… [T]he last few years have [been] so deplorable that [the University of Tennessee] is laughingly called “The University of Thugs” on call-in radio shows across the country.

A local columnist calls for the firing of UT basketball coach Bruce Pearl and his staff.

Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Imagine vomiting forever.

… Someone, whether it’s George Blaney, Tim Tolokan, his family, somebody who loves and cares about [University of Connecticut basketball coach Jim Calhoun] has got to tell him to extend this any longer will do the state’s flagship university no good. This no longer can be a case where the coach lifts his leg, squirts on the NCAA like it is a fire hydrant and shrugs at a complicated rulebook.

… Kelvin Sampson at Indiana, Bruce Pearl at Tennessee, Butch Davis at North Carolina, schools will go to great lengths to protect valuable investments. So what UConn did in backing Calhoun isn’t shocking, although the hundreds of thousands in legal costs are.

… [The illegally recruited student] was expelled from the school — over the coach’s strenuous objections — after allegations [he] had abused a female student and violated a restraining order 16 minutes after receiving it. [The student] played no games…

… Texas Tech, our nation’s raunchiest, most good old boy-ridden, sports factory. If you’ve got the stomach, type texas tech into my search engine and read all about it.

Or just consider the latest raunch: Upping the football coach’s salary “by $500,000 through 2015.”

The impoverished, salary-frozen faculty is upset – or at least some professors are upset…. I don’t think you get to be the national disgrace Texas Tech is without a lot of professors excited at the thought of debasing themselves for football.

You’ve got your coach – highest paid employee in the state – overseeing a football program which puts thirteen students in the hospital for days, being treated for “rhabdomyolysis, which forces muscle fibers to release into the blood stream and can cause kidney damage.” The condition was apparently brought on by punishing practice sessions. The coach didn’t come back to check on the students when the news broke — too busy recruiting.

You’ve got your athletics director playing golf with alumni in Florida. He didn’t come back either.

And you’ve got your team physician, paid $385,000 a year to take care of the students, enjoying a medical junket at a beach resort:

The meeting’s itinerary, released to the AP under the state public records law, shows participants adjourned by noon most days and didn’t have any business Jan. 26, the day the university confirmed the players were hospitalized with rhabdomyolysis.

… sinks yet lower.

ESPN’s number one concern, it would seem, is to not make the channel look like one big UT infomercial.

… Holy Family.

[S]ophomore Matt Kravchuk can be seen in the video getting knocked down by coach John O’Connor during a January practice and then [being kicked by] him while he was down. Kravchuk filed a police report following the alleged incident.

…”Got a little (bleep) blood on you. Good,” the coach says in the video obtained by the TV station.

Amen.

… cutting tree limbs overhead, trying to take down dead branches from the big snow storm.**

But that’s not important. Forget that. Forget that, in Stage One of its extensive lumber-liquidation chez UD, David Gregg’s Tree Removal Service is out there stripping our front oak. A grizzled man in a green tee sits in an open cab at the end of an Altec truck-mounted crane shaving and shaving…

But listen up. James saw this and sent it to UD. It’s written by a colleague of Mr UD’s at the University of Maryland. Read it all. Excerpts:

The culture of football worship [at universities] has gotten so out of control that I think the only solution is to get rid of it entirely…. [W]e need to eliminate football entirely from our universities if we want to maintain our pre-eminent position as the world’s scientific and technological leader.

He says everything UD‘s been saying ever since she opened shop. He gives a local example.

At the University of Maryland last year, the football coach fell out of favor with the athletic director, who wanted to replace him. (This despite the fact that the coach was very successful, with an overall winning record.) The problem was, he had one more year to go in his contract, and the university would have to pay him a cool $2 million if they fired him. U. Maryland doesn’t exactly have money to burn: for three years running, it has imposed furloughs on all employees and prohibited all raises, including cost-of-living increases. So you’d think that blowing $2 million to pay a coach to sit on the sidelines, and paying who-knows-how-much to hire a new coach, would be out of the question.

Nope. The brand-new President of the university, in office just one month, announced the hiring of a new coach, along with a $2 million payout to the old coach.

The author is afraid to write the thing. He’s scared. He says twice that he knows he’s going to get himself into trouble, attacking fabulous, fabulous football. Already he’s got commenters up the wazoo telling him he’s the Antichrist.

———————————-

** Inspiration for this post’s title here.

… just got even sicker.

I can’t tell you how much UD laughed when she realized that the going cliché among pushers of big time university sports is sports are the front porch of the American university. You want to see a big sports university’s front porch? Check out the piss-filled entryways of all the University of Georgia buildings after any tailgate.

This guy says the tree poisoning is symbolic of professional as well as university sports. True. But check it out: University sports get amazing tax subsidies. They take huge amounts of money away from academics and impoverish undergraduates through high athletic fees. They make the admissions and retention process a sick joke.

They play to ugly, invidious emotions, and generate endless sick behaviors.

You don’t think so? You think I’m overstating? Right, because no one says what I’m saying until the next, sicker thing happens. When the next, sicker thing happens, everybody says what I’m saying.

The about-to-retire president of the University of Kentucky done gone and increased the athletic director’s “base salary … from $475,000 to $600,000 annually and he is now under contract until 2019… Should the new president want to bring in his or her own athletics director, [the current AD’s] contract specifies that he would be paid $475,000 a year for up to five years, or up to $2.4 million.”

Hyuk! And he dint tell the trustees! Not a one of ’em. Har!

The University of Oregon alumni give virtually all their money to athletics.

“It’s called a donation or a contribution … when, in fact, as we have discovered in our research … it’s a transaction,” [Dennis] Howard said. “It has nothing to do with giving back to the University or a philanthropic motive. It is purely and simply a commercial transaction in which the individual is paying for tangible benefits: better seat location, access to the Autzen Club amenities. All of those things are driving those transactions.”

A UO student who has worked in the alumni office comments: “Supporting academics means supporting an idea, whereas an athletic donation is something a donor can see and enjoy.”

Me no like idea! BOO.

… values.

Them good ol’ boys at UK keep the good times rolling.

It’s certainly not being done out of respect for the sensitivities of faculty and staff, who have undergone years of low or no pay increases. Nor for the students who have seen hefty tuition increases during his tenure.

… 43%.

But WSU knows where to invest its resources: A stupendous salary for the basketball coach.

A letter writer to the Dayton Daily News ridicules the gotta pay market prices explanation coming from Wright State:

[C]ollege sport is not a market… If it were truly a market endeavor, there would have been no, or very limited, public monies or tax exemptions involved to set up and support the enterprise…

With college sports, there is a captive audience, subsidies through student fees and university overhead and questionable tax deductions and tax advantages through their association with a nonprofit education institution.

There is also the general issue the IRS is apparently addressing in an ongoing audit of college and universities for reporting (or not) related business income, including stadium advertising income for sports and athletics, and the tax deductions received by donors to college athletics.

She concludes by calling sports at universities like Wright State an “ongoing corruption of the college mission by incompetent administrators and compliant businesses and politicians.”

… and nobody came?

Almost nobody?

Southern Illinois University’s massive Saluki Way project has mainly involved building or upgrading sports facilities, at a huge cost to students through increased fees. But the basketball team sucks, and no one goes to the shiny new stadium; the buy-out of the bad coach will cost the students even more; three of the players beat some guy up and are suspended; and, oh yeah, no one wants to go to school there.

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

In a 2006 article in the campus newspaper about the Saluki Way, the reporter makes a prescient spelling error:

[SIU’s president] said he hopes current students will understand why they must pay for facilities they will not use.

“We all have a responsibility to each seceding generation,” he said.