“If only he had displayed this kind of intensity during practice.”
“If only he had displayed this kind of intensity during practice.”
The president and the board of trustees at Indiana tolerated years and years of intolerable behavior from [Bobby] Knight, looking everywhere but right at him when it mattered…. The key was that [earlier] incidents were kept private.
… but the quieter, ongoing, incredibly expensive bullshit of big-time university sports looks like this.
UD‘s latest Inside Higher Education post at University Diaries II.
The Sandusky story moves to another campus.
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Ronald A. Smith, professor emeritus of sports history at Penn State, said the university is particularly invested in portraying itself as a “pristine institution.” Anything that interferes with that narrative, he said, is likely to be hidden.
“The more important it is, the more likely there will be a cover-up,” said Mr. Smith …
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Technique from Sandusky.
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Having a child-care center named for an administrator charged with inaction in a child sex-assault case adds fuel to a public-relations crisis that has besieged Penn State in the last several days.
… Penn State has begun, this morning, to shake itself awake. It’s gotten rid of one and put the other on leave.
(Note: This is a very big, very fast-moving story. I’ve added a number of updates to this post.)
Penn State is football city, so each step of this gruesome process – getting rid of Paterno, accepting the appropriate share of institutional blame, settling the lawsuits sure to come, acknowledging the degree of cover-up, suspending the football program – will be infinitely slow and self-wounding.
I’ve often, on this blog, compared the guys on the inside of big-time university football programs to Blanche Dubois. Self-delusion, denial, and (as with Blanche) outright lies are what it’s about. Some programs – Kentucky comes to mind – have, like Dubois at the denouement, gone totally ’round the bend. Most are beginning-of-the-play Blanche: Brightly smiling and talking one hell of a good game; but, under that, just barely – season to season – keeping it together. Penn State is a strikingly self-deluded outfit and will take a long hard fall.
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“[I]t would be foolish to discount the possibility that, by the time the legal drama fully plays out, Paterno, Curley, Schultz and even Penn State president Graham Spanier all will be gone.”
At least Spanier can go out on a private plane.
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“The board of trustees needs to get hold of it so that they can get to the bottom of it.”
You can always count on a politician to find just the right words.
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The campus landmark – Penn State Creamery – … serves flavors of ice cream named after university celebrities. There is … something called “The Sandusky Blitz.” It might be wise for the owners to consider dropping that particular flavor from the menu.
“Time to go load up on the Sandusky Blitz at the Creamery. It will be replaced soon with the Curley Coverup and the Spanier Surprise!”
And the Paterno Panic.
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Two reasons Paterno and Spanier will melt as fast Sandusky Blitz appear here.
Tyler Barnard, a junior from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, said in Mamma Mia [restaurant] that he objected to the university paying for legal counsel for Athletic Director Timothy Curley and Gary Schultz, senior vice president for finance and business.
They have been charged with failing to report the alleged crimes, and with perjury.
“I want to start a protest movement saying I don’t want my tuition to pay for their screwups,” Barnard said.
Alyssia Motah, 20, a food science major who was among [a group of] protesters at the administration building, said the university needed to be held accountable.
“The reason they have been so silent is in part due to this football culture that we have here,” she said.
Students realize that, one, their university is little more than a tightly controlled football state. It’s degrading (it should be degrading) to perceive that you live in an oligarchy so powerful it can protect a flagrant sex criminal – and name cutesy ice cream flavors after him – for decades.
Throw sugar at the kiddies and they’ll play along.
Students also realize that, two, they’re subsidizing the sickness.
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All of a sudden, a football program where a star gets a new automobile from a booster now and then or a player gets a free tattoo in exchange for memorabilia doesn’t seem that bad. Penn State administrators are accused of failing to act on allegations of sexual assaults on children. Top that, Ohio State. Beat that record, Miami.
And the best question is this: If Penn State athletic coaches and administrators could look the other way when a 10-year-old is sexually assaulted on campus by a prominent former coach, what wouldn’t they do? What could possibly be beyond their capability to accept in order to protect the “good name” of the program?
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Michael Bérubé is Paterno Family professor of literature at Penn State. As incoming head of the MLA, he’ll be using that title a lot.
On Paterno:
[T]he PSU football system didn’t work for a lot of people in this instance. Why? Here’s the answer: Money, power and secrecy. While money has always been down the list of your personal priorities, the other two almost seemed paramount to you. You have had unequaled power in this town, whether you’ll admit it or not. Is there anyone else who can essentially ignore the university president and trustees? …
Perhaps the only conclusion I can come up with is you didn’t follow up because you didn’t want to. You were coming off back-to-back losing seasons, and you knew you were loaded for bear in 2002. If something came to light that summer, well, just perhaps PSU football implodes.
… [Do President Spanier] and those genius trustees think students are going to apply in record number to come to Pedophile State…?
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Congrats [to Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier] on being the second major university B10 president to look like a complete and total fool this year. Gordon Gee hoped Jim Tressel wouldn’t fire him. Now, you’re standing firmly behind two executives who allegedly failed to protect children from being molested, thus allowing it to go on for several more years.
Standing firmly behind and paying their legal costs out of student tuition money.
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The darker, more conspiratorial part of me really, really wants to hope that the coaching promotion [for a person who witnessed what turned out to be an anal rape] wasn’t a payoff [for not pursuing the matter after reporting it to the head of athletics], but many questions along this line will be asked.
For reasons both logical and illogical, [Penn State’s] coach has long been obsessed about sheltering his Nittany Lions team, as if it were a wartime army.
Practices are closed to the media. Assistant coaches are off-limits. Reporters have virtually no access to players. Information – think of [Joe] Paterno’s long-secret salary – is locked away.
A decade ago, for example, when The Inquirer did a lengthy series on the growing influence of money in college sports, Penn State jealously guarded information – such as the dollar amount of its contract with Nike – that other schools, schools with less-upright reputations, readily made available.
Now, unsettling as the implications might be for Penn State’s loyal followers, outsiders will want to know what else has been hidden from public view over the years.
There will be speculation that perhaps the reason Paterno’s program never ran afoul of the NCAA was because the NCAA couldn’t cross the moat. What else went on …?
To live in a university-sports village, to be one of its faithful flock, is to realize that what Coach does is best for you and best for the team, and not ever to question Coach. Coach leads the wartime army. It’s always wartime. In wartime ways of life that seem strange in times of peace become routine. Loose lips sink ships!
The University of Oregon – one of the scummier sports schools around – is having a bit of trouble holding aloft the ‘self-supporting’ banner. We don’t take a penny! Our program makes so much money we don’t need to take a penny!
Well, if you’re persistent enough, and don’t mind filing repeated public-records requests, you’ll discover in the fine print at almost every school that claims to be self-supporting all sorts of contractual maneuvers that amount to subsidies.
For instance, UD‘s friend
Bill Harbaugh, an economics professor … filed a public-records request. What turned up was an illuminating “memorandum of understanding” between Pat Kilkenny, former athletic director, and former UO president Dave Frohnmayer that was signed in June 2009, two weeks before Frohnmayer retired.
That memo capped the athletic department’s overhead assessment at 3 percent through June 2012. That is one half the assessment rate charged other UO auxiliaries this year …
For instance:
UO diverted $8.5 million in general fund dollars from 2002-2010 to pay for academic support — including tutoring and counseling — of its athletes.
For instance:
[T]he general fund is picking up 50 percent of the legal costs in defending UO against possible recruiting violations by the football program.
A clean program (UD hasn’t encountered one yet, but assume a clean program) of this sort costs a fortune; a dirty one, like Oregon’s (And pretty much all the others. You know Jerry Tarkanian’s famous saying: “In major college basketball, nine out of 10 teams break the rules. The other one is in last place.”), costs a mega-fortune because of all the court cases and settlements and lawyers. Basically big-time university sports programs are always under threat of sanctions for violations, always being sued by fired coaches, always – see Penn State – defending themselves against criminal conduct accusations, always paying hotshot accountants to hide their bright budgeting ideas (as in the present case), etc., etc. Do you have any idea how much money self-supporting jock schools have to take out of their general funds just to protect their asses from what it means to do business as a big-time university sports team?
Who knows how much of it had to do with efforts to protect the reputation of a storied sports program?
Whatever the motives, Penn State’s athletic director and vice president for finance will turn themselves in to the authorities on Monday. Both are charged with perjury and failure to report in a sex scandal involving the football team’s former defensive coordinator.
For fifteen years, Jerry Sandusky was a “a sexual predator who used his position within the university and community to repeatedly prey on young boys.” The charge is that the other men knew about it but did nothing, and then lied about their knowledge of it to a grand jury. Did they protect Sandusky because he was “closely identified with the school’s reputation as a defensive powerhouse and a program that produced top-quality linebackers”?
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UD thanks David.
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UPDATE: “We all make little mistakes in our lives.”
Title of Sandusky’s autobiography: Touched.
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The legend of Penn State’s Sandusky
Is beginning to smell rather musky.
Their glorious coach
Is a bit of a roach.
Not to mention a bit of a putzsky.
UD‘s seen her share of bizarre defenses of big-time university sports, but this is her first encounter with the pancreatectomy argument.
Of course, you can remove the pancreas, and though the removal creates problems of its own, the procedure – partial or total – is sometimes indicated.
The pancreas argument – the university is a body with vital organs, and you can’t take out vital organs – comes from Steve Reznick, a University of North Carolina psychology professor and major Tar Heels fan.
Another faculty sports rep said – at a meeting with furious UNC faculty – something just as strange:
“There is a collegiate decor created by athletics that bind us all together in a way that doesn’t happen otherwise.”
Drink that one up, me hearties! A … decor … a decor that binds… A pancreas… a pancreas that sustains the life-giving operations of our … decor…
Rather than drawing their inspiration from interior design or internal organs, UD thinks faculty sports zealots would be more persuasive (the professors at the meeting with them left it even more unhappy) if they drew upon religious faith. UD recommends they start with this book:
Game Day and God: Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South
There are beautiful liturgical paragraphs here that may be easily committed to memory when you are challenged to defend the foundational Being of basketball. The professors around you will certainly scoff at your enthusiasm; but this response will allow you to rebuke them as satanic and flounce out of the room.
… I don’t buy the belief at [Louisiana State University] and elsewhere that athletics serve as the front porch of a university, drawing attention to the academic kitchen. It is a hopeful sentiment, but I don’t see any supporting evidence. In fact, the opposite seems to be true.
Football does not appear to provide an open window but rather a closed shade, reinforcing L.S.U.’s athletic standing while secluding its academic reputation, however inadvertently. In my travels, I cannot remember a single person outside of Louisiana knowing or mentioning that L.S.U. aspires to be as competitive in the classroom as on the football field.
… Kurt Branham Barton, founder of Triton Financial in Austin, was convicted on 39 counts after his August trial, including more than a dozen each of wire fraud and money laundering. The charges could carry up to life in prison.
Prosecutors said Barton …used money that investors thought was for real estate deals and short-term business loans to pay for a luxury box at University of Texas football games…
[The University of] Texas [is] guaranteed an average $15 million a year for 20 years for letting ESPN build a channel around its sports.
… “I think we could ultimately end up with two conferences: one called ESPN and one called Fox,” Louisiana State University Chancellor Michael Martin joked at an Oct. 24 meeting of the Knight Commission.
Sports, and college football, matters to broadcasters because it draws a large audience to live programming, where viewers can’t skip advertisements with digital video recorders, according to a report by Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiCelemente. That helps ESPN generate the highest earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of any Disney unit, at about $3.67 billion.
… Other schools’ anger at Texas is misplaced, said Mike Leach, a former Texas Tech University football coach. “Anyone upset with Texas is mostly rooted in jealousy,” he said. “These guys would walk on glass to make the same deal.”
… $3.5 million annually.”
Iowa’s football coach has the highest salary in the state!
But the nitwits there are pissed off that even with all that money he can’t figure out a way to make a sports team win all its games.
Solution? PAY HIM MORE.