So true. That’s why everyone’s writing about how dangerous and destructive (forget corrupt; corrupt we don’t even have time for) college football is. Nothing makes professors more envious than watching students play sports while failing to get an education, and then becoming unemployed.

[T]here is documentation for [fired Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weis] to have received approximately $8.7 million since he left the school. That figure could rise to close to $19 million once the school reports its payments through the end of his contract in 2015.

Since leaving Notre Dame, Weis has kept working as a high-profile and highly paid coach. He was the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive coordinator in 2010, the University of Florida’s offensive coordinator in 2011 and in December 2011 was hired as the University of Kansas’ head coach.

His contract with Florida was scheduled to pay him $875,000 for the 2011 season. Kansas gave him a five-year deal that is scheduled to pay him $2.5 million for the 2012 season.

… are happening right now.

There’s apparently been a spontaneous outburst of student rage over basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski’s compensation.

At seven million dollars a year, Krzyzewski comes in a full million dollars short of Louisville coach Rick Pitino, and Dukies are not happy about it.

Duke’s president has joined the protesters, pledging in an address to them to set aside $500,000 of his own compensation next year for Krzyzewski. “I challenge my fellow administrators, our trustees, and, yes, our faculty and students, to make their own sacrifices on behalf of Coach K. If we’re going to compete with Louisville, it can’t be done by one person alone. Everyone can give something.”

As he spoke, a hastily composed cheer went up:

ONE K FOR COACH K! TWO K FOR COACH K!! HEY HEY HEY HEY THREE K FOR COACH K!!!

Teamwork. That’s what it is.

Police say they were called to investigate a bar fight at The Eagle’s Bar and say they came upon [Eastern Washington University football player Chandler] Gayton urinating on a wall down a nearby alley.

As officers approached him, Gayton pulled out a 9mm gun. He initially held the gun with both hands pointed towards the ground.

Officers say they ordered Gayton to drop the weapon multiple times, but that he did not immediately respond. He eventually put the weapon down.

Guy really doesn’t like to be disturbed when he’s peeing.

Oh but it does, it does. Southern Methodist University does nothing but go backwards, as it digs an over one hundred million dollar hole via out of control athletics, and then makes students pay for it. You can sort of sense the student writer’s rage as she notes that students have no access to this financial information, and as one university rep after another to whom she speaks responds to her with contempt and condescension.

In an accompanying article, this student says it best:

“I think it’s insane that our money continues to go into a black hole of mismanagement that we don’t even have access to see the specifics of,” he said.

SMU athletics is losing money hand over fist; the yahoos who run it spend like drunken sailors. Why should they give a shit about students!

Insane really says it. The people the student journalists talk to make absolutely insane remarks to them. Here’s my favorite, from the Athletics Policy Committee Chair:

“It’s like what I teach, which is history of the Soviet Union — we want reform, but nothing seems to work until the whole thing collapses, and maybe that’s what’ll happen with this.”

Thanks, man. SMU students will be sucked dry for a shitty education until the Romanov dynasty collapses, and then things will get better.

Southern Methodist University is fucking nuts.

A debate about banning college football took place at NYU last Tuesday.

[Buzz] Bissinger and Gladwell won in a romp. Before hearing the arguments, audience members were asked their opinion, and 16 percent were for the resolution to ban college football; 53 percent were against. At the end of the night, 53 percent were for it and 39 percent against.

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… [Jason] Whitlock said college football was the “highest level of the melting pot,” uniting people from varied backgrounds in a common cause (“the poor and the rich, the black and the white, the Jews and the gentiles”). Bissinger later playfully challenged him, “If you can name four Jews who played football, you win the debate.”

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More here.

You can sort of see why the good guys won. The other side was smart enough to avoid most of the classic character-building bullshit you hear in defense of college football, but this left them with few arguments.

“If you believe in freedom, you can’t have the ‘free’ without the ‘dumb,’ … They go hand-in-hand. Freedom allows us to do dumb things… You can put football with cigarettes, alcohol, and porn.”

Well, that’s just fine and pretty and fine and just the sort of thing we want hanging around our universities.

War is Peace.

And Ignorance is Strength when you’re a football school. The University of Utah, which cancels all classes to accommodate games, announces to the world that football “provide[s] us a pathway to showcase our academic excellence as well as our athletic strength to a much wider audience.”

The University of Utah! So committed to academic excellence that we say fuck you to professors and students who want to use the campus to hold scheduled classes.

Though the proposed budget was approved by an overwhelming majority of the board, members Betty Steffens, Larry Pendleton and Jim Smith raised their hands in objection.

Smith delivered a passionate plea for the board to re-consider the budget, saying that he would not support a decrease in spending in athletics at a time when FSU’s competitors continue to increase their budgets…

“Florida State needs to decide if we’re going to be in big-time athletics or not,” Smith said after the meeting.

How do you keep stupid schools stupid? Schools like Jim Smith’s Florida State?

Well, there are lots of ways.

But the best way is to keep putting guys like Jim on your boards.

When UD says big-time sports destroy universities, this is what she has in mind. People want to think UNC Chapel Hill is a good school, a reputable school, but it’s not. It’s the sort of place that cynically designates entire departments as dumping grounds for athletes UNC would rather not educate because football and basketball are big money. The French worry about a cultural degeneration in their country that they refer to as Italianization. It’s too bad American universities don’t know enough to worry about Auburnization. UNC is definitely getting there.

[P]eople cling to football. To penetrate that bubble, you literally have to say, “This could be killing our kids.” … You see a guy get totally jacked. He’s down on the ground, we think he might be paralyzed. Everybody is holding hands and praying for this person. But as soon as he gets carted off the field, it’s like the volume comes back on. A pause for a moment, and then someone on TV says, “Well, that puts it in perspective.” No. What puts it in perspective is the fact that five minutes later, we don’t give a shit.

What would our universities do without it?

So let’s head into this post with the understanding that whatever UD – a native Washingtonian – says, she’ll sound like a snob. She’ll sound like someone who doesn’t know that the purpose of a university is to provide venues for boxing bouts full of beer drinkers. She’ll sound as though she doesn’t understand that public universities in particular exist to rent out arenas for whatever activity the voters of some city – say, El Paso – find amusing. She doesn’t understand that the head of a university is someone who spends most of his time in negotiations with the representatives of fight fans who like to drink.

The University of Texas system’s chancellor first tried to keep the fight from taking place in the university arena. He lost. It will go forward. He is now trying to prohibit liquor. The city of El Paso, and the elected leaders of the state, are screaming at him to back down on that too.

And he will. He will be made to back down on the liquor prohibition.

And that is university life in El Paso, Texas.

… this Tuesday – topic: BAN COLLEGE FOOTBALL – Buzz Bissinger, arguing in favor, begins to make his case. He mentions all the obvious stuff everyone mentions, and drops in a few current yummy examples. Like:

New Mexico State University’s athletic department needed a 70% subsidy in 2009-2010, largely because Aggie football hasn’t gotten to a bowl game in 51 years. Outside of Las Cruces, where New Mexico State is located, how many people even know that the school has a football program? None, except maybe for some savvy contestants on “Jeopardy.” What purpose does it serve on a university campus? None.

All true: It serves no purpose. Yet the question to ask about New Mexico State and other bad schools with expensive football teams is: What purpose does anything serve on that university campus? Wouldn’t eliminating football do away with the only game, as it were, in town? If you banned football, and Auburn and Clemson couldn’t play it anymore, what would be left? People forget that the very scandals schools like these generate are part of their lore, part of the excitement of being a student there. It’s hard to imagine anyone applying to a football school that’s become a shell of its former self. Banning football would ultimately mean closing down dozens of American universities.

We find one faculty member, and one administrator, to set up a system of bogus independent studies for our football and basketball players. The faculty member pretends to have taught these courses to the athletes, the students keep their traps shut, and the administrator signs off on everything. The players stay eligible without any university-related distractions from their games, the professor gets all kinds of salary bonuses for working so hard for the athletic program, and everyone’s happy.

It’s happening at a big sports school near you. The only reason my title singles out Auburn, Binghamton, and UNC is that these jerks got caught.

Like most of Rutgers University’s almost 30,000 undergraduates, Matt Cordeiro has never put on shoulder pads and played football on a Saturday before a sea of scarlet-clad fans.

Yet Rutgers athletic teams cost him [and every other Rutgers student] almost $1,000 this year, the most among schools competing in the top category of college football. The total includes mandatory student fees and university funding of the money-losing sports program, both of which rose more than 40 percent in five years.