[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…

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?