How did things come to this, Donna Shalala? What have you done to deserve this? Maybe it’s that $1.2 million salary.
This Dead Spin blogger is only the first of many writers who in the next few days will turn their attention to the woman who has presided over all of the amazing events at the University of Miami – hiring Charles Nemeroff, fielding the most violent university football team ever, enabling Nevin Shapiro for years… Miami, in UD‘s opinion, is just a scummy school, and Shalala has let it get that way. She should go.
Nevin Shapiro, who orchestrated a $930 million Ponzi scheme and is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison, told Yahoo! Sports that he gave [University of Miami] Hurricanes players gifts such as money, jewelry and yacht trips, as well as paid for sex parties, bounties on opposing players and even an abortion for a player’s girlfriend.
And it’s all alleged to have happened under the watch of former Miami athletic director Paul Dee, the former chairman of the NCAA committee on infractions …
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“Former Miami athletic director Paul Dee sat in judgment of USC and others while all of this went on under his nose.”
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“The hypocrisy of the NCAA makes me sick,” [one university president] told the Press-Telegram. “To allow institutions like Miami and Nebraska to chair and oversee its infractions committee is like putting foxes in charge of the henhouse.”
Why do people associated with conferences and schools make up the majority of the 10-person infractions committee?
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UD readers have already met the much-loved University of Miami sports benefactor – the “living scholar” after whom the Nevin Shapiro Student Athlete Lounge is named… Was named… Don’t know who it’s named after now… Allen Stanford?
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The sort of thing the University of Miami did during the Nevin Era will, I think, strike anyone as fully in line with the ethos of any serious American university:
Three sources, including two former Miami football players, confirmed that Shapiro offered bounties.
The booster told Yahoo! Sports he had a number of individual payouts for “hit of the game” and “big plays.” He also put bounties on specific players, including Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and a three-year standing bounty on Seminoles quarterback Chris Rix from 2002 to 2004, offering $5,000 to any player who knocked him out of a game.
“We pounded the (expletive) out of that kid,” Shapiro said of Rix. “Watch the tape of those games. You’ll see so many big hits on him. Guys were all going after that $5,000 in cash. [Jon] Vilma tried to kill him – just crushed him – a couple of times trying to get that $5,000. And he almost got it, too.”
I mean, name any school that doesn’t offer $5,000 extra in scholarship money to an athlete who can kill a competing player.
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Anyway, the writer I quoted up there, the one pointing out that the Miami AD who oversaw the whorehouse during the Nevin years was also NCAA infractions chair… His thing is that the current head of the NCAA is a “detriment to the NCAA” because he’s “not a reformer.”
It’s true that Mark Emmert will do nothing, just as his predecessor did nothing, to rid American universities of the ever-erupting shit-volcano which is big-time football and basketball. But that doesn’t make him a detriment to the NCAA. Uh-uh. Au contraire. How do you think the NCAA chooses its leaders? The point of the NCAA, like any organization, is to sustain itself, not reform itself out of existence. For that, you need a guy as mercenary and cynical as the NCAA itself.
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UD thanks her friend Ralph for linking her to the Yahoo story.
— it’s the only school in America actively trying to transform itself from a university to a jockshop — has been chronicled, step by step on this blog.
And now, rather in the way San Diego State’s last president reduced it to shabby jockery and then retired from the mess he’d made, the president of Rutgers, having presided to his satisfaction over the reduction of his school to a sports whore, will soon take a well-deserved rest.
UD‘s friend Roy sends her the latest article detailing what Richard McCormick has done to a once-proud school.
In the course of a massive fraud trial, details of university life in the state of Texas.
International soccer’s governing body has always been a punchline for corruption in sports. They make the NCAA look like UNICEF.
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Yes, my dear little brothers in sport, our retreat last week was all about this primary fact: We stink to high heaven.
What will we do about it?
Nothing.
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I mean, look up there. Two posts up. Headline Among the Company’s Expenses…
Do you seriously expect us to fuck with that?
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Sweetie, I hear you. But it’s too late to get rid of the scum. And our next President, Rick Perry, wouldn’t hear of it.
My best advice to you: Try to get a job at a school that’s not a sports factory. There are plenty of fine colleges and universities in this country.
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Another comparison.
“[P]rotecting and enhancing the integrity of intercollegiate athletics” … is the equivalent …of upholding the gold standard of the government of Somalia.
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And never forget who’s running the show.
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“It’s a circus. And the NCAA is running behind the elephants with shovels.”
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College football and men’s basketball are multi-billion-dollar businesses being run as an illegal cartel. So don’t say Congress or the President shouldn’t be “wasting time” on sports.
If the President and Congress make it clear to the university presidents that the system is completely unacceptable and they will lose all the tax breaks they currently enjoy if they do not do a complete tear-down, that will force action.
It sounds impossible. So did going to the moon. Sometimes you need to attempt the impossible. Especially when the current situation is completely sickening to witness.
Don’t be pretty much nobody smarter than a University of Florida Gators fan.
I mean no surprise there …it’s a university and all!
Gators fans spend loads – not just hundreds on each season ticket, but thousands on something UF calls a “contribution” before they even get the right to pay for one of the state’s most prized commodities: admission to a Gators football game …
Did I say admission? Hell, any jerk can get admission. These thousand dollar babies admit you not only to a guaranteed air-conditioned lounge but to a pre-game buffet!
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Hey but what’s this? You say the Gators eat shit this year and some dummies are dropping their season deal? Leaving precious commodity gaps all over the stadium? Nobody wants to see a three thousand dollar seat sitting empty! What does that say about fan loyalty? How does it make the loyal fan in the next seat, who’s out tens of thousands of dollars for a privilege few people seem to want, feel?
It’s kind of lose/lose when you think about it. Figure you’ve spent all that cash and grazed the pre-game buff and inhaled the lounge … figure you’ve even gotten drunk as a skunk.
Now everything’s set for the big payoff… what we lady folk call The Big O — a winning game! Only it don’t happen. What happens is that the other team wins.
Well don’t you feel like a chump. All that money just to pig out, get drunk, access air conditioning, and watch your guys lose. You get up from that thousand dollar seat unsteadily, and you drive home pissed every which way.
The other lose part of the lose/lose thing I’m suggesting here is that you go to the next game and you set yourself down in your thousand dollar seat and the guy next to you spends the whole game telling you how much less he paid for the seat than you did ’cause UF is so desperate it’s practically giving them away. Plus the team loses again. Haw!
“Everybody is going to come to these games,” [Florida Atlantic University Mary Jane] Saunders said last week during the ceremonial first lighting event at the $70 million stadium on the north end of campus. “You go to one game and you are going to be want to be part of the whole thing.”
Even if the team goes 1-11? 3-9? Everybody’s gonna wanna be part of that whole thing?
Now this here sports writer in Florida, he’s warning FAU that well you take a place like Akron. They bought a big new stadium and not everybody came to the games.
Akron planned on an average attendance of 15,000 a game when creating its financial plan for the stadium, and the sagging attendance is what created the shortfall in the budget.
And that’s just Akron. You read this blog, you know about tons of other examples of schools that just felt sure their team would win every game so they’d triple that hundred million investment in no time.
See, it’s real simple. You know how your sports team wins every game and packs ’em in? It’ll be just like that for FAU.
[UT football player Austin] Johnson, who was charged for public intoxication and disorderly conduct [Sunday], apparently was trying to pick a fight and was also “hitting parked cars.” Johnson told Knoxville police that he was drunk.
There’s something sad about the futility there – Johnson couldn’t find a person to fight, so he started hitting huge pieces of metal instead.
… seems to have scared the University of North Carolina into doing something about its rancid football program. They’ve fired the coach.
Gin-soaked University of South Carolina has a competition going between its football players and their coaches to see who can show up drunk in public more often.
So far quarterback Stephen Garcia dominates, not only numerically (five suspensions), but … how to say… The guy’s got a sense of irony:
Starting quarterback Stephen Garcia has been suspended five times in his career. Most recently Garcia was suspended on April 6 after an incident at a life skills seminar.
Sense of irony, sense of humor… It takes a sense of something to show up drunk at a life skills seminar.
Garcia’s main competition comes from his coach, G.A. Mangus, who earns upwards of $150,000 a year — though even by USC standards, he must be said to be earning it in a rather odd way…
Two officers said they were driving down Main Street in Greenville [in the wee small hours of the morning] when they saw Mangus urinating on the sidewalk curb and roadway outside the Carolina Ale House.
The officers said they got out to speak with Mangus about what he was doing. Police said there was a large wet area close to where he was standing.
“He was intoxicated, was not cooperative,” said Greenvillle police spokesman Jason Rampey. “He could not provide answers the officers were looking for to questions like, was he with someone, how he got there and how he was getting home.”
Police said Mangus was unsteady on his feet and had a strong odor of alcohol. Police said his eyes appeared to be dilated and glazed over. Police said when they questioned Mangus about his actions, his speech was slurred.
Garcia’s got Mangus on sheer numbers; but only Mangus has whipped out his dick and made his own pool. Extra points.
UD don’t even blink at this shit no more.
Not so much good ol’ universities like Tennessee with almost fully criminalized sports teams… Not that, onaccounta she done read about that for five, ten years goin’ on now… No, UD don’t even blink at the way the local rags report this shit.
I mean, look at it from the rags’ POV. Every year, all year, including the summer, they know they’re going to have to report constant devilry on the part of their local gods, like say the football players at the University of Tennessee. Scary stuff – driving around dead drunk, beating people on the streets of Knoxville, taking part in armed robberies …
So – in order to hold fast the faith of the people, there’s a formula their scribes use for every incident. UD will cite this article – one of thousands of clones – to clarify.
1.) First they remind the people that it’s been eons since they had to put the last player in jail. I mean, really, to be fair, the team’s been clean for an incredible stretch. (“[T]he football team’s arrest record remained clean for nearly five months…”)
2.) Then the assistant director of fuckups gets on the horn and tells the scribes the school is vaguely aware that something vague has happened and they’re looking into I guess or they sure will soon as they know something but it’s real early days and let’s be fair. (“We’re aware of an incident…”)
3.) Now, without giving any detail about the incident, you go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about the position the guy played, the effect on game strategy of possibly losing this guy to suspension or jail or whatever, etc. (“The position is one of the Vols’ biggest concerns…”)
4.) Next, testimonials. (“He made a mistake but he was not causing trouble.”)
5.) Wrapping up, another reminder of the amazing crime-free stretch. (“UT coach Derek Dooley’s continued efforts to clean up the program’s run of recent off-field troubles and change the culture appeared to have paid off, as the Vols were nearly through the entire summer without any incidents.” Have you ever tried to get through an entire summer without getting arrested?)
6.) And finally: The players’ court date is checked against the team’s practice schedule. (“His court date is scheduled for Aug. 4, the Vols’ third day of preseason practice.”)
“[S]haring funds between the Athletics Department and the [University of Iowa] is a good idea; it would go a long way toward alleviating the university’s budget woes and prevent the Athletics Department from being an essentially independent corporation using the UI’s name, trademarks, and academic allure.”
With state funds falling, public big-time sports universities are wondering why they get so little of the tens of millions generated by their programs. Administrators patiently explain that coaches need millions and millions of dollars in compensation every year just to get by, but students and faculty aren’t listening. Here’s the editorial board of UI’s newspaper:
The university’s Athletics Department predicts revenues in excess of $70 million for fiscal 2011. With the UI facing an $8 million decrease in state appropriations, there’s a cogent argument for at least pulling enough from the athletics budget to make up the difference.
After all:
Kinnick Stadium will [soon] be rumbling with more than 70,000 rabid football fans, many of them university students. Few will probably take the time to consider the sheer magnitude of wealth concentrated around them…
The fact that the high school football talk has gone on unfettered for the better part of six months with nary a public response/rebuke from the NCAA is unimaginable. The fact that ESPN is very publicly braying about high school prospects is unconscionable — but not nearly as unconscionable as the NCAA allowing this discussion half a year after it should’ve been shutdown to continue on.
He’s talking about the humongous new network deal between the University of Texas and ESPN. Programming will include “high school football games in the state of Texas,” which is to say that the Longhorn Network will televise “potential football recruits on a television network dedicated to a single university.” It would seem to give the University of Texas an unfair advantage.
[I]f televising potential in-state — and specifically targeted out-of-state — recruits on your own television network is not a violation, how could The Association ever again look any school in the eyes in the future and accuse them of doing something illicit in gaining an advantage in recruiting?
The writer seems shocked that the NCAA hasn’t done anything; but here’s UD‘s theory. Although it does nothing to stem big-time university sports corruption, the NCAA is the busiest organization in the world. It’s like tax season at the IRS there every single day. They have simply run out of staff.