… between a local columnist’s bland recitation of the reasons why the University of Tennessee has had a fall-off in football ticket sales (the economy, bad match-ups, etc.) and some of the commenters on his story, who stress the thug problem.

I can’t name another school that has had two car loads of 8 thugs driving around town holding up convenience stores with guns and weed in the car. Can you?

Yeah, that was a bad one. But the incident was one of many incidents over the last few years involving UT players. Is it possible that there’s a tipping point, even for UT fans? Could their amazingly well-honed cognitive dissonance (There they go down the field, our fine University of Tennessee student athletes!) (The latest one is an armed robbery? Yikes.) be losing its edge?

So far it’s just an anonymous allegation. And David Salinas, the investment banker with the summer league and many investment clients among university coaches, has – just after the SEC announced he was under investigation for a Ponzi scheme – killed himself.

The reason some [coaches] might be concerned about their financial connection to Salinas is because it’s unclear how the NCAA would view college coaches investing money with the founder of a summer basketball program that supplied recruits to several universities over the years.

The suggestion is that the coaches felt compelled to give Salinas hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for his recruits.

If true, it’s another glorious chapter in the annals of amateur university athletics. And it explains why these guys demand such strikingly high salaries.

One writer sums up the situation:

The SEC will investigate the alleged Ponzi scheme, local law enforcement will investigate the death, and the NCAA will investigate why in God’s Sweet Earth an AAU curator was knowingly investing money on behalf of the coaches of some of the schools that his program was funneling players to.

Essentially, this means college sports fans will have to live with yet another interminable fall-out of yet another scandal.

Well, thankfully, we have plenty of experience doing that.

Just keep doing what you’ve been doing. It’s really taking you places.

Having maintained the University of Kentucky’s beautiful sports program [scroll down], and having built Coal Lodge, now-retired President Todd takes a plush, well-deserved rest back on the UK faculty.

Todd’s new office at UK’s Advanced Science and Technology Commercialization Center will cost $143,828.

The office will be built from an existing conference room, complete with two subdivided rooms that will be a waiting area and a suite for Todd and his assistant.

Some on the faculty are angry that buildings and programs are falling apart right and left on campus while the university sends a big fat thank you to Todd. But you can’t deny that he did a great job of maintaining, and indeed deepening, the culture of the University of Kentucky.

Answer: Hyuk! It don’t! It’s Tennessee!

You want a class act, you way definitely want West Virginia University. The CBS News writer quoted above doesn’t even bother going back to football coach Rich Rodriguez, who brought such esteem to WVU’s sports program shortly before Heave-Ho Holgorsen came along.

Daktronics Inc., in conjunction with the University of Kentucky, are pleased to announce the addition of an integrated, high definition football video and sound system for Commonwealth Stadium, home of the Wildcats. The debut for the multi-million dollar system is scheduled for the Wildcats’ 2011 home opener September 10 vs. Central Michigan. … The most visible components of the system will undoubtedly be the two high definition Daktronics HD-X video displays to be installed behind each end zone. Measuring approximately 37 feet high by 80 feet wide, each display will provide live and recorded video in high definition, with picture in picture capability with multiple zones to show scores, statistics, and sponsor information. …

Yes, your Adzillatron can never get enough upgrades. There’s a lot of sponsor information to pound into your head, and students love to pay for the privilege.

Yeah, well. Problem is – what comes after this? First they “vacate revenues earned from using ineligible players.” Next thing you know they’ll stop giving three million dollars a year to coaches who cheat.

… believes.

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

[I Believe.]

… Ohio State University needs to be bending over backwards to show the world it’s an institution of higher learning and not a football program that has students and classrooms in place to provide a fan base.

… you’ve always got to include estimated annual legal fees whenever someone tells you how profitable big-time university athletics are. Boosters routinely forget to add to their excited financial calculations that, since almost everyone cheats, and since the cheating is often discovered, high-priced attorneys come with the territory. (The other reason attorneys are an inescapable sports budget item: Buyouts of various coaching contracts when teams don’t win games.)

Take the University of Oregon. Due to some typical recruiting fuckup, UO has just hired a bunch of lawyers. Hourly rates for each of these people range from $330 all the way down to $205.

UO students and parent must be pleased to know that their student fees are being used to bail out cheaters.

Presumably they feel it’s a small price to pay for that heady feeling of winning an occasional game.

Via UD‘s friend James, another – yes – heartening recruitment story, this one out of the University of Illinois. Christopher Jones is a freshman football player.

Assistant State’s Attorney Scott Larson said [two] men were walking in the 600 block of East Daniel Street holding hands when Jones drove by in a car.

He and others in the car taunted the pedestrians by calling them derogatory names, Larson said. The car stopped, Jones got out and called the men more names, Larson said.

He then hit each of them in the head with a fist. One sustained a cut to the inside of his mouth and the other had swelling around his eyes, he said.

Jones, convicted last year of cocaine possession, is now in jail for aggravated assault.

Jones said he attacked the guys because one of them jumped him last week.

“Jones weighs 320 pounds while the alleged victims weigh 140 and 165 pounds.”

The attack was recorded on a security camera.

Coach Zook was recently rewarded with a raise for being such a heartening recruiter.

He’s the highest paid public university employee in the state.

Real reason?

Because they’re hilarious.

An excerpt:

Coaches and administrators have forgotten how to cheat. These things used to be taken care of with a few hundreds rolled into a handshake and a job for mom at the tractor factory down the road from the school. Now, it’s amateur hour.

This isn’t rocket science, people. The NCAA has what amounts to subpoena power over current athletes and current university employees. That’s it. The NCAA’s rules don’t apply to anyone else. That opens an almost infinite array of cheating opportunities completely undetectable by the NCAA’s enforcement cops. If you get caught cheating, you got caught because you’re incredibly stupid.

UC Berkeley says don’t worry: Our “new Pac-12 Media Rights Package” will make us ever so much money.

A Berkeley computer science professor responds:

[S]ince money will be distributed to all teams in the Pac-12, there will be pressure on intercollegiate athletics at UC Berkeley to continue the spiral of increased spending so that it can keep up with the other Pac-12 teams in what is a fiscal ‘arms race.’

A law professor uses one of UD‘s favorite university-sports adjectives (she’s probably used sordid almost as much as squalid in writing about big-time football and basketball) to describe Rich Rodriguez’s contract dealings with the University of West Virginia. (Background – including his subsequent experience at the University of Michigan – here. Scroll down.) But he does more than that. He proves that what sports boosters always say is true: Sports contribute a huge amount to the university.

Bambauer said the heated dispute [between Rodriguez and UWV] worked “wonderfully well” for his Contracts B class, a second semester contract law class he was teaching in the winter and spring of 2008.

“It was a nice teaching moment because it showed that you threaten a lot and then, eventually, the parties sit down and negotiate. This is the norm.”

Yes. That is the norm in the big bad world, and it’s the norm in our big sports universities. They’re every bit as sordid as the big bad world.

As Philip Larkin would say, useful to get that learnt.