— proudly self-sufficient.

“I don’t think it’s a great idea to be honest with you, because I have the one class tonight. I’m not a big football person. I’m here for the education,” student Jackie Fulco said.

A student at the University of Central Florida fails to get on board for the half-day-because-of-football thing.

… the Sports Sites I Like on Wendy Parker’s sports blog, Wendy’s Parker’s Extracurriculars.

University Diaries! A sports site!!

… for fearless entrepreneurial zeal.

… In IRS documents filed to maintain its tax-exempt status, the KU athletics department reported financial liabilities for 2008-09 of $93.67 million, an increase of about 57 percent from a year earlier. The report also showed long-term debt of about $46.56 million for 2008-09. That figure is more than triple the $15.06 million debt listed the previous year.

… There also are indications that even if the nation’s economy takes a turn for the better, donor dollars [which KU expects to pay the debt] may be harder to come by…

A money strategy as American as apple pie.

The Boston Globe reports on the overwhelmingly positive results of Northeastern, Boston U., and Hofstra having dropped football.

Quite a few other universities continue to “spend between $3 million and $5 million annually on the sport for equipment, scholarships, travel, coaches’ salaries, and facilities, and their teams generate little interest on campus or success on the field.” Some of these universities will certainly drop it…

It won’t happen in the south, of course, where football is a religion.

But imagine… Imagine how strange it would be if significant numbers of schools did can football. You’d have a diminishing group of big boys – Texas, Florida, that lot – begging someone to play with them…

Of course, these schools could just keep playing against each other, but fans would get bored and demand more variety. Hm…

UD predicts that eventually Alabama will pressure Nick Saban to give back 2.5 of his 4.8 million dollar yearly salary so that Alabama can create a football program at another university. Other southern universities with four million dollar coaches will do the same. In order to have someone to play against, these places will begin funding and running football programs at northern universities. Four or so times a year, an organized group of fraternities and alumni from these schools will come up here and deliver PowerPoints on how to do really sloppy drunken tailgates that the whole family can enjoy, etc.

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Update: Details on the Southern Model here.

“I’ve never been to Michigan-Ohio State, but I can’t imagine it being near the experience that the entire weekend is of [University of Oklahoma]-Texas,” OU senior Matt Patten said. “The stuff that goes on down there is just ridiculous. I mean you have an enormous amount of alcohol all over the place down by the hotels where we all stay. Fights are breaking out all around you between OU fans and Texas fans…”

What bothers me more is that a coach who is responsible for a non-academic activity and for a team that is smaller than most classes at IUPUI would earn more money than most faculty members, and that she would have a contract that allows her to earn three years of pay after the university determines that her services are no longer wanted.

A professor at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis notes the strangeness of a fired basketball coach getting $300,000 in severance (the local newspaper has had to file a complaint with the state for release of records, since IUPUI sees no reason to explain to the world why it has done this). The professor wonders why athletics “loom larger than the central mission of the campus.”

The answer to this is clear: Athletics is the central mission of the campus.

Reports on this are ambiguous, as are reports about why the traditional University of South Alabama cheer – SOUTH IN YA MOUTH – has been ruled out of bounds.

The decision was made by South Alabama Director of Athletics Dr. Joel Erdmann, who cited University’s intent to move away from a potentially politically incorrect statement.

Sexually incorrect it may be; but UD doesn’t see any political problem with it.

Students plan to resist. “You can’t truly ban it if it’s something we want to chant,” says one.

Answer: It doesn’t.

Hawaii’s athletics department had been trying to rely on the $23 million a year it generated from ticket sales, donations, television and marketing, plus an additional $10 million in direct and indirect support from the university. But by this summer, the department had accumulated about $10 million in debt and was adding to that at a rate of $1.5 million to $2 million a year. Over the objections of undergraduate and graduate student organizations, the state board of regents voted in July to impose an athletics fee for the first time.

An article in USA Today features Hawaii, and lots of other universities, soaking their students with athletics fees.

Lots of universities don’t disclose the fees. Why disclose them? You know that if you do, students are likely to vote against raising them. Just sneak them into unitemized tuition bills.

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At the rate they’re going, Hawaii will accumulate $20 million in athletic debt in not too long a time. Students will to have to take care of that.

In his five-plus years at [the University of] Florida, [Urban] Meyer has had players tasered while trying to flee police, arrested for being passed out drunk at a traffic light, stolen a laptop and then thrown it out the window when police arrived, fired an AK-47 into the air, stolen the credit card of a teammate’s girlfriend after she died and used it 70 times.

And that’s just a handful of the 30 times his players have been arrested or faced charges.

Look, it’s OK to fork over hundreds, even thousands of dollars for those season tickets and prime tailgate spots; it’s OK to fly the alma mater’s flag from your front porch on game days; it’s OK to wear the colors, to Hail the Victors, to Script Ohio, and to shake down the thunder and cheer, cheer for old leprechauns.

Be proud and hope for the best. But always remember one thing. College athletics are a cesspool.

Dave Hackenberg, Toledo Blade

Without Division I athletics, Northern Iowa’s not on the cover of the Sports Illustrated. Without Division I athletics, the Panthers aren’t whisked to Los Angeles and handed an ESPY award.

This University of North Carolina professor is certainly correct about her school; it cares far more for lower-ranked coaches than it does for philosophy professors… Yet she adds:

“It is what it is. It gives you an idea of where society places its value.”

Both of which are curious things to say. It is what it is — meaning nothing to be done… I wonder if she takes the same approach to her work in economics… unemployment rates, gross wealth disparities… they are what they are…

And then… way to blame it on society! As you may know, UD asks her students to avoid, in their papers, any generalizations about ‘society,’ because they almost always sound dumb…

In this case, for instance, society does not pay assistant university coaches hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill does. Many universities do not pay their coaches in the way UNC pays its coaches. As Balaban points out in her initial comment, UNC could give a shit about the life of the mind. Its resources go to athletics, and, with this latest scandal, to athletics-related public relations and litigation.

… its interest in luxury suites at University of Louisville football and basketball games onaccounta people were really pissed when they realized Dismas is a tax-funded non-profit charity sort of thing.

At first its CEO — who makes a humongous, totally corporate salary, so what’s the big deal with the luxury suites? — refused to give up his babies and said he had nothing to apologize for. Then I don’t know. Something happened. The IRS noticed the news stories about it maybe. I don’t know. Suddenly Dismas is all weepy and apologetic.

The UL athletic director agreed to release Dismas from its luxury suite contracts, but said this is “somewhat of a hardship” for the school.

You said it. They’ve got quite a few unrented luxury suites for both basketball and football and I don’t know how that has happened. Sports is a religion down there, etc., and watching the games from a luxury suite must be like worshipping at St Peter’s Basilica. You’d think they’d be clawing each other for the privilege. Anyway, I’m sure the university is making up the shortfall by destroying educational opportunities for its students.

It’s worth remembering that the University of North Carolina was not founded to field a football team; it was created to educate the sons – and much later the daughters – of the people of North Carolina…