… in victory.

Kent State athletics must be majorly pissed with the student journalist who discovered that a guy about to donate a million dollars to the program stole from his investors. Of course KSU already knew the guy was a scam artist, but didn’t care, since money is money and fuck the university’s reputation. KSU’s athletic director explained to the student reporter that the donor’s run-in with the SEC “was 12 years ago, and it was fully litigated and he abided by the letter of the litigation.” If, after paying his multimillion dollar penalty, this guy still had enough investor money left over to assist KSU in its basketball ambitions, what the hell? Where’s the problem?

Well, turns out the guy rescinded the gift. The guy got offended.

Poor KSU! All ready, arms outstretched, to take the leftover fraud bucks, and here comes this student journalist digging up ancient history and offending the donor! Maybe they can approach Bernie Madoff.

Once again, as in the aftermath of Penn State, an evocation of a sports factory as smiling cult-of-personality-land… Just the thing you want a university to be… A happy land for you and me… Coach Chairman smiling beatifically…

This guy – a professor at UNC – thinks sports boosters should have to give half of their donation to the academic side of the university. But look at his first two paragraphs if you want to understand why this proposal will sail way wide of the goal posts.

With the profane joys of the New Year celebration behind us, we begin 2012 recommitted to the central figures of our faith:

“[T]he coaches who remain deities on their campuses and in their states, parlaying success, fame and indispensability into power.”

[S]pending more on [university] football didn’t lead to a more profitable team. It also didn’t lead to additional alumni giving. Why not? Possibly because … teams that upped their funding didn’t necessarily improve their records. Nor did a better record guarantee increased revenue.

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UD thanks Shane for the link.

Excellent on possession, bad at avoiding tackle.

[Northern Kentucky University] professor Al Lipping, president of the Faculty Senate, said some faculty opposed the move to Division I, convinced that it would compromise academics.

“I’m not vehemently opposed or rah-rah for it, but I do know that in terms of American society, athletics is an integral part of society,” he said. “If you look at the majority of institutions in the country today, they usually got their notoriety and exposure through athletics.”

Hey, where is everybody? We’ve got these hotshit teams, going to the big bowl and all, and … nada! Not only do our universities take a big ol’ hit, but we’re gonna have to scramble to find people to give these tickets away to if we want to avoid looking a bit… meagre… fanwise… on tv.

“Obviously we had hoped that we would sell more with it being a prestigious bowl, a BCS game,” [the West Virginia University sports marketing guy] said.

Yeah WTF. Human enterprises don’t come any more prestigious than the Bowl Championship Series; and – dang! – football’s the front porch of the American university! I challenge you to say one word against big-time university football! So WHAT the hell’s going on.

… the “2011 Virtual Bowl.”

Sing along with me:

Cheer for Fucking Nothing
Cheer for old E.C.,
We know that we’re nothing.
Onward, invisibility!
GO NOTHINGS!

Cheer for Fucking Nothing
Cheer on for old E.C.,
Total abyss
Less than a piss
WE ARE THE NOTHINGS OF E.C.U.!

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UD thanks Dave.

The last place you’d expect to find nihilism would be on the gridiron.

Sports matter like hell. Look at all those people in the stands screaming.

Amazingly, though, the money boys seem to have created a small but growing cadre of Raskolnikovs, men who still slink to the games, but hate themselves and the world for making football a pointless putrid emblem of our pointless putrid lives.

“And somebody thinks this all makes sense?… [T]he entire [university football] enterprise has spun out of control,” says a Nietzschean on the sports staff of the Boston Globe. (I quote him in this post’s headline too.)

Sports Nihilism – a new concentration for the Kinetics and Leisure Studies Department.

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UD thanks Andre.

No.

[A group of faculty at scandal-ridden University of North Carolina] distributed a letter last week at a news conference held to introduce new UNC Football Coach Larry Fedora, asking the university’s Board of Trustees to explain how the hiring of the coach and his seven-year contract worth $1.7 million a year advances the mission of the university.

… [Among the questions the letter asked was:] How will the fallout from the recent [UNC sports] scandal and the new direction of the football team affect the health of the university?

… “[UNC’s president said] they were good questions,” [a spokesman said.]

“I just don’t think the football coaches should get paid what they’re paid,” Joshuah Gross, a [Western Carolina University] student said bluntly, shaking his head over the amount of money [a coach] pulled down.

Gross ran out of money to attend WCU and is headed to a local community college to continue his education. He works at Rolling Stone Burrito on campus to earn his living.

“The team is terrible, and here they are planning to sink even more money into a failing program,” Gross said one day last week. “The professors are suffering — they need to redirect that money into other areas, like into the engineering department.”

…”Nobody at Western gives a (expletive) about the football team — we are all there for the marching band [said another student]. They are just great.”

[A member of the athletics director search committee said that] athletics, along with other university programs, help students with “professional development, personal development and their networking” abilities. It helps build “good character,” she said.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

It’s strange to think of a world without the Bowl Championship Series. Not that it’ll happen. Stories like this one, in which its filthy corruption – even by the general standards of big-time university sports – is once again described, always conclude by saying, as this one does, “the end is near.” But the BCS sustains itself the same way other filthy American enterprises – for-profit colleges, for instance – sustain themselves, by using our tax dollars to lobby politicians.

The American university – whether through sports or through Kaplanization – has become a perfect money vector for white guys who understand how lucrative non-profit labels and tax subsidies can be.

Not that it’s rocket science. All you have to do is take the money. If your conscience allows you to take the money a non-profit or tax subsidy status provides, you and your friends can become incredibly wealthy. All you need, somewhere along the line, is to pick up the idea that the intended recipients of the money – students, schools, charities – are a problem, an obstruction … an embarrassment, really. Give them some pennies to shut them up, lobby hard, and rake it in.

… for a job well done.