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.

… describes the NCAA.

… 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.

Inside Higher Education provides a plot summary of the time-honored tale of a giant sports program swaggering a campus and sucking all the money out of it.

“O giant,” say the professors. “Don’t kill us.”

“Ho, ho,” says the giant. “I won’t. By the hair on my chinny chin chin I’ll balance my budget. Sit down in my chair and watch my self-sustainability increase.”

The professors don’t want to sit in the giant’ s chair, but they do not want to make him angry.

Ten years pass.

“O giant,” say the professors. “Your subsidy has increased to 35 million dollars.”

“ROAR,” says the giant, showing his teeth.  “The coach was getting picked off by SMU.  We had to increase his salary to ten million dollars a year.   We haven’t resolved the lawsuit the last coach brought against us, and that costs five million dollars a year.  The teams aren’t doing well this year and no one’s buying tickets …  You do the math.”

Four ex-Texas Lutheran University football players have been indicted over the alleged beating of a rival two weeks after a game.

The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise reports arraignment is pending for the men charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon resulting in bodily injury.

University of Incarnate Word on Oct. 17 defeated TLU 53-18.

[C]ongratulations on the new contract extension — it’s quite the accomplishment.

Not many Connecticut residents can boast about getting a 25 percent increase in salary as a reward for a less-than-stellar year — especially your fellow state employees, many of whom are taking furlough days and foregoing pay increases because of the state’s fiscal crisis.

[M]issing seven games over a 23-day period, finishing the season with an 18-16 mark and a second-round NIT loss, and an NCAA investigation into alleged recruiting violations, and yet still pocketing a $400,000 pay increase, is something. That is, at least, how we understand the new five-year, $13 million extension is defined — retroactive to this past season with a salary increase from $1.6 million to $2 million.

And then another raise, $2.3 million, for the coming year…

A commenter on this article about Oregon State’s criminal football team reckons up the wages of cynical recruiting.

Scooping up drunks who’ve been flushed out of other programs (“Beavers quarterback Peter Lalich was arrested Friday at Shasta Lake in Northern California on suspicion of drunken boating and briefly jailed. The former player from the University of Virginia … transferred to OSU after two incidents involving alcohol led to his dismissal from the Virginia program.”) turns out to be especially clever.

All South Carolinians should keep in mind that two assistant football coaches at two public institutions of higher learning are now making a combined $1.275 million even as our state government experiences severe fiscal distress.

Post and Courier

The Lawrence Journal-World notes the deterioration of a once-fine university.

… [T]he Kansas Board of Regents has become politicized and no longer has, or deserves, the respect of legislators — or the public. It now serves as a convenient and easy place for a governor to take care of political IOU’s rather than appointing individuals who are respected and can make a powerful and convincing case for higher education.

… The ongoing embarrassing expenditures for the university’s athletics programs have caused serious concern among faculty and alumni. The salaries of some within KU Athletics are almost obscene…

… [Eminent professors] are far more important to the university than a fancy coach’s office or a $3.2 million super-duper scoreboard, but their salaries, as well as the salaries of most other KU faculty members, are a shame when compared to what KU and other universities are paying those in their athletics programs…

… giggle.

Wild at heart.

It was a very bad bet. Their brand new basketball coach, Tim Welsh, was just found asleep at the wheel at a local traffic light, plastered.

He forgot to tell the university about this event. Hofstra read about the arrest in the paper. The school’s not happy. It looks real dumb, hiring this guy at hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Hofstra has suspended Welsh.

“One month into the job and already setting a good example for your players,” comments one sports site.

Will he be fired?

Are you insane? Have you been reading this blog even for five minutes?

Of course he won’t be fired.

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

Update: Welsh has resigned.

A Berkeley professor speaks up at an open meeting about funding.

A math professor at the same meeting does the numbers:

Professors and community members debated the role of athletics on campus after Calvin Moore, chair of the task force and professor emeritus of mathematics, presented preliminary suggestions for how the department can remedy its financial instability.

Though department officials said last semester that the cost to campus – which totaled about $13.7 million last year – would be significantly lower this year, Moore said the cost will be the same if not more.

Part of the campus support the department received last fiscal year came in the form of a $5.8 million loan from funds at the discretion of Nathan Brostrom, former vice chancellor of administration.

Though Brostrom and Laura Hazlett, associate director for the athletic department’s business office, have said the loan will eventually be paid back, Moore said he doubted any money would ever come back from intercollegiate athletics.

“This is sunken money from the campus, and it’s not going to come back in our lifetime,” he said.

Sunken money’s a nice phrase.