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.

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…