… 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.

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.

… C-SPAN.

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.

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.”