More fun stuff from sports factory University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Ah, big-time athletics. The front porch of the university! Beeeeeeg money maker! Applications for admission go through the roof!

Eh bien. It’s hard to keep up. But let’s see:

The biggest problem Penn State’s president had before his school’s storied athletic program caught up with him involved his having flown a private plane to Harrisburg in order to tell the legislature that his school was really hurting financially.

So he was a little tone deaf! It’s not like he said in a 2001 email that
“it would be ‘humane’ to avoid alerting social services” to allegations against the now world-famous Jerry Sandusky – who, you may recall, until recently had a flavor of campus ice cream named after him…

Athletics has already brought Penn State so much. It may now make it the first American university to have a president brought to trial for failure to report a crime.

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Paul Frampton gets one; Jerry Sandusky gets one. Everyone gets one. Bless the DSM.

Sandusky’s defense team also filed a motion to allow evidence that he has histrionic personality disorder…

… would wait a decent interval before the it had nothing to do with Auburn football bullshit started up. But here it is, bright and early Monday morning:

This is not a sports story. It has a sports element, but it is not a sports story.

As such, it is not a reflection on college athletics or Auburn specifically. It is a reflection on our society…

Auburn football players, past and present, were involved, but that is not the story. The story is that young people have had their lives snuffed out far too soon. The story is that we as a society have issues that need to be addressed.

… The sadness and anger that is being expressed today, the questions that are being asked, should be focused [on] the loss of lives, not that some of those involved, some of those who died, used to play college football. To make the sports angle the focal point of this story is to miss the greater issue at hand.

If you’ve read University Diaries for awhile, you know what I call this tactic: Going Cosmic. This thing that happened, this problem that confronts us, can’t be understood (the writer uses the word ‘senseless’ four times in his senseless opinion piece) or even in a modest way solved. No, no… it’s society, society, society.

It doesn’t occur to this fool that Auburn is a society, a self-enclosed world designed to generate bad outcomes. Its board of trustees is full of former Auburn football players. For decades the school was for all intents and purposes run by Bobby Lowder, a football-obsessed trustee. Cheating is endemic – player payments, bogus courses, you name it.

You want to understand the heart of Auburn society? Here’s an ESPN writer:

Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.

Senseless! Tragic! Society’s to blame! Or, to quote again from this unconscionable local opinion piece: “What’s the world coming to?”

Oh Lordy Aunt Bee yes what’s it coming to??? I declare I need smelling salts.

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Tons of these coming in now. Just a senseless random event having nothing to do with Auburn’s football culture.

This writer is particularly pissed that an article in the New York Times about the murders quotes someone suggesting that “guns and marijuana appear to be a part of the culture around the Auburn football program.”

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Auburn football and guns? Nah.

… is a dangerous place.

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Updates are coming in. So far it looks as though three people are dead and several wounded. Current and former football players seem to have been involved in the fight over a woman that set off the shooting.

In the most recent sports school scandal, North Carolina at Chapel Hill has asked a professor who offered pretend courses to football players to pay up.

UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp told trustees Friday that Julius Nyang’oro was asked to repay $12,000 for teaching a 2011 summer course as an independent study rather than a lecture.

Does anyone really think this guy — who was chair of his department, and who will be allowed to retire with full honors at this end of this year despite the fact that he taught tons of bogus courses — is going to pay the university this money?

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Longer article, with many important comments, here.

Go OSU!

Hopefully this serves as a reminder to not only Stoneburner and Mewhort, but the entire team, that they must conduct themselves properly 24/7 because they are held to such a higher standard than the average college student.

Two Ohio State football players learn the hard way that while average college students can piss freely all over town, players are held to a higher standard.

A head football coach who says:

“I’ve been saying it for a long time, I will not hire an assistant coach until I’ve seen his wife,” Franklin said. “If she looks the part, and she’s a D-1 recruit, then you got a chance to get hired. That’s part of the deal.”

A passion so strong he was ready to kill for it!

Watch as his passion for a middling school with an overpaid president drives him over the edge!!

Virginia Tech has a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to enhance its football recruiting strategy by building a practice facility whose conveniences will attract the attention of our best high school players. Cutting down a rare old growth forest is a small price to pay for a shot at a national championship.

A bunch of eco freaks have some damn fool petition up about saving the trees, and if we give in to them the high schoolers will see what pussies we are and maybe not come. If our university doesn’t stand for giving all we’ve got to impress high school football players, it doesn’t stand for anything.

Somehow the soccer stadium has remained the last bastion of unmitigated maleness. You can behave badly and be proud of it, the way you can’t in virtually any other venue in Europe.

… when you have absolutely no arguments, and cannot write, it’s better to remain silent.

… essay? Opinion piece? Indictment? Not sure what to call it.

It appears in ESPN, of all places, and expresses a strange emotion – hopelessness, I guess. There’s something religious, something sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God about it. It recalls some of the most disgusting scandals in college football in the last few months, missing quite a few of them but touching on enough to make the tired point about the stinking corruption of the enterprise.

But this is a routine rhetorical strategy, beginning your article about the vileness of all aspects of university football by reviewing five or six of the most recent you-could-pukes. Usually the next step is to point out that even by those standards the Miami story startles; or people are getting upset but really the latest Chapel Hill vomit isn’t chunky enough to count… (Here’s a good example. Typical sentence: “After the last 12 months, which were filled with scandal and cover-ups and lies and payouts and allegations of child molestation and motorcycles and mistresses, The Ohio State recently reported something like four dozen secondary violations and we didn’t bat an eye.”)

Instead of this, the author goes all Ballad of Reading Gaol:

We make a monster of what we love, and to make a point about what our society honestly values, a writer might post here a comparison of the state-by-state salaries of head football coaches and governors… In the end we remain helpless against ourselves.

Each man kills the thing he loves, it turns out. As in the endlessly anthologized poem by James Wright about the beginning of football season in American towns:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

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We who are about to die for you losers salute you. Our mothers lie abed wondering why instead of fucking them our fathers want to watch us concuss.

Has another year of scandal and revelation and condemnation finally undone the sport? Are Petrino, Tressel, Paterno, Miami or Montana the beginning of the end?

C’mon. Does any casual fan, any casual reader, any casual viewer, any reasonable person anywhere at the beginning of the 21st century think of “big football schools” as anything other than big football schools?

As it was in 1905, it was another tough year for fans. How do you root for what’s on the helmet without worrying about what’s in it?

Yet we remain helpless against not merely our indifference to what’s in it but indeed to what’s on it. What fan really gives a shit whether it’s Auburn or Alabama? What you’re after is gladiatorial gore good enough to get you going.

UD reads these so you don’t have to.

UD reads the mainly indignant but occasionally explanatory (see this post’s headline) comments from University of Kentucky fans in response to an article that notes a faculty group’s objection to Kentucky’s basketball schedule. The notorious John Calipari’s insistence on “neutral sites” for games means “a geographic separation of entities which already can have a tenuous coexistence: athletic programs and the student body/campus community.”

In short, who gives a shit whether his team’s games have anything to do with whatever sports factory gives them a home? These are NBA men, not wussy college boys. As for that faculty group…

…who gives a rats opposite end orafice…They can say what they want…and make all the accusations they want…

I think he means Orafix.

Maybe what they ought to do…is have no college sports at all…maybe that would thrill the no life, calculus formula discussing intellects of the ever so popular and important entity as the faculty coalition….

Calculus formula discussing is nifty.

Most students take five years to move from academia to their chosen profession. We should celebrate those that are gifted enough to do it in one.

But they can do it in zero! We should celebrate that by shutting down Kentucky basketball.

… just keeps it coming! Good on you! Especially for a religious school.