From a comment thread after an article about the latest University of Florida player arrest:
[Commenter #1] Please point out one program that has [like UF] had 28 players arrested in the past five years. Thanks.
[Commenter #2] [D]id you forget the fact that Georgia had 30 arrests over the 4 year period that UF had 24?
Obscene yearly increases in student fees, a stadium whose construction they keep postponing because fund-raising efforts are for shit, a fourth-tier university … Florida Atlantic has it all.
Its athletic director explains:
He said with FAU’s planned stadium, the university is working to create a model where athletics is supported more from outside sources than student fees. But he said the fee increases just help the university maintain the status quo.
“If there needs to be a discussion of whether universities think it is time to devalue or downgrade their athletic programs, that is another story,” he said. “However, with athletics many times being the ‘front porch’ to the university and arguably the most visible, it may be a tricky exercise.”
Working to create… You know, that new stadium (the current, much smaller FAU stadium sits more than half empty at most games) was supposed to have opened years ago; this guy insisted it’d all get done with outside money, only it didn’t, blahblah…
But this front porch thing… The only idea coaches ever learn is this thing about the porch and they’re always sharing it with journalists… And the guy’s right – football and basketball are the most visible…
The most visible what? He doesn’t say. Let’s complete the idea.
For most American universities, and quite notoriously for FAU, big time sports are the most visible manifestation of their moral, intellectual, and financial failure. They are the ‘front debtors’ prison’ to the university.
The IRS is examining the University of Texas at Austin for executive compensation and matters related to taxable income, preliminary offering documents show. Mack Brown, head football coach, the highest-paid state employee at $5.1 million per year, earns almost seven times more than Francisco Cigarroa, who’s paid $750,000 as chancellor of the University of Texas System.
… The IRS mailed questionnaires to 400 nonprofit colleges and universities in October 2008, seeking data on endowments, compensation and income from businesses unrelated to their missions of teaching and research. It picked more than 30 institutions to audit on the basis of answers…
Disgusted with the vileness of Southeastern Conference-type university athletics, and embarrassed for his alma mater, the University of Southern California (current target of one of the NCAA’s random sanctioning fits), a professor proposes a new league:
Stanford and Notre Dame could take the lead in establishing a national conference of first-rate academic institutions that offer athletic scholarships only to true student athletes, as defined, largely, by an iron-clad commitment to graduate with their classmates in four years. An invitation to join this conference could be extended to other private institutions with both high academic standards and proud athletic traditions – such as Northwestern, Duke, Boston College, Pittsburgh and Brigham Young (which could substitute a suitable variation on the four-year graduation policy to accommodate Mormon missions). The three United States service academies might also be asked to join.
The University of Waterloo football team has been suspended for the entire 2010 season following the revelation that nine of the 62 players on the roster have committed doping offences. The coaching staff has been placed on paid administrative leave.
… “We have a total of nine possible anti-doping violations. Two violations have been confirmed to date and the sanctions have been accepted. We are in the results management process as it relates to the other other seven potential violations,” [said one official].
… Waterloo athletic director Bob Copeland decided to test the entire team following the arrest of a member of the team, Nathan Zettler, for possession and trafficking of anabolic steroids.
During the news conference Copeland defended the university’s decision to suspend the entire team…
[The] Big Ten Commissioner [says] that academics are a top priority [in the upcoming expansion of various university athletic leagues].
“Of course they’re going to say that,” Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist said of the Big Ten’s repeated emphasis on academics. “What are they going to say? ‘We’re going to prostitute ourselves?’ ”
If the Big Ten truly valued academics, it would not [add] Nebraska, Zimbalist said. He notes the school’s academics aren’t on par with those of Michigan, Illinois and other Big Ten schools.
“What’s happened over the decades, more so in the last two, commercial value has trumped academic value, and that’s decidedly wrong,” he said.
Yet in a slumping economy, it stands to reason that schools are looking to improve their bottom lines.
“It’s understandable there are certain financial pressures and they’re trying to sustain themselves,” Zimbalist said. “It doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do to subject yourself to the needs of TV and media.”…
Those pesky night games, during which wasted tailgaters turn the campus into a reeking dump, will go on. After all:
Athletics director Damon Evans said Wednesday that he hoped to find a healthy balance between the early kickoffs and the games under the lights …but said television contracts with CBS and ESPN would ultimately outweigh many of the school’s desires.
Background on Bobby Gonzalez here. He’s been fired and is suing.
On admissions standards at Seton Hall:
Every one of those kids that I brought in, I’m not the admissions director. I’m not the administration. They were very well aware of all of their backgrounds. They admitted every one of them. There was a process with every one of those young men, they knew every kid there academically. They knew every player we brought into the program.
On his future:
Star Ledger: Do you feel that, given everything that has happened, you’ll have another shot to coach again?
BG: Absolutely. If you look around the country — and I’m certainly not going to name any names of coaches or schools — but there’s been guys right now currently (coaching) that have had sex scandals. There have been guys that have had DWIs that are coaching. There have been guys that have had major NCAA violations that are coaching.
From the Charleston Daily Mail:
Marshall University students pay about $890 a year, or nearly a fifth of what tuition costs, to support the university’s sports programs.
By contrast, West Virginia University students are required to pay only $157 a year…
Looking at the money Marshall sends from its university side to its athletic department, about 19 percent of its overall tuition revenue goes to fund sports, according to the center’s data.
In other words, if Marshall eliminated its fees for the athletic department, it could cut student tuition by nearly a fifth. But then, its athletic department would lose about half the money it uses to operate each year…
Oregon State Fires Chair-Throwing Coach, runs the headline at USA Today about LaVonda Wagner, the latest coach to cost a university millions of dollars in salary and then millions more in contract buy-out. Among the 129 comments in response to a local Oregon paper describing the scandal, the one that serves as the title for this post seems to me to express the situation best.
The coach’s abusive ways cost the team almost all of its players — they left in disgust — but OSU’s athletic director did nothing. Not even after players’ parents sent angry letters to him and OSU’s president. After all, good coaching sometimes involves roughing people up a bit. Look at Bobby Knight and Mark Mangino. Reasonable people can disagree about what a university is, but I think we can all agree it’s a place where students ought to be traumatized by multimillionaire coaches.
A reporter for the El Paso Times describes the University of Texas at El Paso, a school that’s sort of the moral equivalent of British Petroleum — only it’s trying to make its mess even worse.
… [U]niversities with high numbers of low-income students and unremarkable sports teams take more money from [their] students — in fees and in diverting money away from educational programs — to subsidize athletics programs.
The University of Texas at El Paso falls into the trend.
… UTEP diverted $774 per student into athletics in the year 2008-09 — the third-highest in Conference USA and significantly higher than the national average of $506.
Of 99 schools [recently] studied, UTEP had the highest percentage of low-income student in Division 1, with more than 62 percent of the students receiving financial aid.
… In April, UTEP students rejected the creation of a new athletic fund that would have more than doubled the amount UTEP athletics received from tuition and fees…
Universities sometimes forget, in thinking about the benefits of big time sports, this one: Guaranteed permanent employment of a large, high-profile legal staff.
The bigger your athletic program, the more likely it is that, like Texas Tech, you’re currently being sued for tens of millions of dollars in a case followed by the national press.
It’s all about coaches. Lots of coaches are fine and upstanding. But if you keep hiring new ones long enough, you’re almost certainly going to end up with a drunk, a sadist, a loser, a guy who doesn’t know how to cheat without getting caught, or a quitter.
The quitter’s always leaving for a job that pays more. The sadist wallops his players real bad. The drunk gets caught plastered inside his Porsche. Even though you give the loser most of your endowment, he can’t win a game. And you know you’ve hit the bottom of the coaching barrel when the guy can’t even cheat like all the other coaches without getting caught. Only a death wish can explain that.
So all these guys sue, see. Or you sue them. I mentioned Texas Tech. A judge just ruled that TTU’s latest legal desperation move ain’t gonna work:
A judge says former football coach Mike Leach’s lawsuit over his firing from Texas Tech can move forward.
State District Judge William C. Sowder on Tuesday struck down the university’s claim of sovereign immunity from the lawsuit’s breach of conduct claim.
… The university fired Leach on Dec. 30, two days after it suspended him amid allegations he mistreated a player with a concussion.
… [Adam] James has said his coach twice ordered him to stand for hours while confined in a dark place during practice.
But here’s one other thing to keep in mind about big time university sports and constant expensive high-profile litigation: Fans love it. It’s an expected accompaniment to the story on the field, another game to follow. You gotta pay to play.
… Corruption is the NCAA’s life partner. Passing itself off as an institution promoting the ideas and values of “amateur athletics” is a fraud so bold and laughable that it borders on criminal.
The NCAA’s goal is profit by any means necessary. That’s why TV dictates that college football and basketball are played nearly every night of the week at all different hours. That’s why kids who have no intention of pursuing an education are enthusiastically welcomed on campuses.
It’s greed…
… where the university went. Where the university’s president went. Where everybody went.