… about the syndicates that run football and basketball at American universities, defenders of the racket have been fighting back.

In this opinion piece, the writer argues that university football should break free of the NCAA altogether:

… Now before you think they will set up a wild, wild west operation, remember that university presidents will be figuring this out. They lose their jobs when the football program is out of control and brings harm to the school’s reputation.

Presidents lose their jobs (for which they are paid, say, $600,000, while the football coach is paid four million) when their team loses games because the president puts the school at a competitive disadvantage by trying to introduce financial and academic reforms. (“All this ugliness is allowed to happen, in part, because university presidents, so-called educators, have ceded control to coaches who are treated as deities and are accountable to no one.”)

Without the NCAA, this writer argues, each school will handle rule-breaking its own way. For instance:

[W]hen a backup offensive lineman on a championship team cheats on an online course, gets caught and is declared ineligible after the fact, that single player [won’t] cost his school numerous scholarships, years of rebuilding and possibly a national title… [It’s all just a] a few wayward teens and a couple unscrupulous agents…

Have to take issue with one, too.

Cheating, bar fights, football titles – it’s about teamwork. It’s not going to be just one guy. A university football player doesn’t walk into a bar by himself and beat the shit out of someone. His teammates are there to kick in the guy’s balls once he’s down.

The same principle applies to cheating, a group effort involving academic tutors distributing tests in advance or calling out answers to the players while they’re in the exam room together. Often the faculty is in on it. It takes a village.

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

Despite our differences, I share the opinion writer’s contempt for the NCAA.

I just think the writer needs to give more thought to the perennial question of order vs anarchy.

Right now you’ve essentially got the Myanmar junta reining in the syndicates. State-sponsored violence, as well as corruption and repression are rampant, to be sure, but blood isn’t absolutely flowing in the streets.

Once you lose central control, rival gangs will go at it very hard for dominance, and UD fears that the university’s ethos of quiet deliberative thought may be imperilled.

UD wonders – if your whole career is the college sports beat, do you ever get to write anything that’s not sarcastic?

… It was a bit priceless — pun intended — that Alabama Coach Nick Saban (annual salary: $4 million) went on the offensive Wednesday, bemoaning how money is ruining this quaint little sport.

Saban was joined in this particular rant by Florida Coach Urban Meyer (annual salary: $4 million).

… [I]t’s almost professional college football season…

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

Update: More sarcasm.

The professionalization of university sports proceeds (here’s a recent defense of agents on campus, for instance) as quickly as the onlining of higher education.

It’s now possible to see a future in which the only actual human activity on university campuses will be the buzz of sports: agents in negotiation with about-to-be-drop-outs; training sessions; games. Classrooms will be used for press interviews and police investigations.

“College football is my favorite sport, and I’d rather not be ashamed of that fact.”

That’s because there aren’t any. Especially not at the University of Florida.

… At a time when LSU’s academic budget is being slashed, the fortunate athletic administrators received pay raises of better than 15 percent.

… [T]he scenario is nothing new in Louisiana. Sports and politics rule…

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.

Wall Street Journal.

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…”