Ah say ah say ah think we need to sit down and talk to the boys about uh thinkin.

The [University of Georgia] Bulldogs seem cursed by arrested development, discipline problems, team infractions and other self-destructive habits that induce rage and worry among fans (like me). If I had suggestions that I thought would make a real difference, as opposed to sounding like blog blather (stop recruiting high school kids who are treated like gods, convince the cops in Athens to look the other way like they do in other college towns), I’d list them.

Unlike Southern Methodist University (the last university program to be shut down):

At SMU, the violations expressly gave it a competitive advantage.

Jerry Sandusky wasn’t a crisis: a football team that had gone 5-7 the season before in 2000 was a crisis. What had happened to a 10-year-old boy wasn’t a tragedy; losing to Toledo at home on national television was a tragedy.

As revelations about Joe Paterno grow, the embarrassment of the Modern Language Association having as its director a person whose academic title is Paterno Family Professor grows.

University football in America is very rich, very corrupt, and to some degree in search of legitimacy. One lesson for universities to be drawn from the Penn State fiasco: Football is already well on its way toward becoming completely independent of whatever university used to house it. Go with that. Crossover stuff like the Paterno thing will bring you to grief.

Or, more often, for the sake of athletic failure. Strange.

… is the title of my latest post 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 Already out of date.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.

… guilty.

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.

Philadelphia Inquirer