… 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.

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…