[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.

Our university presidents speak. NCAA, government. Somebody’s gotta stop athletics from killing universities. Just don’t ask university presidents to do it.

You’d expect some statement from the president, but schools like Auburn don’t really have presidents. Just coaches.

First they hire rancid Rick Rodriguez; then a bunch of his guys go punching women in the face.

The front porch of the university.

That football players, at least in uniform and often out of it, are crazy, psycho, too-strong and too-fast machines of physical vengeance, and would shoot their mother to win a football game, regardless of new rules vainly trying to rein in the aggressiveness they learned in the womb.

That coaches are paid to win, and motivating players is part of that equation, and if offering bounties to knock players out of the game by injuring them is an added motivation, then that’s what coaches will do.

Is it barbaric? Yes. Is it terrifying? Yes. Is it sick? Yes.

So what?

I’ve said it before and I will say it again:

That is why we watch football. Because it is barbaric and terrifying and sick. Because we love good hits and kamikaze safety blitzes and a quarterback sitting on the field after a sack with visions of Tweety Bird dancing in his brain.

I’m lovin’ it.

…Binghamton, a part of the State University of New York system, has been cleaning up — and paying out millions — ever since [2009] . The president, provost, two top athletic officials and the men’s basketball head coach have been replaced amid a scandal that proved costly to both university’s reputation and its bottom line. … Binghamton, like any number of universities, gambled on too many high-risk high school recruits and transfer students with histories of arrests and academic problems.

UD proposes a moratorium on the word “gamble” in this context. They didn’t gamble. Gamble would mean that they were routinely irresponsible, childishly hoping against hope that all those rap sheets didn’t mean shit, pressing their eyes shut real tight and praying that everything would be okay… That maybe for the few seasons they’d have these guys (before they transferred or flunked out or went to the majors) the stars would align just so and they’d refrain from misbehavior, or not get caught, or something.

Massively paid, highly experienced coaches know perfectly well what’s up and what’s going to happen. As with conflict of interest at universities, it’s not about avoiding it; it’s about managing it. Bringing a certain rhetoric, a certain je ne sais quoi, a certain style, to it. What they’re hoping is that when the naughty thing happens they can get away with feigning surprise and heartbreak and insisting that the kid deserves a second chance. Think of it not as gambling, but as a kind of dance –

Do you love me (do you love me)
Now that I can dance
Watch me now

(work, work) now work it out baby

Work it.

The real point of the dance is to change the nature of the university. UD will never forget being at a Knight Commission meeting and listening to a professor from the University of the District of Columbia insist that coaches should be professors.

Lois DeFleur, [SUNY’s] president, retired. Mary Ann Swain, the provost, stepped down to return to teaching.

Etc. etc. The Binghamton scandal brought down the most important academic administrators and compromised quite a few professors. Why? Because like Clemson and Auburn SUNY was well on its way toward becoming a thorough sports factory and not a university. The coach dance is about corrupting professors to pass flunkies so they stay eligible, corrupting admissions committees so they’ll take in people who can’t do university level work, corrupting presidents so they’ll look the other way while paying the coach millions.

The only thing that got in the way of Binghamton’s devolution to Auburn was some surviving sense among some people on campus of what a university is.

Maybe SUNY’s coach will have better luck next time.

UCLA – one of many American universities with a hell of a basketball program.

Well, it’s all over university football too.

I mean, what do you expect? Like hockey, these are very aggressive games, and you want the most aggressive people on campus playing and coaching them. So if your coach is a bully (Examples? Oh, you know. The storied names. Bobby Knight. Mike Leach. Mark Mangino.) that’s a good thing. If one of your players is a bully, that’s a good thing.

The one thing you want to avoid is some pussy from the press interviewing people, writing it all up.

And Sanctorum is worried college makes people snobs! Huh. UCLA makes them animals.

A commenter responds to Texas Tech coach Tommy Tuberville’s latest run-in with the law:

… Texas Tech head coach Tommy Tuberville has now been linked to two [fraud schemes] in the past year. Tuberville was listed as an investor in former Georgia coach Jim Donnan‘s “retail liquidation company”, GLC, which turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Now, Tuberville is the subject of Huntsville Times report that lists him as the focal point of a fraud case involving an Auburn-based investment company.

What the commenter overlooks is that you can’t make TTU look bad, because TTU has been way, way worse than bad for years. Tuberville? Texas Tech recently announced that they’re raising his salary by $500,000. Good timing! He’s got a lot of investors to pay off! Plus attorneys to hire!

Texas Tech hired disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – paid him $100,000 to teach one course.

Texas Tech hired mad Mike Leach, then fired him when he allegedly concussed one too many players, and is now the object of an incredibly expensive lawsuit he filed against the school.

You don’t make sewers like TTU look bad.

——————-
UD thanks Dave.

… this side of … eh. I’m thinking nothing compares. For sheer vulgarity, sheer classlessness, sheer idiocy, SIUC can’t be beat. UD has watched in disbelief over many years as this campus, with its plagiarizing, political hack leadership, its tanking student body (who would want to go there?), its mindless, grandiose “Saluki Way” sports expenditures, and its empty stadium, just keeps scratching its balls. (Scroll down on this page for earlier posts.)

Yes, the machinery grinds on – coaches still get overpaid, games take place, student and state money is sent down the drain… and President-for-Life Glenn Poshard smiles on, a Brezhnev unaware the USSR has been dismantled…

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The athletic director senses that student anger has now morphed into apathy, and it makes him nervous:

“I can live with anger even though it’s not pleasant. I think what is happening now is we’re slipping into a little bit of apathy, and that’s a little more dangerous. Our fan base has kind of turned, my gut tells me, from anger to a little apathy and that’s what concerns me.”

Right now, the school is giving the molto sucky basketball coach

$762,500 per year, and SIUC would have to pay Lowery twice that amount to buy him out of the final two years of his contract.

But no worries: They’re in great shape to make a payout.

[W]hen the losses started coming, attendance straggled. SIUC averaged 3,299 fans in an arena that underwent a $29.9 million renovation two years ago, down from a high of 7,743 in 2006-07. Additionally, [the AD] said season-ticket revenue is down considerably and the scholarship fund has taken a hit.