One of us does the numbers.

… to the departing athletics director at the University of Kansas.

… [T]he university … has been disgraced by the recent ticket scandal and the ongoing investigations by the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

… [Lew Perkins’] personal manner was arrogant with little concern, interest or appreciation for the long and generous support and help given [by alumni] on behalf of the university.

… [F]aculty members and alumni became upset at the millions upon millions spent on athletics facilities when university officials were being asked to trim expenditures for academic purposes and cutbacks in faculty and support staff. Consider the huge debt Perkins is leaving for someone else to pay.

… Perkins’ receiv[ed] more than $4 million for one-year’s service, clearly the highest salary paid to any athletic director at any U.S. university…

There’s more. Read the editorial. And then ponder the fact that Lew Perkins is the very model of a modern major athletics director.

Another year with Mike for the University of New Mexico.

Background on Mike Locksley, $750,000 a year UNM football coach, here.

Can’t win a game, but sure as hell can throw a punch.

And, you know, there’s losing and there’s losing. Mike does it with panache. First game of the season, Oregon 72, Lobos nada.

Dave Schmidly’s still president too!

From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

[A] nonprofit that manages halfway houses for former prison inmates [spends] nearly $200,000 a year for luxury suites at the University of Louisville’s football and basketball arenas…

Almost all of the tax-exempt, non-profit’s money is federal and state government funds.

It infuriates me to read of ballooning spending on university athletics programs (and especially exorbitant coaches’ salaries) when academic departments are being cut… [T]he culture of athletics promotes anti-intellectualism, alcohol and drug abuse, violence and bullying…

That’s not the full list. Check out the way university campuses look after tailgaters are through with them. The bigger sports are on your campus, the more money your university spends on attorneys’ fees. Plus… ah, fuggedaboutit.

… UD sees nothing on the University of Missouri Saint Louis news page about the NCAA having put the school on two-year probation because of sports betting and unethical behavior.

In one of those typical little scummy university sports stories, UMSL’s golf coach had a fantasy golf business on the side which employed various players and administrators at the university. No doubt the university knew, but gaveth not a shit. Football, okay, you worry about football… But who’s gonna notice golf? Really, let the boys have their fun…

… without a stop at Communications.

Lucas Hanft, a Yale Daily News writer, complained as far back as 2003 that Yale had no Communications major:

We were watching the NCAA tournament when we happened to notice that (surprisingly) the majors of most of the players were stuff like communications, marketing schemes, or hotel management.

These are not majors offered by Yale College. Could Yale’s inability to recruit big-time athletes be the result of their now-seemingly narrow curriculum? Could this bastion of educational superiority be behind the times? Cornell has a school of hotel management, human ecology, and according to some, pharmacology. We can’t be left behind, sucking at the winds of change…

Yet nothing’s happened in all that time to change the majors at Yale. You still can’t major in communications.

Hanft is right to notice its popularity among big time college athletes. In an opinion piece about the big academic scandal going on at UNC Chapel Hill, Bomani Jones counts “seven communications majors” among the athletes being investigated:

When will more athletic departments uphold their end of the bargain and stop shielding athletes behind easy majors and preferred professors? When will they challenge their players to do things they never thought they were capable of scholastically, the way they do athletically?

… As long as education is treated as something to fit in around football, those people use the kids just as the agents Nick Saban so famously referred to as “pimps” do.

… Two and a half years ago, the Ann Arbor News published a damning series about the University of Michigan that detailed a patronizing system in which athletes were encouraged to take “easy” majors and shuffled into independent-study courses that sometimes involved as little as using a day planner. (And this was before Rich “‘Round the Clock” Rodriguez showed up.)

If the series made a ripple, the waters have long since stilled.

Majoring: It’s all about teamwork.

“Georgia football still leads all collegiate programs in offseason arrests,” continues an opinion writer in the University of Georgia newspaper. He’s unhappy about it.

Correction, from the Associated Press:

In a story Aug. 23 about spending in college athletics, The Associated Press, relying on a researcher working for the NCAA, reported erroneously that Florida, Ohio State and Tennessee were among the 14 Football Bowl Subdivision schools that made money from campus athletics in the 2009 fiscal year. The researcher now says athletic expenses exceeded revenue at those three universities, and federal records confirmed it.

… IMG, the world’s largest sports marketing company, has recently acquired Host Communications, International Sports Properties and The Collegiate Licensing Corporation in order the create the most powerful and integrated collegiate sports marketing company in the industry. Colleges can’t generate this revenue from within. They need to partner with, outsource to or accept guarantees from entities like IMG and ESPN in order to maximize revenues. What determines the value of these deals? The answer, plain and simple, is winning. Thus, the immense pressure on athletic directors and head coaches to win conference championships and get to bowl games. When the pressure is this intense, the money this great and the scrutiny this acute, we should expect to see the best and the worst in people …

This is from a rather strange piece in Forbes about the commercialization of university football, and the shocking (to the writer, at least) academic and financial scandal now raging in the North Carolina Chapel Hill sports program. The writer correctly describes, here, the incredible distortions and corruptions attendant on having to win big if you’re going to justify the expense of your program, and maybe even make a profit (almost no universities do). But he describes the functioning of big time athletics programs incorrectly throughout the piece.

He argues, for instance, that all programs go to great lengths to hold down costs.

You need only revisit the recent private plane scandal at the University of Kansas, or consider how universities compensate coaches these days, to shoot that one down. How many schools have bought totally unnecessary, insanely expensive Adzillatrons for their stadiums? How many schools spend millions and millions of dollars every year in litigation with coaches and players any idiot could have seen were going to be trouble?

No – see – it’s like this. Bunch of cowboys ridin’ the bomb.

Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post:

The salaries paid to professional athletes became so inflated [starting in the ‘eighties] that it’s difficult to see how ordinary fans managed to identify with them, but somehow they did. Far worse was the descent of big-time college athletics into a cesspool of greed and exploitation.

… “Is this a misprint or what?” [Former University of Kentucky All-American Frank Ramsey] said when he saw that the K Fund donation required to reserve his second-row [Kentucky basketball] seats would leap from $1,350 to $5,000 per ticket.

… [He] decided not to renew his tickets near the floor.

… “I agree the university has the right to price their tickets,” he said. “I’m sure they’ve done a lot of research on it before raising the prices 300 percent.”

Actually, the increase in required K Fund donation for the first four rows represents a 370 percent markup.

… “(Paying) $10,000 just for the right to buy two tickets in Lexington, Ky., with this economy the way it is statewide — just seems they would have to have something to back it up…”

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

Lexington Herald-Leader

… and asks Tom Wolfe to step in.

It seems to her that only the author of Bonfire of the Vanities can capture the current reality of America’s most hilariously crime-beshat campus, the University of Miami.

Things at UM have gotten Rabelaisian. Dickensian. But both of those writers are dead. Only Wolfe, among the living, can convey everything UM, from the mercenary madness of its science labs to the bitter jihads of its jailed boosters…

Yes, Nevin Shapiro, who, until his Ponzi scheme collapsed, hung out with the team and endowed athletic buildings, has announced from his cell that he’s written a draft of a shocking exposé unmasking fifteen billion NCAA violations.

And just when the football team was beginning to recover from bad publicity over its onfield riots!

Here’s how you get there.

Editorials in the academic year’s first edition of the University of Kansas student newspaper suggest that students there are beginning to discern the connection between scandal-ridden sports dominance and institutional reputation.