghamton, Auburn, and all the other recent national academic fraud stories with exactly these elements – no one at Chapel Hill had enough distrust in the integrity of its catering-to-athletes department to investigate even a little. We’re supposed to believe that, until the unfolding of a series of events entirely outside the hands of the school’s leadership, everyone trusted in the integrity of this department and its chair.

It’s tawdry and pathetic. It’s insulting to all of us watching as UNC simply and repeatedly lies. It’s particularly insulting to the taxpayers of North Carolina who pay the salaries of corrupt department chairs and cynical administrators.

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.

… on Penn State.

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.