Dan Fulks answers this question, posed in the first paragraph of a Birmingham News article:

Why did the University of North Alabama board of trustees ignore its students, staff and faculty [who all voted against] by voting 6-3 this week to pursue a move from Division II to Division I?

My dear little brothers in Sport, we meet this August in retreat, to think on our misdeeds and heartily repent of them and pledge to be better men in Sports.

For, as it is said, “College Football Live is … depressing and full of tragedy.” And, as it is said, college football is “morally bankrupt.” And that’s just football.

I invite you to meet me in a verdant space, where we, together in retreat, shall think upon our misdeeds while playing golf… Where, through warm summer evenings, we shall confess our naughtiness and sip sweet liqueur… What a fellowship, what a joy divine.

And after! Ah, after! Cleansed, we shall, each of us, stand before our local scribes and try to control our ecstasy as we speak of the new men in Sports we have become.

WBNS, Columbus:

For [Ohio State University athletic director Gene] Smith, the [free courtesy] Cadillac is part of his deal. He earns $800,000 a year and his contract requires a free car for him and his wife. [OSU director of NCAA compliance Doug] Archie, who is directly responsible for making sure players don’t go wrong with car dealers, makes $117,000 a year. He does not have a contract that guarantees a free car.

Archie’s [free] car comes … from Miracle Motor Mart, located at 2380 Morse Crossing. Former 1980s-era Ohio State player Mike D’Andrea, who owns the lot, said he sometimes employs student athletes during the summer.

In exchange for the cars, D’Andrea said he received a pair of season tickets to Ohio State football games.

… finally gets its own Adzillatron. [Scroll down for UD‘s earlier Adzillatron posts.]

Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith said Thursday he is considering hiring private investigators to strengthen the monitoring of Buckeye student-athletes.

Hard to imagine a finer intellectual setting than this: Your students trailed all day by the school’s private investigators.

And what an excellent use of university funds.

A University of New Mexico football player is in jail for suspicion of “trespassing, battery and resisting arrest,” after refusing to pull his pants up.

An airline employee spotted [Deshon] Marman before he boarded Flight 488, bound for Albuquerque, and complained that Marman’s pants “were below his buttocks but above the knees, and that much of his boxer shorts were exposed,” [Sgt. Michael] Rodriguez said.

The employee asked Marman to pull up his pants before he boarded the plane, but he refused, Rodriguez said. Marman allegedly repeated his refusal after taking his seat on the plane.

“At that point he was asked to leave the plane,” Rodriguez said. “It took 15 to 20 minutes of talking to get him to leave the plane, and he was arrested for trespassing.” Marman allegedly resisted officers as he was being led away.

… 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.

If you add up all the violations, it doesn’t really amount to much by the standards of big-time American university football.

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.

Maurice Clarett puts the blame where it belongs.

.. 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.

It’s got everything but a university.

… 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).