… has inspired some good writing —
One Canuck-clad hooligan made several attempts to throw a five-gallon water bottle through the remaining unbroken windows of the Budget office. His eyes were glazed over in pointless rage and he was easily exploited by the crowds to do their destructive bidding… These weren’t hardened criminals raised on poverty, but rather booze-fueled suburban youth who gulp their courage from a bottle.
— and reminded UD of all the post-game university football and basketball riots she’s covered on this blog over the years.
VERY.
[Athletic Director Mike Hamilton’s] resignation is effective on June 30, [just days before the NCAA’s infractions committee comes to pay a visit] but he will be on administrative leave beginning Monday. According to reports, he will receive a buyout of $1.335 million over the next 36 months or $445,000 per year ($37,083.33 monthly)…
Hamilton fired football coach Phil Fulmer in 2008, Bruce Pearl in March and most recently baseball coach Todd Raleigh. He hired Lane Kiffin to replace Fulmer, but Kiffin resigned after one season to take over the University of Southern California program, which was sanctioned by the NCAA.
According to the News Sentinel, Pearl is being paid $948,728, and Raleigh is owed $331,657.53 for a total of $1,280,385.53.
According to The Tennessean, Fulmer received $6 million when he was fired.
The football violations being heard by the NCAA this weekend are under Kiffin’s regime.
He also fired baseball coach Rod Delmonico and basketball coach Buzz Peterson, who received $1.39 million in 2005 when he was fired, according to the News Sentinel.
According to The Tennessean, the total cost of all of Hamilton’s firings is $9,070,385.53.
Ed Greif, a local sportswriter, does the numbers.
Tennessee: Hire guys you have to fire because they get caught breaking rules, then pay them millions and millions of buyout dollars for years. Genius.
… say Richard Vedder and Matthew Denhart in Forbes, nothing will change in the supremely scummy world of big-time university sports.
Wannabe schools in the shadows of the Ohio States of the world often lose $15 million a year or more on sports, usually directly or indirectly financed by socking it to students, a large portion of whom do not share the enthusiasm of some alumni and others for whom sports is a passion. Even at these schools, it is difficult to find a football coach who earns less than $200,000 a year. Fans often claim these salaries are driven by market forces. Yet one doubts that a properly functioning market would ever provide such high compensation to the chief executive of a company that loses millions annually.
But back to that unless. I doubt it’s unless a herculean scandal occurs. It will occur; and it won’t happen at just one school. There will be, simultaneously, herculean scandals at, say, five schools. The national headlines, for weeks on end, will feature universities — universities — buried in piles of pig shit. People will definitely notice.
And what will happen?
They’ll replace the head of the NCAA with another guy just like whatzisface.
.. and author of a series of books on strength conditioning, has killed himself.
He suffered from depression.
He jumped off the roof of the New York Athletic Club.
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On the same day, an opinion piece in Emma’s city’s newspaper, The New York Times, features this phrase:
suicide is generally wrong
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Indeed the opinion piece’s headline makes the wrongness of suicide paramount. It asks:
WHAT’S WRONG WITH SUICIDE?
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This is the writer’s second column, in the last couple of days, on suicide. In neither column does he even begin to hint at a justification for the claim that suicide — assisted or non-assisted — is wrong. Let’s see if we can do that.
There is an obvious religious way in which suicide is wrong. You are born by God, you live by God, you die by God. For many religious, taking your death into your own hands is – like abortion – denying the will of God in regard to the most basic of human realities. It is a sort of grotesque disobedience, a usurpation of divine powers, essentially unforgivable in its extremity.
Other spiritual traditions may not bring so punitive and outraged a rhetoric (and indeed damnation) to suicide, but they may well see it as … not exactly wrong, but, as the Buddhist Matthieu Ricard explains:
[W]anting not to exist any longer is a delusion. It’s a form of attachment that, destructive though it is, binds you to samsara, the circle of suffering existence. When someone commits suicide, all they do is change to another state, and not necessarily a better state either.
Here, suicide is just sort of stupid, since it doesn’t accomplish the surcease you’re after. On the contrary, it almost guarantees the unpleasantness of your next go-’round.
If you’re not part of a spiritual tradition in which the will of God or karmic action prevails, in what way is suicide wrong, or ontologically mistaken, and therefore to be rejected?
Here are three possible ways: One is the harm argument; a second is the antithetical-to-life argument; and, finally, there’s the cowardice argument.
Harm: Everyone knows that suicide hurts other people. When suicides write notes (apparently Tom Emma did not), they almost always include the words I’m sorry. Weighing on their minds as suicides do the deed is the shock and despair and guilt they’re handing people who love them, and they routinely ask their forgiveness.
Just as for the religious you are, in killing yourself, denying yourself to God, for human beings you are denying yourself to them. The act is the ultimate taking. Hence, suicide is wrong because it is cruel beyond reason.
Antithetical to life: In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis writes that “because of what I do all day ,… suicides … are antithetical.” An artist, a writer, creates, makes something out of nothing. Her material is us — living breathing human beings and their ongoing dilemmas — and she needs us to be there, to keep at it.
When we check out, we take the air out of everyone’s tires. We threaten the fundamental, unthinking commitment we’re all supposed to have to the human comedy and our part in it. Life is good… or at least interesting… or at least compelling in its pleasures. Something like that. Each suicide is thus an intimately demoralizing act for the rest of us. Why persist? Why create? Who says life is good? Suicide is wrong because in killing oneself one ontologically puts at risk all of us.
Cowardice: Old age, people like to say, is not for sissies. All of life is full of challenges and deficits and sorrows and anxieties, and old age is of course rife with them; but, as the cliché suggests, only a sissy would take the easy way out. Life, under any circumstances, is a gift. Your life is a gift to you, and to others. Suicide is wrong because its commission makes you a supreme sissy, someone whose unseemly fear of existence itself blights your very being.
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UD would argue that none of these three arguments succeeds in marking suicide as wrong.
… uh whatever. You know. The latest shit.
Oh yeah. Ohio State.
… [T]his entire exercise is part of the grand hypocrisy that defines the N.C.A.A.
… [T]he only ones in this con game who can make money are the coaches, the athletics directors and the bowl officials.
… The [big-time college sports] beast devours coaches, administrators and college presidents, and enjoys a steady diet of athletes who help generate the revenue that has turned college sports into a billion-dollar industry.
Beer vote is a-comin’
Our Bud is in sight
Beer vote is a-comin’
There’s dancin’ tonight
Why don’t-cha chuga chuga chuga Bud
Why don’t-cha chuga chuga chuga Bud
Look here! The beer vote is a-comin’
There’s dancin’ tonight
Coach is at the Cross Lanes
To show us the way
Coach is at the Cross Lanes
It’s a shiny new day…
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UPDATE: Hyuk!
Because if there was one thing some WVU fans weren’t already, it was drunk enough… [The athletic director] said the sale of beer… would, and I quote, “improve fan behavior”.
[He] also mentioned beer sales could provide around $500,000 in revenue for the program (ah, there we go).
A USA Today reporter asks the author of Onward Christian Athletes about “college sports evangelism” post-Tressel.
[B]ig-time college sports are a mess and a poor platform for the promotion of religious virtue. The central idea of sports ministry — use sports and famous athletic figures to promote the faith — seems more problematic than ever in view of what’s happened with Coach Tressel. …With regard to the concept of using sports as a platform to promote faith … At a certain point, the platform no longer works as a vehicle to promote Christianity, because the platform is corroded and decayed.
West Virginia University’s English comp course rightly stresses the importance of argumentation in public discourse. You can’t just say boo. You can’t just say x. You have to say why boo. Why x.
WVU itself, however, seems not to have learned this. Its big-money new football coach is behaving badly in public, and the university is under attack. Here’s how WVU has responded:
After looking into its options, West Virginia University will take no action to refute allegations raised against the football program, athletic department and administration in separate columns published by two state newspapers over the weekend.
… WVU [is] assessing the validity of the claims it believes are false. University officials were also determining whether a response to the publications would be necessary.
A WVU source said Wednesday the university will not take any action, but “knows the Herald-Dispatch story had blatant inaccuracies.”
Uh huh. And what are the inaccuracies? If they’re blatant, they should be rather easy to refute.
Oh. WVU isn’t sure a response to blatant inaccuracies is necessary.
And it certainly doesn’t think reviewing the video footage of the coach’s most recent misbehavior is necessary. Why bother? Hell [spit]. Boys will be boys. And, you know, by and large, university football’s a nice clean business. You wanna argument? That’s my argument and I’m stickin’ to it. Hyuk.
… is an expert in performance management. Under her authority for the last three years, MSU has become arguably the most mismanaged, most under-performing campus in the country.
A humongous sports fan, Bradbury successfully pushed for JQH Arena, MSU’s new money-hemorrhage machine. Reed Olsen, an MSU economics professor, tried to explain to Bradley and MSU’s president and everybody that the arena would be a disaster, but they were too dumb to listen. They all beat up on old Reed. Nobody at a university – least of all its leadership – wants to read damn fool reports with lots of statistics and shit in them.
Okay but now they’re like losing tons of money I mean like what the hell happened? and now it’s time to sell beer there and chisel more fees out of undergraduates and rent out the place to well jackshit anybody I guess and I dunno fuck with the numbers…
The task force recommends the accounting of the arena be combined with Hammons Student Center and Plaster Sports Complex to create a “true” financial picture of athletic venues.
Dunn said the three facilities currently share resources such as personnel.
Former State Auditor Susan Montee last year specifically warned against mixing the finances of JQH Arena with other university sports facilities.
“In that way, it would not be transparent and nobody would be able to tell,” she said then.