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.

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!!