… sports round-ups.

This university’s president looks forward to a future even more “bright and positive.”

Minnesota Spokesman-Revew:

Compared to other Big Ten schools, the data shows that Minnesota ranks at or near the bottom in graduation rates of its Black students in three revenue-producing sports: men’s basketball, football, and women’s basketball.

Men’s basketball
GSR for U of M Black student-athletes: 43 percent (ninth in Big Ten); Northwestern leads with 100 percent.

Football
GSR for U of M Black student-athletes: 39 percent (last in Big Ten); Northwestern leads with 90 percent.

Calipari is allowed to keep coaching for the same reason Knight was allowed to stamp, scream and bully his way through Bloomington from 1971 to 2000. They both win.

He’s wrong.

Winning’s a lot of it.

But audiences like to see the same aggression in coaches that they like to see in players.

Coaches who are sons of bitches are exciting to watch.

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There’s a whole charismatic world of violence and destruction off the university or professional football field that people find exciting to follow. Players and coaches with their drunken assaults, crashed sports cars, and gun play — these aren’t things universities tolerate because they only care about winning. They’re things the fan base adores. Football wouldn’t be football without them.

“… College athletes, many of them African-American, are brought to college as hired guns, under the guise of getting an education. The entire charade is sustained for the sake of helping the NCAA maintain its multi-billion dollar professional sports league.

Yes, I said professional, not amateur. Any league that earns money on par with the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB is a professional sports league. NCAA coaches, commentators and administrators – mostly white – earn six and seven figure salaries while simultaneously robbing athletes of their educations, their futures, and the money that they and their families have earned. In order to avoid paying taxes on their revenue, the NCAA spends millions on marketing to convince us that their multi-million dollar corporate extravaganzas are polite little weekend activities that students barely remember to keep on their schedules. All the while, Tyrone Smith attends four years of college and doesn’t even learn how to read.

… The NCAA needs independent oversight. The federal government should take the lead and give meaningful disciplinary power to individuals who care more about education than winning percentages. When schools like The University of Kentucky choose to pay millions to coaches like John Calipari – who has consistently violated NCAA rules and carries a horrific graduation record – they are making their intentions… clear …”

Boyce Watkins:

http://www.thegrio.com/2009/12/educational-mission-of-ncaa-is-great-scam-of-21st-century.php

“…In the 2007-08 school year, nearly 80 percent of major athletic programs reported operating deficits, with programs in the red losing an average of $9.9 million, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Add the recession, which has affected state appropriations and private giving at most colleges and universities, and college sports face unprecedented economic challenges.

A recent NCAA report noted that even football-generated revenue does not cover the operating cost of the football team at 44 percent of the institutions playing major-college football. Such figures would be worse if the millions in debt for stadium improvements and other facility enhancements were included. These are hardly profit centers at most institutions.

Now, consider all this in an environment where athletics costs are escalating at all but a few institutions while academic budgets are being cut and student fees and tuition are being raised. NCAA data show that the rate of increase in athletics spending in Division I programs is three to four times greater than the rate of increase for academic budgets. That is neither acceptable nor sustainable…”

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Oh hell sure it is. I can’t tell you how many times UD’s been lectured by readers about how acceptable and sustainable the situation is.

And anyway, the two writers of this opinion piece in the Washington Post —

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/18/AR2009121803510.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

— don’t take up the real problem. They’ve done the numbers, but they haven’t done the ethos.

You’re up against a deeply corrupt and deeply embedded culture. Pontificating about how it’s not sustainable is like an Italian politician telling constituents the Mafia isn’t sustainable. Sure it is.

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Apologies for the bare-bones look of this post. I’m having trouble getting a good window to open in my WordPress dashboard.

… about brainless but brawny University of Oregon.

… At the University of Oregon, academics has taken a backseat to athletics. Despite the generosity of Nike founder Phil Knight, who has given hundreds of millions of dollars to the school, Oregon has gone on such an athletics building spree that it has had to postpone a long-term project to renovate student housing. That’s because the university has hit its debt limit of $200 million.

“We literally can’t go out and ask for more bonding authority for the academic side of the campus,” said Nathan Tublitz, an Oregon biology professor and the co-chair of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a reform group that’s often critical of the culture of college athletics. “The mission of the university is to educate students and perform cutting-edge research,” said Prof. Tublitz. “To be spending so much money on an auxiliary enterprise is not only scandalous, it’s criminal.”…

… asks readers who Notre Dame’s next football coach should be.

Here’s one of the answers the bloggers got.

Football is starting to harm ND.

… In general, college football at the highest level is now so corrupt that the NCAA cannot control it, and the universities, supposedly bastions of academic integrity and higher learning, exploit the labor of young adults, many with few options, for personal and institutional gain. A majority of teams that went to bowls last year graduated <50% of the players. Meanwhile the nature and frequency of injuries suggest that the kids are not viewed as much more than fodder, necessary casualties to keep the alumni happy and contributing. [T]he continuing effort to field a dominant football team in a fundamentally corrupt environment is eating away at the soul of the institution. ND should get out of football and focus on academics.

This, from January 2006, is the first of many posts (type Saluki Way into the search feature) University Diaries has featured on only one of the many benighted aspects of that most-benighted of American university campuses, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale — its ridiculous sports expenditure.

Here’s an update — a letter to the editor of the student paper, from an English professor there.

According to SIU President Glenn Poshard, SIU may probably [may probably is awkward] close in March or lay off large amounts [should be numbers] of people … He is quoted as stating, “This isn’t a panic situation; nobody is panicking here.”

This may be true for SIU’s higher administrators who will certainly not be laid off. But for the majority of faculty and staff in an already depressed economic region, this is a very worrying time. Should the worst happen, Carbondale would probably become a “ghost town” [no need for quotation marks] after losing its chief source of revenue.

In the light of the recent high-salaried appointment of a new chancellor (who may not even have a job to go to in June) despite a supposed hiring freeze, another solution is possible.

What about temporarily transferring the $35 million dollars allocated to the Saluki Way sports project to alleviate this urgent budget crisis?

This project is opposed by the majority of faculty and students on this campus, and in a time of economic recession, sports should be the lowest item on the agenda.

It would be one of a number of necessary efficiencies Trustee Bill Bonan II has urged. Should the economy recover, this project could then go ahead. The issue remains whether sports or education is the main priority on this campus at this particular time.

… Surely the economic well being of people is far more important in a time of economic depression …than an irrelevant sports stadium that has nothing to do with educational quality.

Mack Brown
Won’t back down
He wants five million now.

UT’s
Faculty
Is having one big cow.

“We thought we
Were a university!”

You really thought that?
Wow.

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A resolution criticizing the $5 million pay package for University of Texas football coach Mack Brown as “unseemly and inappropriate” was approved in an unofficial vote at a Faculty Council meeting Monday despite an impassioned defense of the package by UT’s president.

… The resolution was approved 23-15, with four abstentions.

… “College sports is widely viewed as an out-of-control train on a collision course with academia,” said David Hillis , a professor of integrative biology. “Right now, UT is stoking this train to make it run ever faster.”…

… search for Anthony Galea at the University of Toronto. He says he’s on the medical faculty.

Galea’s in trouble with the law, here, there and everywhere.

… The F.B.I. investigation of Dr. Anthony Galea, a sports medicine specialist who has treated hundreds of professional athletes across many sports, follows his arrest on Oct. 15 in Toronto by the Canadian police. Human growth hormone and Actovegin, a drug extracted from calf’s blood, were found in his medical bag at the United States-Canada border in late September. Using, selling or importing Actovegin is illegal in the United States.

Dr. Galea is also being investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for smuggling, advertising and selling unapproved drugs as well as criminal conspiracy…

Some university coaches teach their students by beating them up.

The Financial Times reviews a new book.

… The excesses of college football have hit new levels of absurdity since the 1990s, writes Michael Oriard in his new book Bowled Over. Colleges throw money they don’t have into football. “From any reasonably objective perspective,” says Oriard, “the case for reform seems overwhelming. For a football coach to make several times as much as the university president is obviously crazy.” Oriard knows his stuff. He played football for Notre Dame University and in the NFL before becoming an English professor at Oregon State University…

He excels at identifying the sport’s abuses. Some players leave university illiterate, having played football nonstop. They are unpaid, and yet colleges still manage to blow fortunes on tuition centres, airfares around America, and sometimes on “recruiting hostesses” who entice promising youths to the right college. The great majority of colleges lose money on athletics, yet most football teams overshadow their universities. And the craziness worsens each year.

The boosters’ arguments for college football are probably bogus. Football doesn’t seem to persuade alumni to give to a university’s academic work, and doesn’t attract better students. Indeed, donors have recently given “to athletics at the expense of academics”, says Oriard….

From Fanhouse:

Texas’s Mack Brown became the highest-paid coach in college football this week when the university gave him a raise to at least $5.1 million annually.

Michael Granof, an accounting professor at Texas, says that doesn’t make sense at a time when the university is making academic cutbacks to make ends meet.

“The major problem today is one of timing,” Granof said in an interview on ESPN’s Outside the Lines. “The University of Texas is facing a major budget crisis. We’ve had layoffs, we’ve had major changes in the curriculum, the faculty has been meeting for the last month trying to figure out how to save a few hundred thousand dollars here and there, and I’ve never in all my years at the University of Texas heard so much outrage.”…

— sends me this, from today’s New York Times.

Like Northeastern, Hofstra has dropped football.

… and nobody came?