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.

Four out of five Tamarac [Florida] commissioners from the class of 2006 have been arrested. I haven’t seen an arrest rate that high since the University of Miami football team was winning national championships.

Michael Mayo, Sun Sentinel

Auburn University: The scummiest sports factory in the nation.

And that is saying one hell of a lot.

… it must be college football.

[The Ohio State University scandal: the] latest offering from a septic tank of a system that’s unlikely to be flushed out in our lifetime.

Sports Illustrated

One thing you gotta say for holy roller hypocrites like Gordon Gee and Jim Tressel: They inspire really good sports writing.

… on a single football game?”

At least they’ve got a sweetie of a basketball coach.

… is featured in this PBS report about big-time university sports. (Click on the video.)

Thanks, Dirk, for the link.

Sports Illustrated:

… Before this rash of arrests, Pitt had no procedure for screening football recruits for past trouble with the law. But after Knox’s arrest Pitt’s athletic department implemented a new policy requiring coaches to seek more detailed background information on potential recruits.

… Pittsburgh had more players in trouble with the law (22) than any other school among SI’s 2010 preseason Top 25.

… Pitt chancellor Mark Nordenberg and athletic director Steve Pederson declined requests for comment…

… [C]ollege coaches are willing to recruit players with questionable pasts to win. More surprising, however, is just how little digging college coaches do into players’ backgrounds before offering them a scholarship…

We’ll see more and more of these professor-confessionals.

For 33 years, I taught classes at the University of Missouri’s main campus in Columbia. Every year, I felt my indignation kick in as students, fellow faculty, administrators, staff, alumni and townspeople with no direct connection to MU seemed to show more concern about the football and basketball teams than about teaching and research.

Tell it!

[B]ig-time athletics damage morale of faculty and staff, who see stratospheric football and basketball coaches’ salaries as everybody else swallows reductions. Athletic programs sometimes increase budget deficits rather than earn money for the campuses.

Yes!

So, I will continue my tiny protest by boycotting MU football and basketball games and occasionally speaking out. Many of my colleagues and friends will make fun of me, as they always have, and I will probably die without seeing even a bit of meaningful reform.

… talks about the athletic fee.

…Non-negotiable student fees subsidize over 23 percent of the athletic department’s budget.

Each semester, all U of M students registered for six or more hours must pay $225, the full-time cost of the Student Athletic Fee, on top of sundry general access fees, the student activity fee, the debt service fee and the facility fee.

Combined, these program service fees total $606 per semester, so the athletic fee comprises more than 37 percent of the sum.

I can think of hundreds of better ways I could spend the athletic fees I’ve paid over the years, not to mention what some of The University’s other departments could do with the $7.4 million students contribute to the athletics budget…