He’s a University of Florida dropout.
He may have done something so unethical when he was a student there that the school will have to forfeit its recent Sugar Bowl win.
UD sometimes wonders…
What’s the psychology of the reverse refudiated game? All that kee-razy school pride! That excitement! We’re Number One! … Does that vanish as if it never happened when the NCAA announces that you didn’t win after all? Do students at places like UF even give a shit about ex bribe facto dicta from distant organizations…?
… From fiscal year 2003 to 2009, the [athletic] department expenses have increased 61 percent, to $73 million.
That includes compensation for the coaches of the school’s 29 teams, which increased 70 percent, to $14.7 million, and for the department’s administration, which increased 55 percent, to $13.8 million.
… The university has been subsidizing the athletic program to the tune of $7 million to $14 million a year…
[F]ootball Coach Jeff Tedford and basketball Coach Michael Montgomery have lucrative contracts with a combined cost of roughly $5 million each year…
Nah. Not Auburn. Your one-stop on-line education spot: The University of California at Berkeley.
UConn lost roughly $280,000 in football, according to the numbers. Only three BCS programs lost more…
How can UConn football lose money with an advertising deal with IMG that pays the school $7 million annually? And UConn, through apparel and merchandise sales, can almost count on another $2 million every year.
[The U Conn athletics director comments that] “[F]ootball, men’s basketball, women’s basketball is a tremendous source of pride for our university and the state of Connecticut and for 200,000 alumni….”
Plus it comes from the student newspaper. Multimillion-dollar enterprises don’t care about student newspapers.
Still. It’s worth noting the intensity of disgust on the part of a sports writer for the University of Georgia paper.
Thus far, seven football players and the highest-ranking athletic department executive have been arrested this off-season. In 2008, eight players were arrested.
Thus far. We’re only talking off-season. These guys haven’t even put their cleats on yet.
These scholarship athletes pay nothing to attend classes here. They merely ride the coattails of being able to play a game and milk it for all its worth.
Lose the mixed metaphor. Otherwise, you’re on a roll.
As a fourth-generation Georgia student and an ardent supporter of the Bulldogs, it pains me to see shame brought to this university.
But I would rather see the team miss a bowl game than this disgraceful parade in handcuffs.
Because at least then something would have been changed for the better.
Here’s your problem. Michael Adams. Your president is deacon of the First Church of Jocksniffers. Your president was first runner-up in the Miss Head of the NCAA pageant. You are screwed.
Since virtually “all of our sports figures eventually get arrested,” Clay Travis offers “a summer course in the etiquette of arrest.” His negative example throughout is Damon Evans, the University of Georgia athletics director who did everything wrong. An excerpt:
… Since SEC athletes are always being arrested for a variety of reasons, I thought we should use Evans’ arrest as a teachable moment.
… [D]on’t keep a woman’s panties in your possession for any longer than it takes to remove them. This is really hard to explain otherwise. Who are these men who keep the panties? It’s not like the panties are some great jewel. They cost $12 at Victoria’s Secret.
Don’t hold on to them or you’ll end up sounding like an idiot explaining why you have them.
Witness, Evans’s explanation of the panties: “She took them off and I held them because I was just trying to get her home.”
This explanation alone proves Evans was drunk. That actually sounded good to him...
The big news out of Texas is that Southern Methodist University’s admissions committee has apparently begun reviewing the applications of football players. Two recruits have been turned down.
[Jeremy] Hall, who signed a football scholarship with the Mustangs in February, was informed by SMU Thursday that he would not be admitted to the university despite being an NCAA qualifier.
The Dallas Morning News reported online Tuesday that another SMU commit, offensive lineman Darryl Jackson from Long Beach, Calif., had also been denied admission despite being an NCAA qualifier.
See, they’re recruited and they sign and they show up and all, and then whammo. Turns out you’ve actually got to be admitted to the university.
The coach at Hall’s high school is appalled.
“At the very least, I can say this is an injustice to Jeremy Hall. He did not do one thing wrong. He did everything he was asked to do and to his knowledge, he was packed and moving up there. To his knowledge, it was done.”
… Is [UK basketball coach John] Calipari shady? No question. Everybody knows that the two college programs he coached prior to Kentucky — Massachusetts (1996) and Memphis (2008) — both had their Final Four appearances vacated by the NCAA. And, yes, there are already TMZ reports that NCAA investigators are snooping around Kentucky.
Who knows what the NCAA might find.
Agents paying players?
Players with bogus SAT scores?
A university administration that admits athletes who don’t have the academic credentials or desire to be in college?
Sounds about like every other big-time program to me.
The only difference is John Calipari understands that his program is nothing more than an NBA developmental league.
He is at least honest about the dishonesty that contaminates college athletics.
Fine, you’ve got to name the place your university’s teams play after the bank or the pizza parlor that paid for it. That’s tacky enough.
But the University of Louisville has taken corporate affiliation to a new level.
Before University of Louisville men’s basketball season-ticket holders started to choose their seats at the new KFC Yum! Center, the university set aside more than 6,000 for corporate sponsors and its own employees, students and friends of the school…
But let’s look closer at the article.
In interviews with more than two dozen [season ticket holders], many complained that they had to pay more to get less — seats higher and further away from mid-court than those they enjoyed at Freedom Hall.
Dr. George Nichols, Kentucky’s former chief medical examiner, said he was so mad at U of L for failing to honor his loyalty to Cardinal basketball that he told his alma mater he would never give it another dime.
Actuary Kenneth Hohman said he was so appalled with the seats available on the day he was to make his pick that he walked out and abandoned the season tickets he had had for 25 years.
“I always thought U of L valued loyalty,” said Hohman, who had asked to buy two seats in the first row of the second tier, “but I guess it’s a one-way street.”
… [A spokesperson] acknowledged that instead of assigning patrons seats that approximated where they sat at Freedom Hall, the school opted to allow people to buy their way into better real estate with additional contributions to the Cardinal Athletic Fund.
As a result, some fans who had supported the basketball program for decades found themselves displaced by Johnnies-come-lately with bigger wallets. University officials said they didn’t know how much fans had donated to procure better seats.
“It is our job to raise money,” [a spokesperson] said, defending the decision. “Certainly people had an opportunity to make additional gifts to improve their position.”…
Nice seat you’ve got there. Pity if anything were to happen to it.
The newspaper finds a sociology professor:
Why is seat selection such a big deal? Jonetta Weber, who teaches a class on the sociology of sport at U of L, where she is also the director of academic services, said that for some, it’s a status symbol.
“We are a society which values economic success, competition and materialism,” said Weber, who hopes to go to a few games with her boyfriend, also a faculty member. “Sitting courtside — or as close to the court as you can get — feeds into those values. We see celebrities courtside at NBA games, and we associate the proximity of their seats to the court with prestige, power and money.”
In fact, “Trial lawyer Gary Weiss … was so angry in May that he threatened to file a class-action suit against the university…”
… to be sure, but the University of Michigan — which pays millions to a negligent president and many more millions to Rich Rodriguez, an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, crooked football coach — seems to be on an even faster schedule than that. Every moment it spins out some new way to get taken.
The latest involves $350 an hour legal fees:
The NCAA investigation into Michigan’s football program has cost the university nearly half million dollars so far, and expenses continue to mount.
According to invoices from the law firm Lightfoot, Franklin and White released this week as part of an open-records request, Michigan has paid $446,951 in legal fees and other expenses since contracting attorney Gene Marsh and others to handle its internal investigation last September.
The payments are for services rendered through April, and do not include a busy May, when the university released its findings and self-imposed penalties in response to the NCAA’s Notice of Allegations.
… Michigan, in a letter dated Sept. 15, 2009, agreed to pay … the former head of the NCAA Committee on Infractions, $350 an hour to lead its investigation. Other attorneys were billed at $300, and paralegals $130 an hour…
Check out the article’s comment thread if you want a sense of the reality on the ground. If UM were a public university in a financially distressed state, this would be a real scandal.
… seems to have been fired. Sometimes a person behaves too repellently even for the University of Georgia.
“The Bulldogs [teams] are a brand, and [Athletics Director Damon Evans is] in charge of controlling that, definitely, from the business side. If it was one of the top three or four folks at Delta [Airlines] who did this, you wonder what would happen to them,” [a University of Georgia booster] said.
It’s a distinction UGA works to maintain.
Apparently, head coaches need to worry about their bosses dipping their toes into legal hot water this time of year as well as their players.
According to the FOX affiliate in Atlanta, Georgia athletic director Damon Evans was arrested Wednesday night following a traffic stop and charged with DUI.
The station reports that Evans’ 2009 BMW was pulled over at 11:55 p.m. Wednesday. Evans was given a field sobriety test, and then later refused to take a breathalyzer test.
(It also apparently took police officers quite some time to set the camera up for Evans’ mug shot as the athletic director appears to have nodded off at some point during the process.)
… [One dealer] said that the Kansas incident shouldn’t tarnish the reputation of ticket brokers, just as the misdeeds of crooked car dealer or a rogue government official wouldn’t mean their entire professions were tainted.
Las Vegas ticket broker Ken Solky agrees. Yet he said the pressures on campus ticket managers to generate revenue for their schools could lead some to cut corners.
“You’re in a position to (ensure) that there are butts in a seat,” said Solky, president of his industry’s national association. “If I’m doing my job right, and I’m in the athletics department, I’m going to do whatever I can to get fans into the arena.”
The Kansas incident. A tiny drop in the big university sports slop bucket.
University police say three incoming UCLA football players arrested last week face felony theft charges for allegedly stealing a student’s purse.