… this Sunday night, on my other blog, at Inside Higher Education.
… this Sunday night, on my other blog, at Inside Higher Education.
More gun trouble among our student athletes.
Background on recent difficulties.
I could only find a list for 2008-2010.
It all came together in the University of Georgia winning the 2010 Fulmer Cup.
The tradition continues.
These updates end in April. Already out of date.
Ho hum, guys are dumb.
Then there’s “the $500,000 in guaranteed annual compensation that Maryland is paying its new offensive coordinator, Mike Locksley.”
Locksley! The beautiful Mike Locksley! How degraded can a university get?
That’s a headline in today’s University of Georgia newspaper. Story includes a big ol’ picture of Georgia’s outgoing president, who’s also an NCAA honcho (he was on the short list to replace Myles Brand as head of the organization).
Although the story doesn’t pick up on it, the headline touches on the Southeastern Conference, and how it’s real unlikely you’re gonna see a woman president from an SEC school.
And why is that?
Because the SEC schools (with one exception: Vanderbilt) are all football factories, and in order to stay in operation the foreman must be male. With a woman you run the risk of hiring an egghead.
[Was Penn State’s leadership] really trying to protect the program by protecting a child molester? If so, there’s only one way [for the NCAA] to punish a program like that beyond the civil lawsuits the university itself is facing.
Pennsylvania State University, as an institution, decided that protecting Joe Paterno’s reputation and winning a few more football games was more important than stopping the ongoing rape of young boys.
… For at least a decade, and probably far longer, State College was full of people who deliberately closed their eyes to the truth about Sandusky.
… [T]he powers that were — including Paterno, Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, and vice president for business and finance Gary Schultz, who we now know kept a thick file on Sandusky — decided that, as president Spanier put it in a deleted email that he sued to get back, the “humane” thing would be to cover up Sandusky’s ongoing career of serial child rape.
[T]he Penn State football program was sort of its own little fiefdom and people were aware to varying degrees of what was going on and … that never resulted in greater action until, you know, victims started coming forward.
… [F]or a long time now, there’s been a move, as football programs have gotten bigger, to sort of separate them from the university and when you bring in recruits to the university, you know, you say, this is where the students live, but this is where the football players live and this is where the football players eat and that sort of thing. And, you know, former players I’ve talked to at Penn State said you really could almost go through your whole career there hardly interacting with anybody who wasn’t part of the football program or part of your team.
That’s been a trend at a lot of universities, although I think Penn State to a greater extent. And, now, you’ve seen a lot of big programs sort of reeling that back and trying to reintegrate their football programs into the university as a whole.
Where is this happening? I can’t think of any campus where the trend is anything other than the exact opposite, with Kentucky’s John Calipari leading the way – he increasingly doesn’t even bother playing games on UK’s campus. Professional venues are much better than some dinky school arena.
No, the trend toward separation – or colonization of the university by the big sports teams – is obvious. There’s simply too much money involved in college football and basketball for things to go any other way.
And:
[T]he university began preparing trustees for the possibility of an indictment against former president Graham B. Spanier.
[T]he forces that conspired to allow Sandusky free rein on the campus of Pennsylvania State University for way too long are just as guilty as Sandusky. If prosecuted and convicted, they will be found guilty of different crimes, but had they acted differently fewer children would have been molested.
… While Sandusky can be easily put away as a rogue freak who passed among us, Schultz, Curley, and Spanier were the very cloth of the community, and if that can be rended, what does it say about the community? If the all-encompassing influence over the region – Penn State – can be demonstrated to be morally bankrupt at its core, then what about the rest of us?
… Spanier, Schultz, and Curley were acting as administrators for Penn State, and if they go down in court, the school will have serious civil exposure as a result.
A commenter at the Lexington Herald-Leader explains why it’s pointless for a local columnist to criticize the University of Kentucky basketball program.
But you’re a Kentucky fan, which means you’re much too far gone to give a shit.
Barnhart acknowledged that the [basketball ticket] increases could be considered ill-timed considering how Kentucky Coach John Calipari refused earlier this year to extend the series with Indiana on a home-and-home basis. That removed a potential game between top-five opponents from UK’s home schedule in 2012-13.
“I understand,” Barnhart said of any potential fan dissatisfaction. “There are some of those pieces that are difficult to reconcile.”
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Oh yeah. UK football sucks. The program is bleeding money.
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But at least Forbes ranks UK 427th best university in the nation!
The NCAA still has to drop the hammer on the Miami football program for the great Nevin Shapiro caper of 2011, which we’d unbelievably thought at one point was the worst thing that could happen to college football, or something like that. Those were simpler times, and I’m pretty sure we all really miss them.
There was talk about how environmentally friendly the structure would be and how, included among the luxury suites and private boxes, would be recruiting areas, not just for athletic officials, but for department heads who wanted to impress upon potential faculty or students how great the university is.
Faculty recruitment at the proposed new Colorado State football stadium.
… if you need a little pick-me-up about university football, complete with excited invocations of ‘shirtless boys,’ read this. Its title is It All Begins With Football, and ain’t it the truth. This one little essay will put all your angst right in the shade and get you pissing your pants all over again for the team.
With the beginning of the Sandusky trial, the rhetoric-fest also begins. The outrage expressed months ago, when the story broke, now expresses itself again, often with an emphasis on the pathetic obsession with football in Happy Valley.
They’re pointing the same thing out about pathetic Auburn: “The shooting has shaken Auburn, a city of 53,000 that revolves around the football team.”
You’d never know there were universities in these locations.
[I]f all this is true, Sandusky was allowed to operate for years because other men decided there was something more important than innocent children.
Football.
Indeed in what way can it be said that universities, as we understand them, are at these locations? These are places where people are driven by blind fanaticism toward patently unworthy objects. It’s hard to get farther from the ethos of the university.