UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS VOW TO STOP
IMPROPRIETIES IN COLLEGE SPORTS

Yes my little brothers and sisters in sports, this our summer retreat has now come to an end.

All please raise your right hand and repeat after me.

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country to obey the Scout Law to help other people at all times to keep myself physically strong mentally awake and morally straight I vow if I see any improprieties and I mean any I vow to stop them pronto amen.

Gray said that either Rupp Arena or a new downtown arena had to meet the needs of UK’s basketball program.

When asked how Rupp Arena was not currently meeting the needs of the program, Barnhart said, “In today’s world, we’ve got to make sure the fan amenities are what we think our fans deserve.” Those amenities include “electronics” and updated concession stands, he said.

Well, UK. University of Kentucky. What would this blog do without the University of Kentucky. Gotta spend their money on a brand new – or overhauled – stadium… It’s those needs… meeting the needs of the program…

For amenities (needed so that UK can charge more for tickets), and for mysterious ‘electronics,’ which probably means – yes! – the biggest, baddest Adzillatron money can buy! Our fans need loud, huge advertisements exploding in their faces every moment of every game, and, dammit, we’re going to find the money for it!

There have to be enough university professors and administrators who recognize that a soiled reputation is not worth it.

… If you have any doubts about how and when the athletics department lost its way, watch ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary about Miami football, “It’s All About The U.” The backdrop is Miami’s national championship football teams of 1983, ’87, ’89 and ’91.

The show details how Miami developed a “bad boy” image through the taunting of opponents, player arrests and athletes accepting illegal benefits. The worst part is interviews with former players who come across as proud of their actions and the reputation they left at the school.

… Miami never has had a great fan base. Its average attendance for home football games the past three seasons has been 46,299, 47,551 and 51,509. That represents about 60 percent capacity of Sun Life Stadium…

[T]he athletics department likely operates at a deficit.

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Well, but as is usually the case, not a peep out of the professors. Maybe they’re the 45,000 people who come to the games.

Quelle question!

Are vous insane, Wall Street Journal? Look at my last post! T-a-a-ax Ex-emp-tion! And why tax exemption? Because athletics at U Miami are an intrinsic, inherent, ineluctable, innate, inspirational, and – fuck it – intellectual part — part and parcel! – of that institution! Students can’t think straight without a football team! Plus these grand spectacles of sportsmanship and amateurism deepen our students’ moral sense. It’s all about integrity – on the field and off.

There’s a chance that losing football could, in fact, have a positive effect the school’s academic reputation — not to mention donations to support academics. Jonathan Willner, an economics professor at Oklahoma City University, said that in recent years, athletic donations have been eating into some schools’ academic endowments: Some donors who would have given money to a university’s general fund have started giving gifts directly to athletic departments instead. So while the end of football would “certainly see gifts to athletic department drop precipitously, it could increase gifts to university’s other activities,” he said.

While [Southern Methodist University’s] football team returned to the field two years after its suspension, it hasn’t returned to its previous heights. The school has made other strides, though: it said its average SAT scores for incoming students are up compared to 10 years ago. The school said its endowment has grown to $1.07 billion, more than double the pre-penalty total.

Academic improvements help attract donations and out-of-state tuition. SMU’s recent fundraising campaign almost doubled its original goal by raising $542 million from 1997-2002, the school said, providing 80 endowments for academic programs.

Oh shut up.

Forbes:

[B]ecause of the tax-exempt designation for college athletics, nearly all of the revenue, including that generated by ticket sales, television deals, bowl games and corporate sponsorships flows tax-free.

It looks like a business. It smells like a business. But we won’t call it a business. We won’t because we’re still buying into the fiction that these programs are somehow an integral part of the academics at these schools. So we call it a charity.

… It’s a game – a game that makes a whole lot of money for a whole lot of people. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I just happen to believe it’s not a tax exempt purpose.

Shalala …was the president of Wisconsin when Barry Alvarez was football coach. She wanted to hire him as Miami’s coach at one point.

… Alvarez and his son lost $1 million in [Nevin] Shapiro’s Ponzi scheme. Here’s a couple of questions Shalala will get hit with whenever she surfaces:

1) Did your know your good friend, Alvarez, lost $1 million to Shapiro?

2) Why didn’t you inform [Miami’s new coach] of this issue when he took the job?

Some will argue that eliminating amateurism for college football means the “bad guys win.” In fact, the opposite is true. Eliminating amateurism will diminish the role of those boosters who have polluted the college game. Some will wonder what minor league football is doing on campus in the first place — I have wondered about that myself. Yet, the game has found an important entertainment role connected to academia, and the billion dollar television contracts prove it is a valuable commodity.

Huh?

You’d think a law professor might have a grasp of argumentation.

We should promote professional sports on college campuses because it’s entertaining? Broadcasting all student sexual activity on large screens throughout the campus would also be entertaining. Should we do it?

“Eliminating amateurism will diminish the role of those boosters who have polluted the college game.” Yes, and that is why professional basketball and football in American are so pure and unpolluted. It doesn’t seem to occur to Roger Abrams that there are manifold other sources of pollution.

And …connected to academia? Big time sports as currently played on American campuses not only have no connection at all to academia; they’re actively destructive of it.

I mean, what does Abrams have in mind by academia? Classroom buildings adjacent to stadiums? The appearance on a television screen, during a football game, of the name of a university?

And billion dollar tv contracts prove it’s a valuable commodity? Ask Donna Shalala, or any number of university presidents up to their asses in legal bills and bad publicity, how valuable a commodity it is. It’s precisely the outrageously big money that’s brought in all the scum and made university football and basketball lucrative but deadly to academia.

That is, again, if by academia you mean something other than buildings where administrators collect ticket and luxury suite and television proceeds. If on the other hand you’re okay with the Auburnization of our universities – if money and entertainment seem to you overriding ‘academia’ goals – if you think universities are money and entertainment centers above all (they will certainly become so under this regime, since no other activity on any campus can hope to compete with an immense high-profile billion dollar industry), then go with it. Go with it.

People like [University of Miami president Donna] Shalala ... are the system. They have cross-contaminated school standing with NCAA hypocrisy. They are one and the same. Shalala maintains a watchdog role in the NCAA.

… Was this decades-long culture of institutional malfeasance [at the University of Miami] so rooted it ignored [warnings about Nevin Shapiro]? Was the lack of institutional control at the very heart of the institution?

… on the Nevin Era at the University of Miami:

I’m starting to wonder if college football will someday start losing the benefit of its fans, too. Is it just me or are you, too, starting to feel guilty and dirty rooting for a sport where seemingly everybody is cheating in some form or fashion? Isn’t it hard to clap your hands for your favorite team when you have to hold your nose at the same time?

Sometimes, you wonder if you are as hypocritical as the sport itself. I mean, we like to act like we care about what is just and right, but do we really? If we did, would we still be packing the stadiums to watch the 100-yard lie?

The Heisman winner and quarterback of the national championship team had a father who apparently had offered his son’s services to Mississippi State for $180,000. The national championship basketball team was on probation. One of the game’s premier programs (USC) already is on probation, with another (Ohio State) ready to follow. The Ohio State case already resulted in the earlier-than-expected departures of Buckeyes coach Jim Tressel and potential Heisman contender Terrelle Pryor. Over the past 12 months or so, the 2004 BCS championship, the 2005 Heisman presentation and the 2009 ACC football championship have been vacated. And now we have one division – the ACC Coastal – that has half its membership (Georgia Tech, Miami and North Carolina) in hot water with the NCAA.

But that only scratches the surface.

Here’s a big one; and one of her favorites: All her life she’s heard and read pragmatic reality-based broad-shouldered boots on the ground straight-talking university sports enthusiast types ridicule humanities types as pie in the sky dreamers, limp-wristed do-nothing childish emotional deluded obscurantists jabbering pointlessly away in empty jargon.

Yet from the moment, ten years ago, she began attending NCAA and NCAA-related conferences, and heard one speaker after another intone words like integrity and principle to complacent audiences, UD has recognized that these NCAA words have exactly the same value as words like (counter-) hegemonic, imbrication, and modalities among certain groupings of English professors.

Hollow abstractions prop up both groups as they struggle to maintain a sense not only that they are united, but that they are not marginal, not incorrect in their beliefs, and – in the case of the NCAA crowd – not corrupt.

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Of the two groups, which is the more pitiable? The more deluded? Foucauldian academics occasionally score a meaningful cultural intervention; their efforts to radicalize the academy have had an impact. The NCAA crowd is caught in the eternal recurrence of win/loss, with winning as meaningless as losing.

“[S]o many colleges have bent the rules in the great academic act of winning meaningless football and basketball games,” writes Buzz Bissinger of his initial reaction to the University of Miami story, “that it was hard for me to muster much excitement.”

It is not only the ultimate meaninglessness of their endeavor – a meaninglessness made more acute by its location within that most ardently meaning-generating institution, the university – that the NCAA crowd must shield itself from; it is its filth. Few people, beyond sociopaths like Bernard Madoff and Nevin Shapiro, want to think of themselves as corrupt, but hundreds of NCAA administrators and NCAA-governed coaches, university presidents, and players certainly know that they are corrupt, that they play important parts in a corrupt system, if only by looking the other way when coaches and agents and fans and players around them are corrupt.

Bissinger argues that Miami football is so corrupt that the program should be permanently killed, and Donna Shalala

should be hauled before Congress, where the allegations against Miami are 10 times more serious than all the steroid nonsense paraded about in Washington.

Once she has done her murky dance of denial, a grand jury should be convened. If it turns out she did know the outrageous conduct of booster Nevin Shapiro — such as filling virtually an entire hotel floor with prostitutes for Miami players to gorge on, like grapes — she should be charged with perjury.

But… eh. She knew and she didn’t know. You know? It’s what I’ve been saying. She kind of knows that the games are meaningless and the people running them are disgusting… but a palm-lined campus is such a beautiful thing lalalalala. Pitiable.

Cam Newton is such a beautiful thing. A $2.2 billion contract with ESPN is such a beautiful thing. Pitiable.

And today, as always, these pitiable deluded people are the talk of the town.

Vox populi, University of Miami.

An editor at the Atlantic hesitates to join the crowd and call for the professionalization of college sports – paying players, dropping the whole goes to class thing, etc.

Why even keep the “student” in student-athlete? There’s really no reason players at a big program like Miami should take classes. After all, it’s not like they’re real students. They’re just football players, right? They’re pros. Aren’t they?

Ending amateurism sounds like a no-brainer. Maybe it is. But one inevitable consequence of it is that absolutely nothing would stand between college athletes and sleazy boosters like [Nevin] Shapiro. There’s something in me that hates that. Whether or not it’s rational or fair, there’s something in me that says we need a mechanism in place saying it’s not okay to take college players to strip clubs or buy them jewelry — just as something in me says, all evidence the contrary, it’s important for those players to be enrolled in classes.

Some thing… some je ne sais quoi… arrests this person on the verge of agreeing with everyone else that universities should house hundreds of people whose only function is to hurl their bodies around in ways that excite large numbers of people. Whose only reward is strippers who do the same thing. Some thing… some almost-forgotten, impossible-to-articulate inkling… some metaphysical scent has wafted to this person’s nostrils and whispered that it’s important for players to do something other than play for us when they’re at a college.

Something in this person “hates” “sleaze.” Strong words. But what’s really being said?

If you take the player out of the college altogether – if you place this person in the pros – the problem disappears. Which is kind of interesting. It suggests that the college as such represents a different world from … the world. The college seems to be a different world, with pressures of its own toward higher things, better and more serious ways of life. Remove the silently but powerfully remonstrating college from the totally familiar, totally unremarkable dissipation most people, given enough money, will want to live, and no problem.

No one cares, in other words, about the behavior of professional athletes (except when it’s really, really, really appalling) because we don’t expect anything different. People care about the behavior of university athletes — because they’re at universities. If the university has any distinction as a location – any distinction at all – it lies here, in its call to its students and faculty to think rather than instinctively act; to be serious rather than always be at play; to hate violence and to love reason; to prefer reflection to impulse.

To be sure, there are locations in America to whose name the word university is affixed – Auburn University, Texas Tech University – which we all recognize to be mere locations, quads in the sand, nothingness. Nothing but games and the scandals that accompany them. We don’t get upset about the scandals emanating from these locations. We barely cover them. If we cover them, it’s just to laugh at them.

But there are all these other places in our country, these universities, where we feel shame and sadness and confusion, where we feel, as the Atlantic editor writes, that it’s not okay when large numbers of well-organized, well-financed members of the university community dedicate themselves exclusively to games and greed.

Within this inchoate discomfort lies the beginning of personal and collective efforts to define university.

… Day.

UD offers this poem, composed of Antrel Rolle’s comments about his friend Nevin Shapiro.

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WHAT’S TRUE AND WHAT’S NOT TRUE

To me it doesn’t matter
What’s true and what’s not true.

Matt Hayes, of Sporting News, correctly anticipates that stories about Donna Shalala’s professional football team bring the NCAA that much closer to extinction.

Why the hell should the multimillionaires running college football and basketball have to deal with some dipshit organization run by college presidents who put fine businessmen like John Junker out of business? Junker is our business, and the NCAA doesn’t seem to get that.

Sure, the organization is basically toothless; but it’s forced us to come up with all sorts of fake coursework for our team members… Sometimes it forces us to take important players off the field just when we need them… It takes our wins away… Shit like that…

Secession is the only way. Places like Auburn and Clemson and Miami and Alabama know exactly what they are, and they’ll thank us for finally allowing them to be what they are.

And don’t forget: With the NCAA and its financial penalties out of the way, there’s that much more to go around.