The University of North Carolina starts football season with a bang: Two scandals, one involving inappropriate contact with and financial goodies from agents, the other involving an undergraduate woman who seems to have written academic papers for at least nine players. She also works for the head coach’s family as a nanny.

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

I know. Who cares? Question is, are the Tar Heels gonna be able to field a good team if half the guys can’t play???!

Oh, just bleed your students for more money. Big deal.

UD finds moving the efforts of this recent University of Texas graduate to consider some very basic and at the same time complicated truths.

His writing is rather awkward, but UD doesn’t mind, because the awkwardness reflects a deepening understanding of things. You can see the writer grappling, even as he writes, with changes in his way of regarding the world. Bravo.

… Based on its decisions in the Realignment Madness and its recent paranoia related to football practices (even the two “open” practices), UT is starting to feel less like a college team — and more like a pro team — than any other school in the country. In fact, some actions from pro teams could even be viewed as being more accessible and fan-friendly than some of the recent decrees coming from Belmont. As a whole, these decisions are not necessarily a bad thing, but they take away from what has been traditionally identified as the typical relationship between a college program and its most dedicated fans. And it is these type of bonds that are supposed to transcend the experience of fans of a professional franchise.

Going even deeper, I’m still trying to fully understand why athletics even matters. … [I]t’s hard for me to grasp how winning or losing football games really affects the academic stature of the University of Texas, yet those games are something I spend hours upon hours obsessing about…

… [T]he current hyper-monetization and professionalization of college athletics has made rooting for the Texas Longhorns feel more like rooting for a professional franchise than it ever has in the past. And that undercuts the nature of the warm and fuzzy feelings over school and state pride. It’s different (and easier) to root for the University of Texas than to root for Texas, Inc.

The University of Texas represents the dream come true of all big time university sports programs. It’s a staggeringly superior champ, ultra buffed and studly.

This fan registers the irony of his disengagement from the team just at its greatest moment of dominance. He notes that along with annihilating the competition, it has annihilated the university.

… wonders why he was lied to.

When the University was considering adding NCAA football in fall 2007, the administration promised this new program would not take any money from the general University budget. But the administration has brushed this pledge aside.

The original football budget, which was proposed to the Board of Trustees in its December 2007 meeting, required no money from the general budget (though it does use $150 per student per semester of student fees).

Further, USA President Gordon Moulton told the Press-Register that football would “break even” and not use University funds.

But football has taken more than half a million dollars from the general budget since its inception.

In fiscal year 2008 (Oct. 1, 2007 to Sept. 30, 2008), the football team received $215,034 under “direct institutional support” — which means money from the general University budget…

The next year, which ended Sept. 30, 2009, football used $320,959 from the University budget…

The Oregon Lineman.

Glen Campbell sings.

I am a lineman for the Beavers
And I drive the offense
Lookin’ in the bar for another overload

I hear you singing in your office
I hear you singing out to me
And the Oregon Lineman
Must now take a pee

I know you called the p’lice department
I know I should have worn pants
But I want you to watch me
Do my naked three-point stance

And I need you more than want you
And I see you in my dreams
And the Oregon Lineman
Got thrown off the team

Pictures too.

From an opinion piece in the Washington Post. The author, a sports lawyer, calls for the privatization of university football.

… [T]he sole focus for many star college players is getting ready for pro ball … [C]oaches are looking for financial security on the backs of teenagers … There isn’t anything inherently wrong with these goals…

True, true. Mr UD and I have always sought financial security on the back of La Kid. And people with full scholarships to American universities should certainly spend that money getting ready to play pro ball. Yes.

Miami Today:

… When [Florida International University] got into big-time football in 2003 it charged all students $30 a year in athletic fees to help shoulder the load. By this year, an FIU student taking 15 credit hours per semester is paying more than $435 a year in athletic fees.

For all of that sports zeal, FIU’s conference ranks near bottom on sports — and academic — spending. The Sun Belt Conference was spending $41,895 per athlete per year in 2008, but just $9,691 for all students for academics…

And why? Because the idiots at New Mexico State University who insisted on joining the expensive Western Athletic Conference six years ago have put the program into a persistent, almost ten million dollar, debt.

NMSU will deal with this by “shift[ing] about $4.1 million annually from education” to athletics.

The NMSU Faculty Senate in March OK’d a resolution asking for administrators to stop subsidizing the athletics budget with Instruction and Administration funds and to incorporate the program’s budgeting process into that of the rest of the university’s. Plus, it asked that student fees only be used to boost athletics, if it’s approved by the student body.

About $2.9 million in student fees – a different pool from Instruction and Administration – is expected to go to athletics in the current year, up from $1.4 million in 2006-07.

Yeah well dream on. Note the bit about only if it’s approved… You wouldn’t want to ask the students if they’d like you to rip them off for more and more sports money every year ’cause they’re going to say no…

The University of Kansas, one of America’s most notorious sports factories, shows you how it’s done. Pay your athletics director millions and millions and millions of dollars, and on top of that, encourage him to take private planes everywhere at a cost of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It’s not about ego or waste. “That’s just the price of doing business,” explains the AD. True. KU is in the business of delivering quality sports to its campus, and to the nation. Price is no object.

… the University of Florida.

Highlights:

… [Football coach Urban] Meyer is essentially a crook. For a head coach who prides himself on supposed discipline and intensity, it’s a joke that he is the leader of a team that has had over two dozen players arrested in his first four seasons at Florida.

… The NFL loves to sit back and wonder why it has had such a problem over the years with violence off the field. Players like Ray Lewis, Donte Stallworth, Adam “Pacman” Jones, Plaxico Burress and Matt Jones were all stellar college athletes given every chance to succeed.

… The NFL will continue to work hard on its end, but the problem really starts with these powerful college programs. The University of Florida obviously values football victories over morality…

… when funding university sports.

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

Here’s an article along the same lines, about the University of Virginia.

… Bad publicity about the program also hurt, including football player arrests, basketball players leaving school, and the UVA lacrosse murder. [The athletics director] says the department is hoping to teach student athletes leadership skills to help avoid trouble off the field.

… at the University of Oregon, comments on the new, astoundingly expensive student athlete center there:

… The Jaqua Center, dubbed the “jock box” by critics, has spurred controversy because of its opulence and exclusivity. Although it sits at a prominent entrance to campus, most of the building is off limits to non-athletes.

“Forty million dollars buys a lot of new faculty, reduced class sizes, better facilities for the rest of campus,” UO senate president Nathan Tublitz said. “It is a travesty to spend so much money for the benefit of such a small subset of students who already receive enormous perks.”…

The university didn’t spend the money; Phil Knight of Nike did. Implicit in Nathan’s comment, though, is the point that this does not matter. Choices were made about how to spend immense sums of money on an important public university suffering from serious budget cutbacks.

A university spokesman says what they always say under circumstances like these: Universities have no sway over donors. If they want to donate only for athletics, what can we do?

Nonsense. Universities can turn down gifts. They can attempt to alter, expand, and differentiate, gifts… Where, after all, is UO’s president in stories like this? Did he attempt convey to Knight the symbolic significance of a serious university spending this sort of money on athletes, many of whom will not graduate?

… Professor James Gundlach and other university sports whistle blowers, Missouri State’s Reed Olsen, an economics professor, has had the guts to expose financial corruption in that school’s athletics program. Background here.

A state audit of MSU’s budget (its results will be released this fall) will presumably clarify how the school’s leadership dissembled in the matter of the profitability of a big new arena it pushed through over strong faculty objection. But without Olsen’s insistence on the truth (despite the president’s assurance that the arena was profitable, it was, and remains, a big loss), the attention of the MSU community, and the attention of far-flung people like UD, would not have been drawn to this all too typical university scandal.

In his dissenting minority report, presented to the faculty senate at about this time last year, Olsen pointed out that the administration was both inflating the revenue stream and hiding the operating costs of the new arena.

To make matters worse, but again totally predictably, arena ticket sales are down.

Any administrator who tells you that ticket sales will support a sports facility takes you for a fool. Ticket sales are madly volatile almost everywhere. Yet again and again administrators think that if you raise prices when the shit hits the fan, things will be fine.

Actually, when you do that, a lot of people drop the whole thing in disgust and stop going to games. I mean, they don’t do this at truly degenerate schools like Kentucky. You could make season tickets seven million dollars apiece at Kentucky, and there wouldn’t be a peep out of anyone. But at most schools you can expect a bit of a walkout.

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

Bottom line at MSU? Olsen writes (in an email to UD):

… Let’s say that we are looking at a $2M ongoing loss in the arena. This is slightly more than 1% of the operating budget of the university. The university, because of a new state law, cannot raise in-state tuition more than [the] increase in the CPI. And for the last 2 years all universities in the state have agreed to not raise tuition at all in return for mostly stable state funding. So that means that most of this $2M must come out of cuts from other parts of the budget or the small increases in student fees from increased out of state tuition or other types of student fees. Students are assessed a fee for [the arena] which supposedly pays for free student seats at BB games. However, that revenue is included in the accounting, still leaving $2M left to pay. Faculty concern is that it comes out of our pocket …

Indeed Olsen concluded his minority report last year by affirming that the new arena has plenty of “negative impact on the academic mission” of MSU. He reminds the administration that the university’s faculty warned that “the university would [end up paying] for the costs incurred by building a new arena.”

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

Why do I call this a typical athletic scandal?

Because again and again on this blog I watch jocksniffer presidents and mindless boosters lie and bluster their way to what they want and then make students and faculty – and taxpayers – pay when their pathetic fantasies evaporate.

Universities desperately need rational, informed, steadfast, and ethical professors like Olsen to act as a counterweight to the moronic grandiosity of their sports-mad leaders.

… confused. And in the case of Missouri State’s new basketball arena, she just does not get it.

Unfortunately, after studying the numbers with care, Mr UD, a math whiz, doesn’t get it either.

This seems to be a story about a university president who fell somewhat short of the truth when claiming that in its first year the arena was in the black. An economics professor at MSU, Reed Olsen, ran the numbers and came to the conclusion that it was in the red – hundreds of thousands in the red.

Part of what makes this story difficult to understand — beyond the whirling numbers — is the odd way the Springfield News-Leader has chosen to present it.

One half of its page features the news that the university is now reviewing the arena’s finances. Oh, and there’s a new president. The old one suddenly left. Didn’t say why.

Check out the other half of the page for the hard numbers.

You don’t have to read Andrew Zimbalist to know that many university athletic programs … is cook the books too strong? There’s obviously lots of numbers-shifting going on here as the university now seems to acknowledge that it was wrong to claim a profit… But I really don’t know. I’ve emailed Professor Olsen about it.

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

Update: Professor Olsen responds:

After my report to the senate and a subsequent followup with the president, the newspaper dug up more information that showed that the arena was doing even worse than I had originally thought. They were hiding costs by allocating costs to the old arena, whose costs more [than] doubled when it quit being used. So on net it seems that the arena was losing about 2 M.

I’ve gone on to ask him several more questions. I’ll report some of his answers when I hear back from him.

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

From the News-Leader’s comment thread:

I and many others told you so. Now, the admission – this thing ain’t paid for.

And, the News Leader buries the story as a sideline.

What many of us said when this boondoggle was announced, what the students reported in their paper when it was learned their academic fees were being stolen, and what the faculty found by analyzing the accounting is all true – this ego pacifier for boosters who want to be like Mizzou is a financial lie.

This is not the end of the scandal. This “2 million” from athletics is a shell game. Athletics already operates with about $5-7 million (admitted) in state funds to make up the yearly deficit, so this is STATE MONEY. Once again the state and students are made to pay for the sports fantasies of wannabe boosters.

I’m pressing this story on University Diaries because, like the scandal at Western Kentucky, it’s shaping up to be the paradigmatic corrupt university sports story — it’s turning into a classic case of the destruction of a university via its sports program. Its apparent elements, shared with virtually all other death-by-sports university stories:

1. Corrupt, sports-mad leaders who cannot think about the improvement of their university in terms other than athletic. (Jealousy of a higher-profile neighboring university also seems at work in these stories.)

2. Toadying faculty willing to lie along with the president and the athletic director about the sports budget.

3. Students who sense what’s happening but don’t have sufficient power and knowledge to fight it.

4. One or two brave faculty members willing to fight against the lies.

5. An inept local press whose boosterism allows it to be manipulated by the leadership of the university.