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…

Oh. Is that all.

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.

In 2007, three Grizzlies football players and a former player broke into a home to steal money and drugs. All three were suspended from the team and convicted.

In 2008, three freshman football players were charged in a beating that broke a fellow student’s jaw. Two pleaded guilty and the third pleaded no contest.

In 2009, standout cornerback Jimmy Wilson was charged in his home state of California for a fatal shooting that occurred two years earlier. He was acquitted of those charges, but later got embroiled with the law again in 2010 after his bite of a co-ed’s leg required her to go to the hospital.

… Another Griz defensive back, Trumaine Johnson, and another student were charged with beating another student unconscious in 2010. Johnson was also arrested in 2011, in conjunction with an incident with police at a party, along with teammate Gerald Kemp.

… Some … run-of-the-mill incidents involve speeding tickets, where during the course of the investigation it came out that Johnson also had unpaid speeding tickets to go with everything else.

Others involved a drunk driving incident involving Nate Montana, son of NFL legend Joe Montana – which was reduced after he pleaded guilty to reckless driving.

Former star transfer offensive lineman J.D. Quinn, too, had a second drunk driving charge mysteriously dropped – after he had already been convicted once before.

A pattern had been set: rather than handle the matters with suspensions or meaningful discipline, it appeared as if folks at Montana were trying to spin their … athletes’ way out of trouble.

… In 2011, extremely serious allegations came to light involving a party involving football players, a female victim, and the sedative Rohypnol, which is sometimes called the “date-rape” drug.

[S]oon thereafter, another woman came forward with an eerily similar story of blacking out and being raped by football players in 2010, proving that the one report was no fluke.

A Detroit News columnist talks a lot of sense on the subject of student athletes.

LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant and Kevin Love, have a combined two years of college experience.

[L]ast night was a validation of the Calipari Way: recruit a fresh stable of top talent each year, luring them with promises of immediate preparation for the N.B.A. and limited academic commitments, then let them go and find new guys to replace them. “What I’m hoping is that there’s six first-rounders on this team,” Calipari said after the game. “That’s why I’ve got to go recruiting on Friday.” What little shred of truth existed in the N.C.A.A.’s beloved moniker “student-athlete”—a phrase Calipari actively, and rightly, ignores—was whittled further away.

… [I]t becomes easy to imagine a series of factories set up, if they don’t exist already, in Lawrence, Chapel Hill, Lansing, Storrs, and the handful of other places with the clout to promise enough national-television exposure for a kid to wait out the N.B.A.’s minimum-age requirement in style. All this has made being a fan of “traditional” college basketball feel a bit like preferring rotary phones to cell phones—there’s no going back, so, best to get on with it.

Rotary phones doesn’t quite say it. It’s more like preferring petty larceny to grand larceny.

[A]thletic success does not seem to imply higher [academic] quality, at least not for the Final Four. Looking at rankings of overall institutional quality as measured by US News & World Report in 2012 , the “Kentucky Arms Race” does not seem to have had an effect. The ranks for the elite eight’s losing teams, Baylor (ranked 75th), Florida (58th), Syracuse (62nd) and UNC (29th) are far better than those for the final four. Of the final four, just one, Ohio State (ranked 55th), is in a comparable academic league. Louisville is ranked 106 spots away from the team it beat last weekend (Florida) and at 124th, Kentucky’s athletic prowess does not seem to be translating into academic accolades.

… before that person gets in any kind of trouble?

If that person is a football coach – Joe Paterno – or an athletic director – the University of Montana’s Jim O’Day – the answer is a lot. A lot of bad shit can go down before you have to answer for it; and even as you’re answering for it, your loyal fans will express outrage that some university president had the unmitigated gall to make you answer for it.

Everybody knows about Paterno; but now people in Missoula are outraged, baffled, wounded, shocked, stunned (some of the words that recur in news reports) that an athletic director who has been in charge of sports at Montana during two major, extensive scandals (one in 2009, and a current one) on his teams might be considered something less than an asset by his school.

Joe Nocera, in today’s New York Times:

… Is it true that black male athletes have a higher graduation rate than other students? It is not. The N.C.A.A. has created several other Orwellian concepts, such as an Academic Progress Rate, which allows it to use data to create the illusion that athletes are doing better academically than their peers.

… In comparing college basketball players with their true peer group — full-time college students — … data show that the athletes are 20 percent less likely to graduate than nonathletes. [When you parse the data by race,] of the teams in this year’s March Madness, for instance, the black athletes are 33 percent less likely to graduate than nonathletes.

… In his great novel about totalitarianism, “1984,” George Orwell described the three slogans of The Party: War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.

The N.C.A.A. has its own equivalents. Athletes Are Students. College Sports Is Not About Money. Graduation Is The Goal.

But spare a thought for organizations like the Knight Commission, whose offering to Oceania is the regular convocation around conference tables of men in their best suits who look worried about the situation. The N.C.A.A. couldn’t do what it does without them.

A professor at Colorado State University writes about the desperate ploy of a desperate university: Invest tens of millions in football, and get rich and famous.

A letter-writer to the same newspaper picks up on Matt Taibbi’s now-famous Goldman Sachs metaphor:

[CSU is beginning to look like a university where] a powerful athletic establishment has become a virtual vampire squid, tentacles wrapped around the university and dominating the directions, programs and missions of what had been an academic and scholarly community, while demanding ever greater funding, facilities and support for an ever-expanding sports entertainment complex now entrenched in an educational community.

Meanwhile Gov. Robert Bentley announced that general funding to the Department of Public Safety and other state agencies would be cut by 10 percent because of revenue shortages. Public Safety director Hugh McCall said he hopes to avoid layoffs of state troopers and other employees.

They don’t need public safety. They’re safe in The Divine Huddle.

… transition to Division I (details here) to notice who they’re hiring. As chair of a department.

One of her students has complained to a dean, but, you know… it’s just an anonymous student… Fuck him. And the staff members who keep resigning? Ditto…

But hey… WE’RE GONNA BE DIVISION I!!!