Donna Shalala’s University of Miami certainly knows how to keep it coming. They know if you want your sports program to be number one on the disgust parade, things have to keep happening. We all know the history:
In 1994 there were allegations that Miami-based rapper Luther Campbell and former Miami players performing in the NFL were offering cash for big hits—50 bucks a fumble, 200 bucks an interception.
In May 1995 an NCAA investigation found that positive drug tests of various Hurricane players had been withheld by the football program a week before the January Orange Bowl. Later in 1995, the NCAA found Miami guilty of eight different categories of rules violations. Among them: excessive financial awards, Pell Grant fraud, pay-for-play payouts, and failure to follow its own drug-testing policy. In 2006 Miami football players were involved in two brawls, one with LSU in the Peach Bowl and the other during the regular season with Florida International, in which safety Anthony Reddick was said to have used his helmet as a weapon.
More recently, the Nevin Shapiro scandal wiped all other sports stories off the pages for weeks. And just yesterday some ex-football coach sued the school for mucho money.
Can you imagine how much all this shit is costing the school? I’m not talking reputation costs. UM went into the reputation toilet long ago. I’m talking dollars. How much of this university’s budget goes for sports pay-offs?
A Forbes writer looks at educational priorities in Florida.
[The University of Florida’s] budget has suffered a 30 percent cutback over the last six years while [President Bernie] Machen and his cronies fiddled. At the same time, Machen threw two big thumbs up to UF’s athletic department when it received a $2 million increase from last year, for a total budget of $99 million, according to The Gainesville Sun.
That’s correct: dismantling the computer and information science department will save the university $1.7 million, while the athletic department receives an additional $2 million.
…football fuckupery. Of course you expect benighted places like Southern Illinois Carbondale to screw themselves permanently via sports spending; but Berkeley?
Yes. In the midst of hideous budget cutting from the state, Berkeley now admits its absurd projections for private donations to its expensive football stadium renovation have fallen way short.
The nearly half-billion-dollar Cal athletic project encompasses a $321 million renovation of Memorial Stadium that opens Sept. 1 and $153 million for a new multisport training facility. That’s far more than Stanford University spent building a new stadium in 2006.
In public pitches for the project starting in 2006, university officials talked about raising hundreds of millions through an “Endowment Seating Program” that was to endow all 29 of Cal’s varsity sports and more yet by selling naming rights to various components of the stadium… But the economic downturn hindered sales and by November 2010, [the athletic director] had posted online a letter to fans saying she was “heartbroken that the program’s intentions will, in all likelihood, not be fully realized.”
So now UC, its leaders having fallen for typical wish-fulfillment athletic accounting, will stick it to the students, upping tuition and fees and degrading the quality of education in tons of other ways so that a chunk of the little money they’ve got from the state goes to upgrade a football stadium.
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UD thanks Andre.
… (background here), but he’ll lose. Colorado State University’s on-campus stadium will be built. It won’t matter that Dave’s got all the statistics on his side, that the cost of the thing will drive student fees way up, that it won’t attract more student applications, that desperation to win (gotta fill the stadium) will drive CSU toward troubled players (of course the school is already dealing with that) and shady coaches.
No, because decisions about things like football aren’t about reason. They’re about rich guys with harebrained schemes. These we will always have with us.
UD‘s friend Dave Ridpath dreams the impossible dream by going to Colorado State University (site of some recent national sports news) and pointing out that building a new on-campus stadium when they already have an off-campus one is stupid.
Ridpath tonight is set to speak at a forum organized by opponents of an on-campus stadium. Skeptics argue CSU already has a perfectly decent facility in the 32,500-seat Hughes Stadium west of the city.
Ridpath said he was “dum[b]founded” when he heard CSU was considering building a new stadium. He said athletic success and student engagement aren’t linked directly to facilities, and he predicted that even if a new stadium is privately financed, costs for students will inevitably rise.
They’ll build it, of course; but Dave is in there trying.
IT’S FRIGHTFUL, HOME?
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Thanks, Dave.
Ira Boudway, in Bloomberg Business Week:
Ad Age reported this week that the NCAA has sent out a request for proposals for a new agency to help spread the good word about college sports. The request includes a sideways acknowledgement of the bad press that has dogged the NCAA over the past two years: “Market research and media analytics show that misperceptions persist and opportunities exist to inform public opinion, increase confidence in the association, and boost awareness and advocacy for the positive values of intercollegiate athletics.”
To quote George Orwell, “such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
He goes on to list some of the zillions of events and people in big-time university sports whose pictures you don’t want your phraseology evoking.
And not that a basement-dweller like the NCAA can get any lower, but note the insult of using university money for burnishing the NCAA.
University Diaries will cover the ad campaign. Should be a hoot.
“Today Auburn does not have to take a back seat to nobody academically or in sports, especially in football, and a big part of the reason is Bobby Lowder.”
Fired.
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The Petrino valedictories are already rolling in.
College football is better off this morning than it was the day before. We don’t get to say that very often about the dirtiest sport in the country, do we?
Readers sometimes wonder why University Diaries spends so much time on big-time university sports. It’s the dirtiest sport in the country, kiddies, and it’s happening at America’s universities.
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And as with the beaten-to-a-pulp-by-football-players problem at Colorado State, don’t even bother wondering about the reputational damage (though read this – you’ll enjoy it.) Just think about how much money it’s going to cost the University of Arkansas. Petrino “seems to be leaning in … [the] direction” of a lawsuit; the woman on his motorcycle might want to try her hand at a lawsuit too; there’s the cost associated with a new coach, who will certainly ask for a premium given the shit he’s walking in to. Think of how much money this public university will pay to vet candidates for that job in order to avoid another liar who can’t control his motorcycle.
But hey. The state of Arkansas is doing a great job educating its people. No problem siphoning off that tax money.
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[B]y putting his girlfriend on the state payroll, Bobby Petrino sealed his fate. And cost himself $18 million…
UD loves that shit. She’s heard it so many times from so many university coaches over the years of this blog. We didn’t recruit the football players who beat four of our students to a pulp (the students filed formal complaints at Colorado State University today). It was those other guys…
What other guys? The coach before you? Like you don’t have a recruiting staff? Like it’s not made up of the same people who brought the school the three horsemen of the apocalypse? Like it was just that guy, the bad guy, and now you’re here, and you’re the good guy…
Yes, we few, we happy few, selectively admitted to American universities because we’re sons of bitches who can tackle. Are we bad at distinguishing between on- and off-field tackling? Yes, but everyone will put up with this because we play football! If the university that admits us has to sacrifice a few raped or beaten students to our violence… well… okay!
But it’s so unfortunate when newspapers run pictures of the latest batch of students we beat the shit out of. There they are with their eyes sealed shut and their teeth broken and shoeprints on their backs. Parents can thank the Colorado State University recruiting coaches. Parents can say a totally fucked up kid is more than worth it. Go Rams!
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While watching this interview, imagine you’re the chief financial officer of Colorado State University. Forget reputation and bad publicity and all that. Simply consider how much this is going to cost you in court fees, buyouts of athletic staff, settlements, attorneys.
The fact that some of the same players, only a few weeks ago, got into a violent fight and CSU did nothing about it is really not going to help you. Words like negligence come to mind.
A couple of updates:
1.) The University of New Mexico athletics will run a two million dollar deficit.
Reasons? All the classics: Gotta pay a vile ex-coach hundreds of thousands in buyout bucks. Nobody comes to the shitty games. Current coach costing almost a million.
Solutions? All the classics: Stick it to the students — up their fees. (Nothing says grow your fan base like the combination of a bad team, an overpaid coach, and ripped off students.) And take out a whopper of a loan.
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2.) The University of Hawaii will run a two million dollar deficit. Same as UNM.
Reasons? Same as UNM.
Solutions? Same as UNM.
“[One and done] makes a travesty,” said [the head of the NCAA], “of the whole notion of student as an athlete.” One might call that poetic justice since for nearly a century colleges have been making a travesty of the notion of athlete as student.
Why does anyone give a shit whether great athletes (“most basketball and football players who wind up in the pros had little or no interest in going to college in the first place”) go to college for a year — or, as is horrifyingly proposed lately, two?
[C]ollege basketball doesn’t depend on the existence of the pros, but the pros could not exist without the colleges. Not only does the NBA pay not a dime in player development, it has always benefitted enormously from the fact that its best players were already household names by the time they were drafted. It costs the NBA nothing to wait another year or two to get the players and works much to their advantage if they’re even more famous when they put on an NBA uniform.
And American universities? Why would they want to go from one and done to two and through?
With so many players leaving school so soon to go to the pros, the appeal of the game has eroded. Regular-season college basketball TV ratings and attendance have been slipping now for several years.
A marriage made in heaven:
… Note that one never hears about the NCAA and NBA getting together to make pronouncements on this subject; that would seem too much like collusion. One might call their relationship, as Dana Carvey’s Church Lady used to say, conveeenient. After all, there’s no need for conspiracy when both parties are in agreement.
Allen Barra, The Atlantic.
Ah, but he’s costing them so much more than that.
Lawyers anticipating the severance deal already have stars in their eyes.