[The commissioner of the Big Ten conference] warned of the risks involved in reducing [athletics] spending. Doing so is likely to raise the ire of donors, university trustees and members of the public. “It is a contact sport,” Delany said. “I’ve found it much easier to generate revenue than to cut costs. I’m being honest with you.”
And that’s how you make the world safe for Bobby Lowder.
In this video, Goldy Gopher from the University of Minnesota prays with a player from an opposing team.
… Instead of compromising (to put it very mildly) academic integrity, we should just dispense with the requirement — often, the pretense — of the “student athlete.” … If [players] think they have a shot at the big leagues (which, incidentally, ought to subsidize college sports as their farm system), then let the kids work full time as paid athletes and perfect their craft.
A local sports columnist, reflecting on the Florida State University fiasco, comes up with a solution that makes even pretend schools like FSU nervous: Throw the whole college meme out and turn your school into a farm system for the big leagues.
Having removed the education thing, you go hat in hand to the NFL and the NBA and explain that your facilities can now train their guys free and clear.
Another day, another arrest, and so it goes in a suddenly troubled West Virginia University football program.
Two days after defensive tackle Scooter Berry was arrested and charged with a pair of misdemeanors after an early morning downtown run-in with police, reserve safety Courtney Stuart was arrested on a fugitive warrant from Arizona relating to a 2007 burglary…
From the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Kentuckians will probably never really understand what inspired University of Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart to hire Billy Gillispie as the men’s basketball coach. But we do know what it cost to undo that decision: about $3.25 million in go-away money that includes $265,000 to cover the former coach’s legal bills. Throw in about $4.7 million more in paychecks for two uninspiring seasons, and Courier-Journal sports columnist Rick Bozich estimates that Mr. Gillispie earned about $192,500 per win.
… [T]his bungled episode cost $8 million or more. That’s a lot of money, and whatever the source, it is not now available for other, better purposes. In a poor state beset by economic problems, wasting resources on that scale is appalling…
A letter to the campus paper, the Daily Lobo, from an emeritus professor brings us up to date on this perennial class act.
The TV ads featuring Lobo Louie and his Lobo floozy accurately convey the tackiness of the partnership between the University of New Mexico Athletics Department and the Route 66 Casino Hotel. How did an institution of higher learning end up with the gaming industry as a roommate?
Sadly, these organizations have become soul mates. Intercollegiate athletics in America today has a bad case of gambling addiction. I do not refer to fans wagering on games. I refer to institutions that throw good money after bad in hopes of hitting that elusive jackpot — a championship.
Few, if any, NCAA Division I athletics programs cover their costs, especially if indirect subsidies for physical plant and utilities are factored in. Yet programs and their boosters insist on spending more and more for coaches’ compensation, sumptuous facilities and player recruitment. They say they want to “reach the next level.” Their behavior resembles that of a problem gambler who, in placing ever-higher stakes to recoup his losses, succeeds only in reaching the next level of penury.
Just as the family of a problem gambler suffers from the diversion of limited resources away from essential needs, so the academic communities of Division I universities suffer from the diversion of limited resources away from their basic educational mission.
Teaching, learning and research are starved as money is lavished on games.
Viewed from this perspective, Louie and the floozy are perfect for each other…
He sounds embarrassed, doesn’t he? But when it comes to tacky and the University of New Mexico under President David Schmidly, there’s so much more. Here’s a start.
Susan Moeller, a finance professor at Eastern Michigan University, spoke at a recent trustees’ meeting and told them that the school’s a mess academically and gives most of its money to a losing football team.
“We’re down to 57 percent regular faculty, and the other 43 percent are lecturers and part time. Searches are being held back, and I’m unhappy that they spend so much money on athletics and not academics. It’s important that we have full time faculty.”
… “Over the last few years, the budget for academics was cut by four million dollars,” she said. “They need new programming. They redid the football stadium before they redid the academic buildings. … The football coach makes more than the president.”
EMU’s president responds: “We had no increases in athletics budget this year aside from necessary pay raises.”
Necessary pay raises. Wonder what they are. I mean, universities all over the country are doing furloughs, salary reductions… What are the necessary raises at EMU?
UD’s guessing those are the raises that raise the football coach’s salary yet HIGHER than the president’s — or else…
You know…
Or else the coach will do what all peeved university football coaches do when the university peeves them: Sue, sue, sue, sue, sue.
Sally Dear, an adjunct professor at Binghamton, recently received an email from an administrator there. SUNY was firing her because of a “strategic reprioritization of resources across the university.”
Now they’ve hired her back.
Binghamton … reversed the firing of Sally Dear, the adjunct lecturer who taught human development for 11 years before being dismissed earlier this week. Dear believed she was dismissed because she spoke out against the basketball program. The university had cited fiscal reasons. But Dear received a letter Friday saying she would remain an adjunct, although in a different department, during the audit.
“How come they’re firing me due to budget cuts and a reconfiguring of the department and all of a sudden I’m being hired by another department?” Dear said.
Easy answer to that question if you understand the inner workings of university administrations.
SUNY’s engaging in what’s known as “Reverse Rereprioritization,” in which formerly reprioritized priorities are reversed, resulting in rereprioritization.
Taking a page from SUNY Binghamton, the University of Massachusetts has dumped a bunch of football players for drug stuff.
The University of Massachusetts has one of the highest levels of on-campus violence of any university UD‘s covered on this blog. It admits amazing numbers of assholes — quite a few of them, recently, on the lacrosse team — and when the school loses a big game, everybody gets together and puts on a big riot.
It’s not pretty at U Mass, and it just got not prettier.
Lois DeFleur, SUNY Binghamton’s president, has fired her athletic director, ordered an external audit of the sports program, and ordered disgraced basketball coach Kevin Broadus to draw up a “recruitment and supervision plan for the program’s future.”
UD thinks Binghamton will also try to get rid of Broadus, despite the fact that – just before the shit hit the fan – they renewed his contract to 2010. Getting rid of him will therefore be very messy and very expensive, since Broadus will certainly sue if they don’t give him all the money they’ve promised.
Of course, at any given time five or ten university coaches are suing their employers over contractual matters, so this won’t be any novelty. It’ll just be ugly and expensive for the taxpayers of New York.
A lawyer writes an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor. Excerpt:
… Congress should prevent federal research grants or subsidies from being awarded to any educational institution that pays greater compensation on average to its football or basketball coaches than it does on average to its tenured faculty members.
Any school that pays more to those who coach big time sports than to those who teach students academic subjects shows its true colors. No taxpayer should pay money to such a school…
Every now and then UD stumbles on pieces like these. They’re the product of a disbelief that turns to rage when people serious about universities start to examine what’s going on.
Some people decide the thing to do is go after the university’s tax exempt status. Others say spin already-professional university sports programs off and make them an independent affiliate of the university, with the players paid athletes rather than unpaid pretend students. This writer would make schools that pay their coaches six million dollars a year while their classrooms sink into ruin ineligible for federal research funds.
It’s unlikely any of these ideas will go anywhere. For one thing, contemporary America is much more about entertainment than seriousness, and our universities, many of them, reflect that priority. In going up against crass campus sports programs, you’re going up against an entire culture.
And you’re going up against deep-lying needs. The people of Alabama don’t see Nick Saban as a coach. He’s a savior. A god. He will make their sad lives happy, their shame pride. Variants of this fervency prevail at all big sports schools, where no amount of criminality, greed, and contempt for the values of universities on the part of teams and coaches diminishes their on-field aura.
A third problem is that people never really look directly at universities. We sentimentalize the places. You’d think, for instance, that people would be able to look directly at the University of Georgia Law School Wilderness Area and conclude the obvious: The University of Georgia isn’t a university; it’s a tailgaters’ trash dump. And indeed until it finds a way to stop being a dump and start being a university, it probably shouldn’t get federal funds.
But it’s like the most photographed barn in America in White Noise. No one, says a character in the novel, sees the barn.
No one sees the dump.
Boyce Watkins on the latest Michigan scandal.
… One can hardly blame Michigan Coach Rodriguez for pushing the players too hard, since universities make it clear that winning percentages matter far more than graduation rates. The University of Kentucky’s decision to pay nearly $30 million dollars to John Calipari, a coach known for both corruption and a lack of academic integrity, sends a message about the importance of winning games over educating athletes.
We know that corruption rolls down hills and at the bottom of this pile are the players, their families and the entire African-American community. NCAA athletes in revenue- generating sports are typically kept in special dormitories, forced to live on rigorous athletic schedules, and pushed to place football ahead of everything else. All the while, the administrators on central campus, as educated as they are, turn themselves into unenlightened blind mice when confronted with the reality of athletic exploitation.
… Massive reform is needed not only within the Michigan football program, but also within all of college sports. Congress must step in and challenge the NCAA for anti-trust violations, as well as its tax-exempt status. NCAA revenues during March madness rival that of the NFL and NBA, so it’s time to note the NCAA for what it truly is: a professional sports league that artificially restricts the wages of its employees…
The University of Montana student newspaper, the Montana Kaimin, on Friday reported that two football players were involved in an assault on another student last March, and that Coach Bobby Hauck swept the incident under the rug. The alleged assault is the latest in a long series of incidents involving violent off-the-field behavior by members of the UM football team.
The Kaimin also reported that when a reporter asked for comment about the incident, Hauck said: “You’re done for the day, and you’ll be done for the season if you keep bugging me about this thing that I’ve answered four fucking times.” The two players allegedly knocked a student unconscious and kicked him in the face following an altercation at a party; they were held out of one game this season, but otherwise apparently faced no sanctions.
In a furious editorial, Kaimin sports editor Roman Stubbs called the allegations involving the two players “disturbing, sickening, alarming,” and denounced Hauck for building a “wall of silence” around the incident and refusing to take responsibility or hold anyone accountable. “A college football coach should never be blamed for isolated incidents,” Stubbs wrote. “But when accusations form a pattern, then not only do the upstanding Griz players become stigmatized, but so does this school, this city and this state. It becomes embarassing. And it falls on the commander in chief.”
UM football spokesman Dave Guffey said in an email to NewWest.Net: “We have no comment on this matter.”