… 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.

… the filthiest of all the Bowls, the very deepest bowel of the Bowls (scroll down for BCS details), has sent a letter out to a bunch of politicians. Over the past few years, the Fiesta people have given these politicians free game tickets.

The letter asks the politicians why they – the Fiesta people – did that.

You read that right. It’s a letter that says you tell us why we bribed you. Turns out it wasn’t a tax exempt sort of thing to do! Who knew? … But … well … maybe it was a tax exempt sort of thing to do only we’re too stupid to figure out how it was tax exempt. Will you tell us?…

Or… maybe if we write this letter to you we’ll transfer the guilt to you! You took the money after all! It wasn’t me, Mom! It was him!

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

Answers to the Fiesta letter are starting to trickle in, and so far it doesn’t look good.

Senator Rich Crandall:

“I don’t have to prove to you it was a benefit. …Your board and directors said it was a benefit… You need to go back to them and ask them how they felt it was a benefit. I don’t have to justify anything to you.”

Senate President Russell Pearce:

The request is “outrageous.”

Looks like the Fiesta guys might have to go back to the drawing board and figure out all by themselves why they’re a tax-exempt organization. For some reason, the beneficiaries of their payoffs aren’t cooperating.

As you recall, we will gather this August in retreat, for one brief moment, far away from the busy bustle of the outer world, to think on our sins and, in sincere repentance, get them hence.

Are there scoffers? Naysayers?

[University sports corruption is] such a point of concern for Mark Emmert that he has convened a retreat for NCAA leaders in August to discuss the problem, play golf, and receive backrubs. The backrubs will be exquisite, and the results of the conference will be hey did we mention backrubs and golf? Seriously, backrubs and golf. That’s really worth the trip alone.

This is the voice of the devil. Do not heed him! The devil wants to banish tax exemptions from luxury boxes and cap what Kentucky can pay John Calipari. Do not heed him!

Gather, instead, with goodly folk like Brother Tressel, and think on how we can make our fellowship yet purer in the sight of God.

… (which unfortunately also taught accounting to Gary Foster). It’s by Dave Matter, in the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune:

Over the last five years, the Big East school has used more than $115 million to cover its athletic department’s spending. That’s almost twice as much as any other major conference athletic department received from its university coffers. And here’s where it gets ugly: State funding cuts have forced Rutgers to withhold $30 million in scheduled raises for its employees.

… Rutgers … is coming off a 4-8 football season and has the Big East’s highest-paid coach in Greg Schiano. At just over $2 million a year, he makes more than any public employee in the state of New Jersey…

… [S]ince 2006, Rutgers has spent more than $115 million to cover athletics spending, a USA TODAY analysis finds. In 2010, Rutgers University said it would withhold scheduled negotiated raises for its employees because of state funding cuts…

[N]o athletics program has matched Rutgers’ subsidies; $115 million is the highest for any public school and nearly twice the subsidy of the next highest school among the power conferences …

The short answer: Get a president who doesn’t preside.

From an interview with the latest one on his way out the door.

On UK’s scandalous athletics culture:

I wish the country as a whole wasn’t as crazy as it is about athletics. It’s out of whack. But it’s a reality that you have to deal with in this position.

On the Wildcat Coal debacle:

Todd and the Board of Trustees received a lot of criticism for accepting $8 million from coal operators to build a new dormitory for the basketball team in return for naming it Wildcat Coal Lodge. Author Wendell Berry pulled his papers from UK, and others complained that the university is too beholden to an industry that denies climate change and resists calls to become more environmentally responsible.

If he had it to do over, would Todd handle Wildcat Coal Lodge differently?

“I tried to handle it differently,” he said. “We had some other suggested names. You have donors who … want to name it what they want to name it. They are good donors for us across the whole university and they are capable of giving more. We discussed other names, but when it came down to it, it was a decision to take the donation.

“I would be glad to build a Wildcat Green Lodge,” he added, if donors would give UK the money to pay for it.

Common thread? You can’t expect me to do anything! I’m only the president.

Well, them boys at Ohio State was supposed to circle the wagons and all, but seems one of ’em didn’t hear the cow bell! One of the trustees dropped the ball! Here’s what he said about all them NCAA violations!

“The cracks here weren’t really cracks of rules, procedures, and policies, they were cracks in a value system,” Jurgensen said. “I think we have a lot to learn on sort of the manual aspects of this, but I think we also have a lot to look at it in sort of the soul searching of what is most important in the game of life.”

Hah? Fuck that! President Gee and all the other boys on the board jumped on this guy so fast he’s still spittin’ up dust! The name Ohio State and the word Value are, like, one and the same! Nothing wrong here! Nothing to see here! We’re a model for the nation!

University of Nevada Reno president Marc Johnson skillfully handles a challenge from the press on the matter of the athletic department’s $1.5 million deficit.

Nothing says finger-lickin’ dignified like having your university graduation ceremony at KFC YUM!

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

And now you got some reporter complaining about Rutgers University in this here headline:

CORPORATE SALES OF STADIUM NAMING RIGHTS FURTHER SULLIES COLLEGE ATHLETICS

First off, I think we can agree that big-time college athletics has long since reached sully-saturation, so let’s lose the further.

Second, High Points Solution is an information technology firm! That’s classy! It ain’t Kentucky Fried Chicken! Rutgers should count its lucky stars.

A fun fact about the football coach at Eastern Michigan University.

EMU is one of many pathetic Division I schools in these here United States. But even by the standards of that tawdry deluded crew, EMU stands out.

Further facts, from a long article by Pete Bigelow:

The athletic department reported $19.8 million in revenues in 2009. Of that amount, $14.9 million came from direct institutional support and $1.6 million came from student fees.
That $16.5 million represents 83.4 percent of the school’s athletic budget, the highest percentage of direct institutional support any athletic department received among the Mid-American Conference’s 13 member institutions.
Athletes make up 2.5 percent of EMU’s overall student body, but receive more than 20 percent of the university’s financial aid budget. The athletes’ share amounts to approximately $6.7 million.
NCAA rules stipulate a school must average 15,000 fans per home football game to remain in Division I. Eastern Michigan, which averaged 6,401 fans per home game in 2010, uses $150,000 from a distribution contract with Pepsi to purchase tickets from itself at a rate of $3 apiece to remain NCAA compliant.

We buy tickets from ourselves!

Very pomo. Très simulacral. Doesn’t do anything to hide the empty stands, however.

It helps, when trying to understand the Division I losers, to imagine the presidents of these schools as Blanche DuBois, and the big football victory that will turn it all around as Belle Reve.