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!!!

[University of Alabama football coach Nick] Saban’s deal now runs through Jan. 31, 2020, and his total financial package will average out to $5.62 million per year. He’ll earn $5.32 million in 2012, and with raises built into the deal, would go up to $5.97 million in the final year of his contract in 2019…

Defensive coordinator Kirby Smart went from $850,000 to $950,000. Also, first-year offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier will earn $590,000. Both Smart and Nussmeier have three-year deals.

Outside linebackers coach Lance Thompson, back for his second stint at Alabama after coaching at Tennessee the last three years, received a two-year deal and will make $375,000.

Of the Crimson Tide’s 10 assistants, counting strength and conditioning coordinator Scott Cochran, seven make at least $310,000 annually.

UD always says that understanding the existential implications of, er, student-athletes would tax Jean-Paul.

A sports reporter grapples with it.

[The University of Kentucky’s] one-and-doners were finished being college students at the start of the SEC Tournament, or sooner.

Thus, it quacks like a fraud. It seems a lot like financial and academic fraud, systemic fraud, fraud by design and with a major university serving as the front.

… Sure, there are precedents. P.J. Carlesimo’s 1989 Seton Hall players, who lost to Michigan in the NCAA Final, simply went their individual ways after that game. No reason to return to school; their business at and for Seton Hall was done for the year, if not forever.

Heck, Andrew Gaze’s first day enrolled at Seton Hall was the first day of practice. Right after the Michigan game, he returned home to Australia. His one-and-done lasted from Day 1 of practice to the last game of the season. So long, mates!

If Seton Hall was in violation of anything — internally or by NCAA code — it wasn’t charged. Kentucky is apparently clean, too.

Being and nothingness. In big-time university sports, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Given arrest rates on big-time university basketball teams, it’s not surprising that police have begun arresting players at their games.

When [an Old Dominion University player] didn’t show up to court [on a DUI charge], an arrest warrant was issued.

[A] Virginia Beach detective drove to the Ted Constant Center Wednesday night, knowing [the player] would be there.

After warming up with the team, [the player] came off the court and was arrested in the back of the arena.

Yes. For the sake of fan and donor morale, it’s much better to arrest them in the back of arenas. Seeing team members arrested on court before games would be a downer.

Back in 2007, on the advice of [T. Boone] Pickens, the [Oklahoma State University] Cowboys athletic department purchased policies for 27 of their very biggest fans. Most were donors and season ticket holders, and all were over the age of 65. Upon an insured donor’s death, Lincoln Financial would pay out $10 million to the sole beneficiary, the OSU athletic department. It was called the “Gift of a Lifetime” program, and it was a wager, like all life insurance, but presumably the actuarial tables were in the university’s favor.

Then, no one died.

… OSU sued Lincoln Financial, trying to recover their premiums… Last week, a federal judge in Dallas dismissed [that, and Lincoln’s countersuit], leaving Oklahoma State on the hook for that $33 mil, and forcing them to pay court costs…

OSU, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor OSU, nor yet canst thou kill me.

Their livingness doth make you desperate men,
Who with death-lust and lawsuits dwell;
No charm sends donors down to hell
Nor gives them heart attack or stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One litigation past, you pay out millions,
And still death hies! OSU, thou shalt die.

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UD thanks Dave.

… in the dictionary of obsolete phrases. What Goldman Sachs has done to client-based, America’s sports factories have done to student-athlete. A philosopher thinks it’s time to dump the latter.

[A]ccording to another N.C.A.A. report, the graduation rate (given six years to complete the degree) for football players is 16 percent below the college average, and the rate for men’s basketball players is 25 percent below. Even these numbers understate the situation, since colleges provide underqualified athletes with advisers who point them toward easier courses and majors and offer extraordinary amounts of academic coaching and tutoring, primarily designed to keep athletes eligible to play.

Extraordinary amounts is something of a euphemism. If University Diaries were really serious about chronicling all of the university-sponsored cheating for athletes, she’d write about nothing else.

[The phrase ‘student-athlete”] is a falsehood institutionalized for the benefit of a profit-making system, and educational institutions should have no part in it.

The deeper harm, however, lies in the fact that, in the United States, there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism that undervalues intellectual culture and overvalues athletics. As a result, intellectual culture receives far less support than it should, and is generally regarded as at best the idiosyncratic interest of an eccentric minority. Athletics, by contrast, is more than generously funded and embraced as an essential part of our national life.

When colleges, our main centers of intellectual culture, lower standards of academic excellence in order to increase standards of athletic excellence, they implicitly support the popular marginalization of the intellectual enterprise. It is often said that the money brought in by athletics supports educational programs. But the large majority of schools lose money on athletics, and the fact that some depend on sports income confirms, in monetary terms, the perceived superiority of athletics.

Even at schools that (sometimes) make a sports profit, most of the money goes right back into sports. Another school has a bigger Adzillatron (go here and scroll down for UD’s Adzillatron posts) and you’ve got keep up. The coach to whom you’ve been paying six million dollars has been beating up his players and has to be fired, which will cost you tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, ’cause he’s gonna sue. That sort of thing.

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UD thanks dmf.

…[E]ven if we concede the point that athletics gives every school massive national exposure, it still does not address the lingering question: to what end is all this exposure?

Do athletics truly promote the academic mission of schools such as [Louisiana State University]? [Its president] certainly seems to think so, as he gushes that weekly televised football games give viewers “a chance to see what LSU is about.” How so exactly? Is LSU about being able to toss an inflated pig bladder around a old cow pasture? Even if television viewers manage to catch the repeated airings of LSU’s promotional spot that airs during commercial breaks in the football games, doesn’t the fact that the game is 60 minutes long (not counting breaks) and the ad 30-60 seconds long tell the viewers much more about where LSU’s true priorities are than any of the content of that advertisement?

… [I]nstead of spending millions to fulfill sports fans’ primal urge for watching virile, young men bang each other on the football field shouldn’t colleges and universities be about encouraging both their students and the public to seek after those things which are of true and lasting importance in life?

What with a drunken lacrosse guy at U Va just convicted of beating his girlfriend to death, you’ve now got a lot of people looking at the lovely culture of many university sports and noticing that even if this culture doesn’t produce a lot of murders, it certainly produces a whole lotta off-field violence.

So much that, as UD has noted on this blog before, a certain overly-familiar dance is danced by coaches and universities post-DUI, assault, rape, riot, etc. Boston University, whose hockey story has just jumped to the New York Times, is currently doing the rape two-step, what with two members of that team recently arrested for sexual assault.

This dance excludes the following:

An acknowledgment that enormous numbers of fans love hyper-violent sports, the more violent the better, and players are richly rewarded for being violent. And, uh, like, you don’t have to be a university graduate to grasp that some hyper-violent players are going to be violent in general.

An acknowledgment that many of the players don’t belong in college (see this post’s headline), that many won’t graduate – won’t really take courses in any legitimate way at all – and, as the person quoted in the headline says, are not college kids as we know them. Now a college president might try a new step and say In the name of diversity, we’ve decided to accept a cohort of violent flunkies. We think our students can learn a lot from them. But le président is likely to stay with the trusted routine in which Our quest for well-rounded individuals with special skills drew us toward this athletic prodigy and we’re stunned and disappointed that he has made some bad decisions.

An acknowledgment that a university can shut down a sports program. Usually, of course, sports programs get shut down when they’re so unmitigatedly vile that even the NCAA wants them to take a breather. But on occasion the campus itself will demonstrate enough integrity to turn off one of its assault-machines long enough to try to regroup (but regrouping is a bitch because it means fielding a new, non-competitive team).

An acknowledgment that the crucial fault lies in the university’s cynical recruitment strategy, which overlooks massive red flags for many players because all it cares about is how tough they are. Why are these guys at Boston University? Who let them in?

Here’s what the dance includes:

A sudden rhetoric of crisis from the president, as if no one had heard of America’s violent sports culture before.

A hastily assembled faculty review board, rather like the pointless Knight Commission, which will grind out more crisis-rhetoric.

A hasty dismissal of the bad boys from the team because their behavior has nothing to do with our values at BU even though we not only accepted them but have been treating them like royalty.