… opinion piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader. Tom Eblen writes an advertisement for the next president of the University of Kentucky:

… Many Kentuckians are suspicious of new ideas and averse to change. They avoid risk for fear of failure or criticism. Ignorance and powerful vested interests often combine to keep the status quo.

Your biggest distraction in this job will likely be UK’s basketball and football teams and their boosters. These programs are rich and powerful and prone to trouble. They bring in a lot of money, and some of it goes to academics. But not nearly enough.

… [A]t UK, as at many universities, athletics has become the tail that wags the dog.

… [Y]ou will face a sports scandal or several. You will constantly be at odds with rabid fans who think the university exists to support a sports franchise…

Some students and professors say Mississippi State shouldn’t cancel Thursday classes for a football game.

In the article’s comment thread, a fan complains:

I guess with all the academics on our campus there’s no surprise we’d get a nerd (or professor) or two to complain.

Background on University of Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl, the lyingest good ol’ boy this side of anywhere.

… Not long after Pearl was hired, there came a day in 2008 when his wife reportedly got the day’s mail and there were two property-tax statements, not one. Yes, the coach owned another house in Knoxville where another woman lived. Whoops.

Of course, a divorce suit followed and a 25-year marriage was dashed because Bruce Pearl, aside from being a great motivational speaker and now a crowd favorite, was also a liar…

In Knoxville yesterday [the UT chancellor] said that once again Bruce would buy his way out of his latest lie…

University of Tennessee v. University of Kentucky: A race to below the bottom.

Scum city all around.

… seems to be losing patience with big time university sports.

… Amateur college athletics is now an oxymoron in full bloom… There isn’t a not-for-profit bone left in its body except for the tax-exempt status it somehow continues to maintain with the IRS despite raking in billions of dollars through television contracts, ticket sales and merchandise sales…

Of course the NCAA itself needs to lose its tax exemption. The whole thing’s a laff riot.

I’d argue that university presidents and the people who run the biggest conferences have never been more openly greedy. Since the end of the last college football season, the dominant story in college sports has been to find a better conference deal and get more money. Your school gets $15 million for being on television? Try for $25 million.

Like many other observers, Michael Wilbon notes that though big time university athletes spend “more than 40 hours a week” working on their game, they make virtually no money — while, in some cases, enriching everyone around them.

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.