So West Virginia University goes after some jerk in the stands wearing a West Fucking Virginia t-shirt?

How about not having hired Rick Rodriguez? Don’t you think if you hadn’t hired Rick Rodriguez that might have helped your image? Or how ’bout that Dana Holgorsen?

Nah – let’s not go after coaches. Let’s go after … that guy! See that guy in the picture? No, not that one. The one wearing the shirt. See?

Let’s liquor up our students and then release big old letters about them to the national press when they act stupid!

That’s how we deal with our students. Coaches? Well, policy there is like this: Give them millions of dollars and let them act like shits and then either

1. keep them on the payroll anyway; or

2. give them millions in severance.

Now how you gonna get around a nepotism policy and hire the coach’s daughter?

Let’s see. Well, make sure the coach is right there, of course, in the room with the trustees. So they can see her rich powerful daddy.

Then ask for a voice vote.

A divided University of Kentucky Board of Trustees on Tuesday narrowly approved hiring Kirby Willoughby, the daughter of UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart, as a graduate assistant in the athletics department.

The trustees voted by voice, and no individual votes were counted. When reporters polled trustees as they left the meeting, eight of the 19 who were present said they voted against the hire…

After the meeting, chairman Britt Brockman said he did not hear enough opposition to request a roll call vote.

… [The coach] was present for most of the meeting…

… hyper-disgusting big-time university sports… I’ll live-blog it...

Let’s see. Starts with an incident in the life of the way-bogus Knight Commission, when ‘sneaker pimp’ Sonny Vaccaro told all the university presidents in attendance that if he was a pimp, they were whores. “[T]here’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it.”

(Later in the article, a coach calls coaches “whoremasters.”)

UD has attended quite a few Knight Commission meetings and has been astounded at its self-regarding nothingness. Vaccaro is entirely correct.

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Moves on to an interview with a former president of schlock jock University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who confirms the sluttishness. “If television wants to broadcast football from here on a Thursday night,” he said, “we shut down the university at 3 o’clock to accommodate the crowds.”

It’s a mark of pride to cancel swathes of classes for the big game. A University of Utah vice-president exults that no classes is “a recognition of the reality that the stadium is now filling for every game.”

Branch now notes that concepts like student-athlete (“[S]uch is the term’s rhetorical power that it is increasingly used as a sort of reflexive mantra against charges of rabid hypocrisy.”) and amateurism are “cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

It is pretty amazing… I mean, it’s not amazing that the NCAA is cynical (“From the summary tax forms required of nonprofits, [one investigator] found out that the NCAA had spent nearly $1 million chartering private jets in 2006. “What kind of nonprofit organization leases private jets?,” [he] asks. It’s hard to determine from tax returns what money goes where, but it looks as if the NCAA spent less than 1 percent of its budget on enforcement that year.”) and that the Knight Commission is cynical. But it is kind of striking that so many universities are so cynical. After all, they’re educational institutions. Why do they only care about money?

Nothing prods students to think independently about amateurism—because the universities themselves have too much invested in its preservation. Stifling thought, the universities, in league with the NCAA, have failed their own primary mission by providing an empty, cynical education on college sports.

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Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.

(At one point, “Cam Newton compliantly wore at least 15 corporate logos—one on his jersey, four on his helmet visor, one on each wristband, one on his pants, six on his shoes, and one on the headband he wears under his helmet—as part of Auburn’s $10.6 million deal with Under Armour.”)

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Branch says we should pay these athletes.

And certainly “no [university] president has shown willingness to tamper with the entertainment product that sports provide, even when scandal has tainted the product.”

Howard P. Chudacoff, a history professor at Brown, considers the synergy of fanatics, cynical exploiters of fanatics, and paralyzed providers of entertainment products, that powers the typical American university.

WKU: a perennial University Diaries favorite:

“Our president has great vision and does not settle for anything less than excellence,” [coach Willie] Taggart said. “The school has put a lot of money and resources into upgrading the football program. We have unbelievable facilities and the budget to get the job done. It won’t happen overnight, but we’re going to get this thing rolling again.”

Western Kentucky has struggled mightily since leaving the I-AA level in 2007, compiling a 4-32 record the last three seasons. WKU posted a 2-10 mark in Taggart’s first season at the helm, snapping a 27-game losing streak along the way. The Hilltoppers have not won a game at Houchens Industries-L.T. Smith Stadium since Sept. 20, 2008. That home losing streak currently stands at 15 games.

Uh, yeah…

Some are, I guess.

Not Ohio State, though.

…[S]everal Fort Hays freshmen are currently living in a Motel 6 across town from campus because… there isn’t enough dorm space to house them. The problem isn’t fixed, and students stuck at the motel have to shuttle to and from classes and on-campus events.

People are instead worried about wasting time bidding on an autographed copy of Jordy Nelson’s autobiography to further contribute to this stupidity.

Again, I wonder if Hays knows how lucky it is to have Fort Hays State University. If it did, its citizens would be more worried about providing better student life and academic quality than donating money to an athletic program that rarely accomplishes anything.

… Apparently, a current weight-lifting room, a wrestling room, a track and two gyms isn’t adequate to house a football team that hasn’t won a state championship in decades. Their prestigious history of never winning anything must demand more.

Excellent writing from Josh Dreiling of Fort Hays State University.

… as university football season finally gets under way!

Maryland fans, with boos and taunting signs, turned the Hurricanes’ pregame entry into Byrd Stadium into a gridiron perp walk. Eight Miami players, including quarterback Jacory Harris, were suspended for at least one game for receiving improper benefits from a convicted Ponzi schemer and former Miami booster named Nevin Shapiro.

Alma mater, ’tis of thee…

“The doping, the raping and the shooting,” is how he refers to his last few months at Oklahoma, where he was 157-24-1 and won three national championships. He points out with his rebel streak that “the academia, the presidents and the board of regents” always get upset when he describes that time that way, but the descriptions are accurate and efficient, if cold. The people around the library always get a little uncomfortable when the athletic department is unmasked like that and brought out into the light, but Switzer has spent his life around the good and bad of sports. He knows this ugly, beautiful beast. And he cuts to the heart of some issues when he points out that the coach who doesn’t loosen his morals is going to lose to the one who does – or, like [Miami’s Randy] Shannon, lose his job.

“Why did you recruit the guy who shot his roommate with a .22?” he begins. “Well, if I hadn’t, he would have been playing at Notre Dame, Texas or Texas A&M. He was the No. 1 defensive back in the state. Started as a freshman. He was a great player. Did a dumb-ass act, probably because he was on drugs …”

On to the raping …

“The first one, two or three she had sex with, that was OK,” Switzer says. “But the fourth or fifth or sixth, she says, ‘No,’ that becomes rape. She should have never been in the dorms. The guys who brought her in there, they went to prison and served their sentence.”

Switzer loses his place.

“Oh, what was the other one?” he asks.

The doping …

“Oh, Charles Thompson was set up – great player, great QB – in an FBI sting. Talked into doing it with a bunch of buddies, thugs that came from high school. Set him up because they were three-time losers and they had a bug on him. Basically, they were trying to get me and my program. He relented after turning them down a dozen times.”

A Duke University economist broaches the subject.

A local person comments on an article welcoming yet another year of on-field nothingness and off-field bankruptcy to Missouri State University (background here).

MSU, with its recent history of sports accounting scandals, is gearing up for another Samuel Beckett season (I can’t go on I’ll go on), degrading itself to the big boys in sure-to-lose games in order to pick up a check; sending its latest interim interim interim president out to say to the press that they’ve got to keep football because it gives the school band something to do… And because a program like MSU’s “helps build student spirit” …

More hilarity from schlock jock school the University of North Carolina, where – with no doubt the same awareness Donna Shalala had of Nevin Shapiro – the university’s president has allowed an entire department to sink into depravity.

The chair of the department – now removed from his position (expect a lawsuit, UNC) – reportedly let a freshman in need of remedial help with his writing take one of the chair’s upper-level courses the summer before the freshman began at the university. Getting a jump on those pesky bogus courses! Bravo!

The chair also earns his close to $200,000 salary by overlooking plagiarism and stuff like that. Read all about it.

Big-time athletics makes a sick joke of academic integrity is an abstraction. It’s important to know the details of systemic sports corruption at some of our once-respectable universities. It almost always involves a group of academic insiders – especially professors – implementing a very conscious policy, in cooperation with the athletics department, of grade and course selling.

Selling? Yes. Think of the money these sports factories have on the line. There are very high rewards for professors willing to play ball.

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Background on the sports agent teaching a UNC course here.

More here.

Some parents of suspended University of Miami players can’t help noticing that their kids are getting hammered while their highly paid coaches remain at large. With Miami in mind, Tom McMillen, in the New York Times, is appalled that “Bloated college sports budgets, with coaches who earn millions of dollars, often more than college presidents, have created a situation where the tail is wagging the dog, with the result that colleges are losing control over their own athletic programs.”

Similarly, recent law graduates – huge swathes of them unemployed and in hock for hundreds of thousands of dollars – are noticing that their law professors continue to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while failing to produce many employable students.

It is kind of an amazingly sweet deal for these two university employees. You hire a coach at three million dollars a year and he gets that even if his team loses every single game. He’ll get more the next year, even with total losses, because breaking his contract and finding a new coach will cost too much money. Then he’ll get even more the next year with the same win/loss record. I mean, eventually they’ll fire him, but he’ll rake it in for a long time before that happens.

The tenured law professor has it even sweeter. Over the course of five years, only half of her students, say, get jobs. She snuggles into bed at night secure in the thought of a low course load and regular salary raises despite hundreds of idle young people suffering under the weight of immense loan repayments because she and her school were unable to train them well enough to make them attractive to law firms.

You’d think a market correction would come into play in both of these arenas. If coaches are corrupt and hurt their players, or if coaches win too few games, shouldn’t their three million dollar salaries take a hit? If law professors teach at schools half of whose graduates remain unemployed for years, shouldn’t their hundred and fifty thousand dollar take home take a hit? No, you say! Silly UD! Both of these groups are eminently re-employable! Universities need to be scared, onaccounta if that law prof gets huffy enough she can just up and take a job at Cravath! NO university football or basketball coach is too corrupt or inept to fail to get another lucrative position!

Well, first off, this isn’t at all necessarily true. Things can get a little undignified even for high-profile coaches. And a law professor at a substandard school (the ABA will accredit anything) doesn’t have many options.

And second: Why would you want to tempt fate (lawsuits from UM players are going to happen, and lawsuits from unemployed law school grads are already happening) by keeping such people at your school? Wouldn’t you prefer reasonably paid, competent employees?

Dietel can take no pleasure in what has ensued over the last few years, though I’m sure he’s not surprised. He told the idiots at WKU what would happen. They didn’t listen. The school is now a money-hemorrhaging laughingstock.

Here’s our most recent information on WKU:

There will be a lot of empty seats at LP Field in Nashville tonight when the University of Kentucky and Western Kentucky open the 2011 football season at 9:15 p.m.

At 3 p.m. Wednesday, 40,262 tickets were available at Ticketmaster.com, including nearly 10,000 in the lower level. The stadium, where the NFL’s Tennessee Titans play their home games, holds 68,798 fans.

They’re desperately handing out free tickets so the stadium won’t look like a funeral home.

… about the University of Miami scandal. Here’s a typical one:

I grew up on two major items on the vast American sports smorgasbord – major league baseball and college sports. In my case, the direct spectating involvement was more college basketball than football, although I was exposed to some very interesting football events when my father was an assistant athletic director at Villanova in the early ’50s…

Ah yes I remember it well… It was stinkin’ crooked then and it’s stinkin’ crooked now and I love it… Because I’m an American! Aren’t you an American?

We are Americans. We want this in our lives.

What?… Say again? Louder?… You don’t want it in your life? Or at least in your university?… What are you Canadian or something? Sit down shut up and listen … Ah… Let’s see… It was ’52 I think… No, maybe ’53…

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Here’s another old fart:

The scandal “only strengthens my support,” said attorney George Lott, a Miami alumni whose family is another major donor. “I think UM alumni, students and faculty will come together as a family and we will get through this together.”

If only we could have a scandal of this magnitude every five years or so! Alumni support would be through the roof.

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Let’s leave Pops and Old Fart on their rockers and go with the youth vote. Here’s a lecture from a dynamic hypercapitalist on why all of life is a market and corruption is a who-gives-a-shit byproduct of markets.

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It’d be interesting to hear these guys on, say, the drug war in Mexico.

Pops: Cocaine? We’re Americans. We want this in our lives. Why, I remember a lovely trip the wife and me took to Oaxaca one summer…

Old Fart: The drug wars bring us together as a family.

Hyper: Hey baby it’s a great big dirty world get real all markets produce corollary damage…

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Essentially all of these guys are signalling that if anyone tries to do anything about their game they’re going to go weewee in their pants.