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.

********************************

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.

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.

***************************

… [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.”

**************************

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.