… Thug U, but the University of Miami – the original Thug U – still shows you how it’s done.

University of Miami linebacker Ramon Buchanan, who was arrested early Friday morning in Coconut Grove, allegedly told a Miami police officer, “I’m a UM football player and I don’t give a [expletive] what you do. I’ll get out of it. [Expletive] the police.’’

Details.

And after all, writes a fan, putting it in perspective, “Very different from a confirmed AK 47 shooting.”

Who must answer this call and begin the reform? That’s easy – college and university presidents. They must take a stand and expect severe, unjustified criticism. They must summon courage to defend the best part of the academy and return athletics to a wholesome place in American higher education. And those of us who love college competition and want to restore it to health must encourage them, support them and take on their critics. While they do the right thing, we must cover their backs!

There’s a sweet, dreamy, retro feel to the prose of John A. Roush, president of Centre College. When the subject is big-time university sports, “metaphors of illness are apt,” he writes; and the only cure is presidential courage. He ends with this defensive play where we all huddle around the presidents and keep them safe while they expose their rears to severe criticism…

Shouldn’t that be the job of the stupendously rich NCAA? Don’t they have the money and the power to protect university presidents as they defend what’s left of their schools against the plague?

Well, of course the NCAA has that power.

UD proposes that we all write opinion pieces in which we dream aloud about their using it.

… is the spectator sport.

Here’s a tax-exempt organization that does little other than make the world safe for big-time university athletics corruption (note its president’s hard-hitting response to the Education Secretary’s latest proposal about the droves of basketball players who don’t graduate).

Ralph Nader’s proposal to eliminate athletic scholarships and replace them with need-based money was a great opportunity for the NCAA to, say, reject the idea as overbroad, but express understanding of the motivation behind it, given the corrupt and destructive nature of much big-time university football and basketball.

Instead, the NCAA did another cynicism number. If the response to government officials wanting to reform a university-based system that fails to graduate huge numbers of high-profile athletes is to say jackshit about it and move on, the response to someone like Nader is to pull out all them nice girls on the swim team who graduate one hundred percent and you better believe it baby! Why is that mean man going after them nice girls?

The 145,000 student-athletes who receive athletics related financial aid each year are in fact students first — as evidenced by the fact that in almost every demographic they graduate at higher percentages than their counterparts in the general student body. …[T]hey are students, just like any other student on campus who receives a merit-based scholarship.

Don’t talk to me about football and basketball! Let’s just put all the athletes together into one big 145,000-person pile and note that most of them graduate! How unfair to pull out of that pile the few who play … What did you say? Which sports? … Oh yeah. Football and basketball. Why the obsessive focus on those sports? They’re just like any other…

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

Why is the NCAA so cynical?

Because it works. No one, Mencken wrote, ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Let’s take a few comments from a recent Inside Higher Ed interview with Charles T. Clotfelter, author of a new book about big-time university sports.

[T]he ingredient that gives big-time sports its remarkable staying power is quite simply support from the top – the university’s trustees or regents – who want to have competitive teams. Period.

Doug Lederer, who interviews Clotfelter, notes what happened when Clotfelter asked universities “who sat in their presidents’ boxes and received complimentary tickets to games.”

Fully half the public institutions with which you filed open-records requests turned you down or gave you useless information. My favorite, from Berkeley: “The public interest served here by protecting the identity of major or potential donors, and thereby increasing the likelihood of acquiring financial support for the university, outweighs any incidental interest served by disclosing who those individuals are.”

Clotfelter, Lederer points out, calls for “ending the tax exemption for donations to commercially driven college athletics programs.” Why? Clotfelter responds:

The income tax deduction we have for charitable donations is usually justified on the basis that these gifts go for socially virtuous purposes like education or community service. In contrast, much of the work of contemporary college athletic departments is purely commercial. Were they not attached to a university, these departments would probably be classified by government statisticians in the entertainment industry, alongside amusement parks and minor league professional teams. So, based on the traditional justification of the charitable deduction, gifts to enhance the commercial enterprise simply don’t qualify.

Trustees, regents, donors, anonymous presidential box sitters, anonymous complimentary ticket holders — what’s missing here?

Oh yeah. Students, parents, faculty, and taxpayers.

Disgusting enough that absurdities like Auburn get tax breaks for being amusement parks; even more disgusting that these schools are run for the amusement of the people at the top.

… must dive below.”

And UD does, she does dive below – way, way below, as must all writers who follow University of Tennessee basketball.

In finding Bruce Pearl, their latest coach, UD has had to dip substantially below what she thought was the bottom of the barrel, UT-sportswise, but it turns out there is no bottom of the barrel.

Having fired Pearl, UT will now reward him with one million dollars. From a comment thread:

[C]ommit minor violations but lie to investigators and cause them to become major violations; subject the school to be the butt of jokes; lose signees, commit additional violations while under investigation; put UT basketball in a terrible position regarding recruiting, scholarships, attendance, etc., for years to come, and get paid a million dollars.

… emptiness.

Looks like the University of Tennessee may be firing Bruce Pearl. Not because of his (cough) ethics problems, but because he’s not winning games.

Voice of the people:

Perhaps the Administration well knows the college’s reputation cannot have them turning any more blind eyes to the magnitude of corruption in the UT Athletics Department. The national attention on the issue will certainly pull anyone down into the whirlpool to flush the UT Athletics system’s corruption.

NO ONE IS worth a crap is going to take the program over with all the trouble it is facing…

These two local commenters point out that the problem is not confined to games lost. That Pearl plays dirty is of course well-established; but this in itself doesn’t distinguish him from most big time university basketball coaches. As the first commenter notices, there’s a … call it a context problem at Tennessee. If them boys hold onto Pearl, they run the risk of attracting so much attention to the university that folks will start gettin’ a whiff of the whole damn UT athletics septic tank.

The second commenter makes the better the cheats we know point. Eventually a school’s reputation goes so far down the tubes that no even vaguely ethical coach wants to touch it. The commenter cautions that UT might want to hold on to Bruce if it doesn’t want to be forced to hire someone who makes him look like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I know. Duh. But what’s really strange at sports factories like the University of Kentucky is that obfuscation has hardened into cult of personality authoritarianism, complete with pretend oversight committees and pretend boards of trustees. Athletic directors tell the president what to do and the president does it.

UK is one of America’s Potemkin Village universities.

A local paper reviews the accomplishments of the departing president of the University of Kentucky.

UD comments in parenthesis.

Take Todd. Since his hiring, UK has had one of its longest stretches without an NCAA investigation. [What an achievement! What’s it been – more than a year?] But with UK sports, calm is a relative term. In just the past four years, Todd has had to manage uproars over basketball coach Tubby Smith’s departure, the hiring, firing and $3 million settlement for the next basketball coach, Billy Gillispie, and the hiring of John Calipari, which was shortly followed by news that his most recent Final Four appearance had to be vacated. Calipari was not sanctioned in the Memphis matter. [So we’re between NCAA investigations PLUS Calipari wasn’t sanctioned! Was Todd a great president, or what?]

Then there was the controversy over coal magnate Joe Craft’s organized donation of $7 million for the new Wildcat “Coal” Lodge, which led one of Kentucky’s most famous authors, Wendell Berry, to withdraw his papers from UK. [Ah hell who gives a shit about that.]

Most recently, Todd gave [the UK athletics director] a $125,000 raise on his annual base pay and extended his contract until 2019, which put Todd at odds with his own Board of Trustees in the last few months of his tenure.

More legacy at the link.

Dave Zirin, on big time university sports:

[The Education Department shouldn’t penalize] the players for basically doing what they have been told to do from the moment they step on to these factories, and that’s what a lot of them are.

When you talk about basketball and football, it’s not coincidence that those are the two sports that do the worst job in graduating players because those are the two revenue-producing sports. Those are the two sports where as soon as you go on campus, a message is sent to you right away. As one former player said to me, a former all-American said, we are not student athletes, we are athlete students. Because as soon as we walk onto campus, we are told what is our job on this campus.

… [P]eople from other countries look at the way we operate in terms of our football and our basketball minor leagues being our colleges, and they think we’re absolutely insane …

Think about it: Our colleges are the country’s football and basketball minor leagues. Now that these places are in terrible financial trouble, think about it again. Our colleges are our minor leagues.

Don’t focus on Arne Duncan’s bold ideas for turning sports whorehouses like Syracuse and San Diego State into shining universities on a hill. Focus on the responses of the NCAA.

I’m not going to sully my screen with the actual content of the NCAA’s response to this latest idea. I’m not even going to type the name of the head of the NCAA. There are (to paraphrase Martha’s George) limits. A blog can put up with only so much without it descends a rung or two on the old evolutionary ladder…

But I invite you to go here and read this man’s words for yourself.

… runs the Detroit Free Press headline. But as Drew Sharp points out, at Ohio State University the football coach isn’t the only fraud.

When reporters asked university president E. Gordon Gee during that comical news conference Tuesday night whether he contemplated firing the head coach, Gee smirked that he hoped Tressel wouldn’t fire him. It was meant to be a joke, but there was nothing funny about it.

That remark told you all you need to know about the barefaced corruption and misplaced priorities of major college athletics.

With a 3-13 record, the UNM baseball team plays in an “empty” stadium.

Monday the UNM Board of Regents approved the use of a $2 million Severance Tax Bond, which was allocated by the 2010 Legislature for a new baseball complex.

“It’s not money that could be used somewhere else on campus,” Krebs said. “If we didn’t use it specifically for this project it would revert … to the state.”

And while the state is in need of more money, the athletic department says this is money well spent.

An impoverished university, its academics gutted, builds a new baseball stadium for a team without spectators.

A newspaper reader describes the leadership of the University of Alabama:

For the person that called about Jim Tressel running Ohio State: Who do you think runs the University of Alabama? It’s definitely not any of the presidents or trustees or board members or anyone else like that. His name is Nick Saban. He runs everything at the University of Alabama.

So true. And so seldom said. We’re supposed to weep for coaches who recruit upstanding young scholar athletes who turn out to be criminals. How could the coaches have known?

Their rap sheets?

“You can’t win big in college sports unless you’re corrupt and lawless,” Steve Rosenbloom goes on to explain.