Fay Vincent gets it said.

… the University of Louisville (background on this university here, here, here, here, here) are shocked to hear that UL’s current recruiting coordinator might have been deeply involved in the Nevin Shapiro University of Miami scandal (his last job was at Miami).

The reporter who broke the story about the University of Miami and Nevin Shapiro says to NPR:

But the reality is the NCAA is comprised of – it’s the universities. It’s the institution. It’s the presidents. It’s the power conferences and the conference commissioners, and in some way, shape or form, it’s – there’s no getting around the fact that they are all in bed together. You’re asking a governing body to look over universities that essentially help to establish that governing body’s power in the first place.

So it’s a little bit of an awkward marriage between the people who are expected to enforce are also made up by individuals who at – you know, at some point in their lives typically had worked within university structures, and I think that’s sort of what creates a lot of the gray area that people tend to attack when they go after the NCAA.

That’s the important thing. That’s what makes all of the university sports scandals so particularly, so intensely, disgusting. The NCAA isn’t a bunch of jocks acting like jerks with whom academic leaders are in constant conflict… because, you know, jock/intellectual… they’re naturally at odds, etc. … No. The NCAA is American university presidents. They run the fucker.

Here’s the NCAA logo.

Here’s what it should be.

Everyone’s upset because Peevy – a UK athletics public relations guy – went and got all peeved with a UK student reporter who had the gall to interview a couple of basketball players without getting Peevy’s permission.

Yeah, just a couple of amateur college athletes, but there’s a big, big big old public relations machine right behind them, and you don’t, like, just, you know, call them… I mean, are you crazy?

When he found out that the reporter had committed journalism, Peevy punished him and his newspaper by withholding various other forms of access to the team.

The Associated Press Managing Editors group sent a letter to Kentucky’s Director of Athletics:

This is a level of abuse of free speech not tolerated at universities in other states and is particularly abhorrent at a taxpayer-owned institution…

Peevy does this sort of thing all the time – whenever anyone dares to do some independent reporting.

Because of course you need to control the news very closely when your franchise is filthy top to bottom (scroll down). You don’t want a free press reporting on what’s going on. Peevy is seeing to that.

… is totally worth a read. Garvin summarizes the pay college athletes argument:

The sky’s the limit [on salary]. And they shouldn’t be distracted by having to go to class, either, or even having to read or write.

He crunches the numbers colleges will need to anticipate:

The average NFL player’s salary, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine reported earlier this year, is about $1.9 million. If colleges wind up paying even a tenth of that — a lowball guess — that means that the University of Miami football team would need a payroll of $16 million just to cover the 85 scholarship players the NCAA allows. (Though, if we’re doing away with the requirement that players be able to write their own names, I don’t know why we’d be nit-picky about silly things like roster limits.)

UD‘s laughing out loud here.

And don’t forget taxes!

Right now college athletes don’t pay taxes on their scholarships because their schools sports programs are tax-exempt. But once you start paying the players (and especially if all pretense that they’re getting an education is dropped), the IRS will certainly want its cut. And that will include the value of the scholarship in addition to whatever salary they’re getting paid. A year at UM costs about $55,000 these days; at current tax rates, that means a UM football player would be around $12,000 in hock to the IRS before accepting another cent.

“The NCAA is starting to crumble internally. It is losing legitimacy in the eyes of its constituents, especially the athletes.”

The problem with this comment, from the head of the Drake Group, is that is misdescribes things in a pretty basic way.

The NCAA is stronger and richer than ever. With the new billion dollar tv deals, and with its retention of its absurd non-profit status, the NCAA is thriving beyond belief, and will continue to do so.

Why will it continue to do so? Because almost no one in this country – and certainly no one with any power – cares about what’s going on in big time university athletics. People want their games. They want them bad. They couldn’t care less what else the games bring.

University presidents know this. Tom McMillen, in the same article, says “You have coaches making salaries that are often 25 times more than what the college president at his school makes” as if he thinks this will get a rise out of someone. It hasn’t. It won’t.

What UD means is… If it were going to, it would’ve. Know what I mean? If I said There are dozens of universities in America which barely exist except as lucrative athletic programs, would that upset you? Galvanize you to action?

Or look at it this way: UD loves Barack Obama. Can’t wait to vote for him again. But Obama is a jock who loves big time university sports and – far as I know – has done nothing but heap praise on it.

And Congress? LOL.

This doesn’t mean you stop protesting the situation. It means you need to be honest about how deeply bad it is.

Another mission statement for the University of Miami (and many other campuses), courtesy of the coach of the Orlando Magic.

Colleges shouldn’t be farm systems. It doesn’t make any logical sense. But the schools don’t want to be blatantly in the situation of being professional sports even though they already are professional sports. They just want to disguise it, so they hide behind education. But, really, all you want is enough of your athletes to graduate so it looks like that’s what you care about. Anyone around sports knows it is all a bunch of bull[expletive]… The alumni want the illusion, and so does the school… But the kids know it is all bull[expletive]. Everyone does.

To judge by the particulars of an eight-year spree of lawlessness by one of your boosters, your football program has no regard for the rules, and your administration has no ability to enforce them.

… [Y]ou must shut the program down…

(Say what you will about the Miami Madoff, but Shapiro may be right: Cheating is even worse in the SEC, where, he says, “the money is an endless river.”) …

Truth, good writing, and all the right ideas.

All wasted.

Look. If you can’t make that campus attractive to people (UD has seen its palm-lined splendor), you’re not much of a president. Shalala did accomplish this.

Her problem is that she did it indiscriminately. She just looked at anything that might tart up the place and went there: football, Nemeroff:

The former secretary of health and human services raised some eyebrows when Miami hired Charles Nemeroff, a star researcher who left a previous job at Emory during a conflict-of-interest scandal, to lead the medical school’s psychiatry program.

Shalala swung wild and wide. And struck out.

[M]ost of these guys don’t get very good educations, because playing on a D-1 football team is basically a full-time job – at least as time-consuming (and certainly more dangerous) than most full-time jobs. Major college football players spend an average of 44.8 hours a week in practice or in games, and everyone knows that a lot of the players get “tutors” to write their papers for them, if their professors aren’t already being pressured to soft-pedal their grades.

The reason they spend so much time at practice instead of in the library is because the amounts of money now involved have skewed the priorities of the universities. College sports has become such a huge business that coaches have to drive their kids hard to be competitive.

The same corporate ruthlessness that drives management in any other big industry drives coaching staffs in college sports. If your second-string linebacker is spending his weeknights studying botany instead of his blitz package, that doesn’t mean he’s a good kid who does what his parents tell him. It means he’s an unreliable worker. Coaches with multi-million-dollar salaries won’t hesitate to cut or discipline a player whose iffy priorities imperil his chance at a contract extension.

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

The predictable has happened with eight Miami football players being ruled ineligible for this season.

… Why is Miami president Donna Shalala still eligible for this season?

They’ve finally gotten what they want at the University of Utah: A football team successful enough to empty their classrooms. Cancelling all classes on this season’s opener, crows one Utah vice president, is “a recognition of the reality that the stadium is now filling for every game.”

Yes, by God, we’ve done it! We’ve finally figured out how to make the Utes so popular that there’s no point in holding classes while they play!

Sure, there are a few pissed professors. And students. But think of the money! The exposure! Now everyone knows how the University of Utah feels about its educational mission!

There’s a beautiful honesty here. It’s not easy to write this stuff.

********************

The business of honoring – not a cheater, but an inept man with a vaguely reformist tendency who got taken over by the organization he was supposed to lead – is also rhetorically dicey.

UD wonders why, in this effort on behalf of Brand, his salary as head of the NCAA is not mentioned. Don’t you think a million dollar plus salary should at least be figured in a little bit in trying to explain why Brand capitulated rather rapidly to business as usual at the NCAA?

It’s like this, see.

Meaningful reform will happen in big-time college sports only when everyone involved – coaches, athletic directors, conferences, BCS, networks, advertisers (but not the athletes themselves, because they have no standing in the argument) – agree to take considerably less money than they do now.

Greed’s the big winner. It’s the Great Immovable. And now that the potential money – for coaches, schools, everybody except the players – has increased, as Art Thiel writes, “exponentially,” the cheating is rising accordingly. To police it, the NCAA would have to “increase [its] enforcement division to something on the order of the North Korean army.”

Solution? Go with the greed, baby. Live in the truth.

The likeliest solution, which is already on the drawing board in some form, is for the top 64 schools to break away from the NCAA and form their own professional association of four super-conferences, with limited connections to the universities and the old rulebook.

To take it a step beyond, the conferences should rent facilities from universities for the same amount they now provide to subsidize the non-revenue sports.

Limited connections to universities… There’s an enigmatic, pathetic psychology in a lot of people out there having to do with rooting until you’re bleeding from every pore for what you think of as your school. The people who write about big time university sports have been telling you for awhile that the players, coaches, tv execs, etc., on and around the field have little to nothing to do with your school…

But we can’t pursue that direction of thought in anything approaching a rational way, so shut up, UD… I’m just saying… Just thinking out loud here… That as long as many fans need the fantasy that they’re rooting for their school, Thiel’s purely capitalist solution – an excellent, excellent solution – will have trouble prevailing.

Ethan Rothstein in SB Nation has a nicely written update of the University of Texas / ESPN tv network – a network showcasing UT’s football team for fun, profit, and recruitment. Rothstein seems to think there’s something wrong with the arrangement. This “walking conflict of interest,” he writes, “marches on, trying to only grow bigger and conflict-of-interest-ier.” He worries about what will happen “if Texas has its own Nevin Shapiro hiding in the wings.”

I must say. Nevin may have to rot in jail for awhile, but his j’accuse has given him an extremely impressive cultural currency. A one-act play has already been written.

If you listen to UM officials, the nation gloats while the U twists in the wind.

“…[I]t pains me tremendously to see such sensational stories and headlines,” former athletic director Paul Dee is quoted in the Miami Herald. “UM is getting creamed again, and everyone around the country loves it.”

But the reason UM is getting creamed again and others gloat is that its football program is in scandal again, as it has been over and over. A fine academic center has developed as its national face not medical giants or scientific powerhouses but a football bad boy on steroids.

The athletic program over the years has been sanctioned three times. That’s ample reason for bad repute…