Aw now Bill don’t put yourself down. (Bill’s executive director of the Bowl Championship Series.) BCS makes all kinds of serious money, and goodness gracious there are entire universities impoverished and prostituted by your organization! You’re worth the attention the federal government’s giving you. You’re totally worth it. Hell, everybody’s reading that letter you got today from the Department of Justice about your anti-trust problem. Everybody’s wondering what the head of the NCAA’s gonna say in response to that letter.

You’re big news! Don’t you worry your pretty little head about the taxpayers’ money!

Dave Cooper, in the Huffington Post, reports on the latest idiocy out of the University of Kentucky:

[A] new proposal by the [University of Kentucky] Athletics Department to spend over $6 million on a new football stadium scoreboard — replacing an existing scoreboard that is only 12 years old — has UK faculty seeing red. … Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart stated the stadium’s current video boards “don’t provide the kind of sophisticated viewing experience that fans have come to expect across the country.”

… [T]he UK Faculty Senate voted unanimously to “strongly oppose” the stadium scoreboard proposal. The UK faculty representative on the Board, finance professor Joe Peek stated “The university’s current classrooms don’t provide the kind of sophisticated educational experience that students have come to expect across the country.”

Mike Bianchi, Orlando Sentinel.

[University of Central Florida] basketball coach Donnie Jones is being accused of using a convicted felon with ties to a sports agent as a conduit to funnel big-name recruits into his program.

Sadly, my first response when I read this story in The New York Times Saturday was this: Doesn’t everybody?

… At this point, it’s impossible to know if Jones is breaking the rules or simply pushing the envelope. And, frankly, when you look at the sad state of the NCAA, does it really matter?

Auburn, the national football champion, had a star player who somehow kept his eligibility and won the Heisman Trophy despite the fact that his father tried to sell his services for $180,000.

UConn, the national basketball champion, has a coach in Jim Calhoun who will be suspended for a grand total of three games next year despite the fact that the NCAA says he runs a cheating program that “fails to promote an atmosphere of compliance.”

John Calipari has been in charge of two different programs that had to vacate their Final Four appearances because of NCAA violations. He now holds the premier job in college basketball at Kentucky…

Background here.

They will lose this round. UK’s destiny is way Adzillatron. But the faculty is fighting. If they’re in it for the long haul, they will eventually win.

You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

Andrew Sharp, at SB Nation, considers the latest Jim Tressel revelations:

… [J]ust what does a coach have to do to get fired? If Tressel’s still at Ohio State next fall, how can anyone associated with Ohio State keep a straight face? The moral high ground doesn’t really exist in college football, but you gotta admit, Jim Tressel sets about as horrible a precedent as anybody in the country.

As with many college football articles, this one is written with what you might call rhetoric-desperation. How much more intensity, the writer seems to ask, can I lend my language? How can my prose ever hope to measure up to the sheer unmitigated shittiness of big time university sports?

A commenter at the Duke University student newspaper calls for beefed up campus security services.

The incident that prompted the comment is recounted here.

Who knew they didn’t already have one? Kentucky is one of our nation’s sleaziest sports factories, and UD‘s been assuming it comes equipped with everything sleazy, including the vast non-stop advertising machine that is the Adzillatron.

But no.

The existing video boards, which were installed in July 1999, use Cathode Ray Tube technology which proves difficult to maintain, according to a project summary on the council’s April 28 agenda. The boards “don’t provide the kind of sophisticated viewing experience that fans have come to expect across the country,” Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart said in a written statement.

The two new boards would use Light-Emitting Diode technology, along with “ribbon boards” — aimed at increasing ad revenue — on the upper deck sidelines and suite corners. Barnhart said that the new boards will offer fans more access to statistics, scoring updates from games, video replays and closed captioning.

“As importantly, the boards will generate increased revenue through the sales and marketing of video advertising,” he said.

The factory will spend millions and millions of dollars on fan ad-bombardment and, you know, the UK faculty is upset. No raises for years, what’s left of the educational side of things looking like a 1999 Cathode Ray Tube… Sad.

Four at once. Attention, Fulmer Cup!

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

The Art of Recruitment

This one’s about Duke:

[Tyree] Glover is the fourth promising player from Duke coach David Cutcliffe’s first full [football] recruiting class that signed letters of intent in February 2009 to find himself in trouble with the law.

The other three — all from Georgia — were booted off the team in January 2010 after being arrested on firearms charges.

… is for sure the empty university stadium. The vast, cost-overrun arena with no one in it is clown school ground zero, the heart and soul of our you’ve-gotta-be-kidding higher ed enterprise.

Study Dada (“Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada.”) and you’ll discover the European roots of this grand gratuitous gesture.

UD covers tons of dada arenas – like the University of New Mexico’s baseball stadium – on this her blog, and there’s always another one waiting to be built.

A professor at Towson University describes the uncomfortable feeling she gets when she looks at her university’s dada arenas.

When watching the sports report on the 11 p.m. TV news, it is embarrassing to see 200-300 people in the stands in the 5,000-seat Towson Center Arena (with the possible exception of a few games with local rivals).

Since the stadium opened, attendance has been negligible, rarely ever coming anywhere near the 5,000 capacity. And, as if that was not enough, it was determined that the stadium size needed to be increased. And so the theory that “BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME!” reared its ugly head once again, and now there are 11,000 seldom used seats at the stadium, another embarrassment on the sports report on the 11 p.m. TV news.

The university’s president has now decided to “build yet another 5,000-seat arena to the tune of $68 million.”

DADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADA

… doing in a bribery scheme like this?

The school, ranked 151 and with a 58% graduation rate, just got a gift of $12 million to build a new football training facility!

Yes, yes, to be sure. Dave Zirin, writing in The Nation, is correct. But he goes on to make a mistake:

We have reached a clear public exhaustion with the injustice of it all and the steady monotony of [big-time university sports] scandals.

Calling athletes modern-day slaves, he insists that they be paid.

But Americans are neither exhausted nor outraged by this injustice. They like big-time university sports just the way they are. So do universities and the NCAA. If the situation were anything near what Zirin thinks it is, Auburn University’s doors would have been forcibly closed years ago.

With a tip of the hat to Mark Emmert.

From the San Jose Mercury News.

UD thanks Norm for the link.

Forbes:

[T]he Sugar Bowl paid its director $645,386 in 2009, a year in which it received a $1.4 million government grant yet still lost money. [The] Orange Bowl [spent] $756,546 on travel that same year, and another $100,000 or so on postage and shipping.

… It’s a shocking tale of greed, excess and entitlement in college sports. Almost enough to give the BCS and big-time college football a bad name.

As if that was possible.