Just where do the pesky buggers go?
Well, whether it’s OSU, or any seriously sporty American university, it’s about lawsuits. (Can you imagine how many University of Miami tuition dollars are going to lawyers and public relations people and penalties and all?) The stinkier the program, the higher the cost of covering the stinkiness, or, when the smell escapes, trying to pay your way out of the malodor-closet.
Ever since Brother Tressel had his cover blown, OSU has been spending mightily along these lines. Among their many outlays: Dealing with an ESPN public records lawsuit.
ESPN stated in the lawsuit that producers at the sporting news network had made several public records requests for all emails sent or received by President E. Gordon Gee, athletic director Gene Smith, compliance officer Doug Archie and former head coach Jim Tressel, that included the keyword “Sarniak.”
Ted Sarniak is a businessman in Jeanette, Pa., closely associated with former OSU quarterback Terrelle Pryor.
… In addition to documents containing the word “Sarniak,” ESPN also requested several documents without success. ESPN said some of their requests were wrongfully denied for being overly broad.
And OSU said… and then ESPN said… For every “said,” add ten thousand or so dollars.
Sell the college programs to the leagues with which they already do business. Sell college football to the NFL and the television networks for $25 billion and a cut of all future revenues. Same with basketball and the NBA. Let the leagues oversee player development and safety and training. Pay players in the same manner as minor league baseball players. As a condition of service, all players get an irrevocable academic scholarship to be applied whenever and wherever they choose, toward any degree from an AA to an MD.
“Tailgates are the core of this school in the fall.”
… just-released report about the real slave class in big time university athletics. These are the professors and academic tutors who devote themselves to play-acting the student part of the student-athlete. Shadowy simulacra sacrificing themselves for the good of the team, mentors/assistants/helpers (they go by many names) often do more than write papers and attend classes for the guys. One of them at the University of North Carolina paid thousands of dollars in parking tickets for a player.
Despite the large, one-time payment being made by credit card just one day before UNC attempted to [interview the tutor about academic fraud], University officials say they did not know about the [player’s] parking tickets until November 2010.
“The University learned this information during a separate review of parking citations received by football student athletes in response to media requests for records under the North Carolina Public Records Act,” the response states.
Those records, for which The Daily Tar Heel [the UNC student paper] and other media outlets sued, showed UNC football players racked up 395 tickets totaling more than $13,000 in a three-and-a-half year span.
One of the additional monitoring measures UNC has now imposed is a biweekly report of student-athlete parking citations from UNC’s Department of Public Safety.
LOL. The Biweekly Student-Athlete Parking Citations Report. This is going to crowd out the biweekly student-athlete police citations report.
Plus, in response to rampant cheating via tutors, here’s what UNC’s going to do:
… UNC has abandoned the academic mentor program, imposed additional constraints to student athletes and their tutors or learning assistants, increased the budget to hire and retain tutors and to expand rules education for tutors, among other corrective actions.
That academic mentor program sounded so good… academic… good… mentor… good… But now they have to trash it! What are they going to put in its place? What are they going to call it? Academic Enactor Program? Meanwhile they’re going to “expand rules education for tutors.”
What about rules education for professors, like this guy?
The author of the much-discussed long Atlantic article about paying college athletes sends a comment to University Diaries:
Big universities are addicted to sports money, but not because it helps the academic budget. Nearly all athletic departments have such enormous expenses that they run deficits, not surpluses, covered partly by involuntary student fees. I quoted unversity presidents saying forthrightly that sports are an unsustainable obsession at the expense of academics.
We are the only country in the world that hosts big-time sports in higher education. You seek to divorce sports from academics to preserve the latter. The two may well be incompatible, but we have not yet even begun an honest debate on that question because the NCAA has reform efforts mesmerized by phony issues of amateurism.
UD thanks Branch for the comment. She agrees that in important ways her railing against big time sports is a kind of throat-clearing for the real argument that can only ensue when things get de-mesmerized.
Who knows . . . maybe we’ll even succeed in impressing Margaret Soltan.
… the University of Oklahoma.
[T]he OU board approved a raise for football coach Bob Stoops before it got around to giving the school president authority to break its commitment to the Big 12. Stoops had been trying to get by on only $4.9 million a year in Norman.
… yet another telling of the scandalous story of university football and basketball. The New Yorker headlines its bland review of current big time campus sports
THE END OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL?
Which has a distinctly New York Daily News ring to it. What happened to the New Yorker?
Fans don’t care as long as the games are played, universities as long as the television contracts are renewed…
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Andrew Zimbalist says that Taylor Branch is wrong about college presidents running the NCAA:
Branch’s assertion to the contrary, college presidents do not run the NCAA. It is run by athletic directors, coaches and conference commissioners, with a smattering of jock-crazed college presidents serving on NCAA committees who have done the bidding of the athletic programs and pass periodic reforms to help preserve a modicum of legitimacy for the system.
But I think Branch is right. The head of the NCAA is customarily a (former) college president; it used to be Myles Brand, and now it’s Mark Emmert. Surely Emmert’s successor will be Gordon Gee.
And there’s a whole lot more than just a smattering of jock-crazed presidents (and other highly ranked university administrators) on those committees.
And the NCAA can’t run without the greed and passivity of university presidents, so it absolutely must keep feeding those two things.
AND the NCAA needs college presidents to maintain the fiction that the organization has a shred of academic significance.
I’d say – along with Taylor Branch – that the power center of the NCAA is the university president and the university administration.
As Ellen Staurowsky says:
As commercial interests in college sport continue to grow, the fictions understandably become more difficult to sustain. The shame rests not with college sports per se but with higher education officials who have served as the architects and promoters of such a system.
… joke schools.
[University of New Mexico Police Department spokesman Lt. Robert] Haarhues said UNMPD’s biggest problem is intoxicated tailgaters leaving the parking lot without attending [football games].
“More people end up leaving than going inside to watch the game, and that can be a problem with driving,” he said. “We are trying to get more people to stay, but the fact that people are leaving probably has to do with the lack of success of the team. If they were better, maybe more people would watch.”
UNM: Just a bar.
… the much-discussed Taylor Branch article about paying college athletes (background here):
Branch makes a compelling case, using a sixties-era civil rights lens, for compensating college athletes. But he seems to misunderstand the dynamics of the actual financial relationship between big-time college sports and the universities that sponsor them. As a result, his argument is incomplete at best.
By his account, big time sports are a tremendous financial boon to universities. Universities under this view end up addicted to the subsidy flowing out of athletics into academics, producing a host of bad effects. It is undeniably true that big money flows to some universities, that it ends up being spent, and that in the process of being spent it generates among those who receive it the kind of self-protective habits and behaviors that a flow of money always does.
What is far less clear is whether the net effect on the university bottom line is positive. Big winners there may be within the university, but seldom is it the case that they reside on the academic side. Most credible studies suggest that, but for a very few net winners, big time sports from a university financial perspective overall is a sucker’s bet.
The addiction of universities to big-time sports, then, is less a function of a corrupting subsidy to academics than it is the politics of the thing: the donors who prefer to give to the sports program even if their gifts result in an increase in financial pressure on the university, lawmakers with influence on the budget who think first about athletics and only in passing about academics, a public that demands spectacle and a press that is generally happy to stoke that desire. The net result is that in most cases the subsidy flow runs in the opposite direction, toward the already pampered and overfunded athletic program.
This has corrupting influences of its own, including an unwillingness to admit to the subsidy or to make clear its depth. Universities have shown themselves to be unwilling or unable to do much about these forces, even if they might like to. Under the circumstances, with universities lacking backbone even in the current situation, adding athlete compensation to the cost base would have the inevitable effect of forcing tongue-tied universities to up their subsidy even more, no doubt fudging the numbers in the process.
So pay student athletes if it seems just to you. But find some way first to divorce the entire mess from universities. To borrow a term from another sixties-era civil rights tradition, universities need big-time sports like a fish needs a bicycle.
Whatever the caliber of play, a few hundred students attended the games. The university was known more for eggheads than big biceps, and at halftime, instead of a marching band, a giant kazoo was brought onto the field. Fans followed with smaller versions of the instrument, moving about haphazardly rather than in formation, an activity meant to celebrate the concept of Brownian motion, the random movement of particles.
… differences in rigor, value… even legitimacy… among university courses.
In response to Donna Shalala’s insistence that Miami’s athletes are academically on a par with Stanford’s, Politifact notes her dependence on APR scores for the football team.
The APR measures, as its title suggests, progress — not academic achievement; students get points for being academically eligible and staying in school. To the APR, a student-athlete who scores all C’s in music therapy would “look” the same as one who scores A’s in organic chemistry.
… Mark Nagel, a professor in sport management at the University of South Carolina, described the APR as a “public relations mechanism” created by the NCAA.
“What APR is telling you is that the students are remaining eligible and retained on campus,” Nagel said. “It is not telling you their majors, educational outcomes or what they are learning.”
… “It’s kind of shocking (Shalala) would consider APR to be a valid comparative measurement or the most important measure of academic achievement,” [another observer] said.
Now this man here says “Texas got greedy,” but I think it’s more like all universities want their own tv network so they can show games and recruits and shit. What’s a university for if not your own three hundred million dollar sports network?
Now jump over to this story and you find out that the suckers at UT can’t watch the network! Or I mean they can but it’ll cost them big. “It’s not good if it’s a network that no one can watch,” notes a UT professor. Haha, soak the students for more fees.
Back to this article, which calls the whole deal a “fiasco.” No, UT can’t do prep telecasts. Yes, it’s alienating the members of its (dwindling) conference.
The article’s author compares UT to the head of a mafia organization.
This thing is just getting started, and the free publicity it’s generating for the university is amazing!
University football is a delicate thing. It’s not like university admissions, where you want to be selective.
You want everyone in the stadium. Everyone. Ticket sales are the ticket. Imagine, along the same lines, making tailgating selective!
But – and here’s where the nuance comes in – in hawking tickets to everyone, and of course in providing alcohol to everyone in the stadium, you admit and then liquor up a certain number of obscene and violent drunks. (Same thing with tailgating, as the University of Georgia has been discovering.)
There’s plenty of money in this procedure, to be sure. There’s also plenty of risk. It can backfire in some obvious ways. Well-behaved season ticket holders may cancel their order because they don’t think spending thousands and thousands of dollars to sit next to … Well, here’s how it goes at the University of Maryland, according to a commenter at the university’s student newspaper:
Maybe Kevin Anderson would like to send out a letter to all of the season ticket holders and alumni because of the guy at the top of section 18 who decided it would be cool to tell Miami that they can “suck his balls,” “eat shit!” and my personal favorite, a call to “Ass-rape the ref.”
While Anderson didn’t send out a letter about that, he did send out a letter about the last Maryland football game, in which an eleven-year-old boy, a fan of Maryland
mistakenly cheered after a play benefited Miami. According to [an email his father wrote to the university], “a U of MD student turned around and screamed, ‘F— You’ and flicked him the middle finger and almost hit him with it.”
No room for mistakes in university football! Doesn’t matter whether you’re eleven or eighty – one false move and fuck you.
Nor does the fun end, at Maryland, when the game does. At Maryland, they do post-game riots. No mention of that in the editorial I’ve been citing (in which students argue that since all big football schools feature drunken threatening fans UM shouldn’t be singled out). It’s only about in-stadium behavior.
Anyway. As I say, it’s a delicate thing. You’ve got to protect the university’s interest in admitting everyone to the stadium so that it can make millions and millions of dollars from its sports program; at the same time, you have to figure out ways of controlling the drunks enough to keep them away from children so as not to alienate non-drunk ticket holders and lose their money. Of course there’s the option of turning the stadium into a kind of police state. But that’s expensive too. And visually… and school-pride-wise… kind of a downer.