A letter to the editor of the University of Minnesota newspaper.
Your recent story on [football coach] Tim Brewster’s helicopter rides was a shocking read. In the midst of a recession and a University hiring freeze, Tim Brewster’s waste of money on an entirely unnecessary helicopter ride to Irondale in New Brighton, a 15 minute drive from campus, should be a scandal. Yet we have come to accept that even when institutions from our state government down to the corner store are tightening their belts, the University athletics department will never be questioned for its ridiculous spending choices. Dan Berezowitz’s comment that Brewster was not “showboating” is an obvious lie.
He knows it, Brewster knows it, we all know it. Worse was the insulting comment from Joel Maturi suggesting that those opposing Brewster’s spending habits “think we shouldn’t spend one dollar [recruiting].” Maturi knows those opposed to expenses like this helicopter jaunt don’t believe in a $0 recruiting budget. His defensiveness and desire to aggressively delegitimize any opposition to the wasteful spending habits of the athletics department are very telling.
Patrick Timmons
[Florida State University President T.K. Wetherell] should tell the whole world what an absolute shame it would be if [Coach] Bobby [Bowden’s]’s iconic career is tainted because of the malfeasance of others. He should point out how unfair it would be for Bobby’s reputation to be disgraced because some nameless, faceless tutors helped FSU football players cheat in an online music course.
This kind of statement, from Mike Bianchi in the Boston Herald, upsets UD.
There’s an elemental unfairness in dismissing FSU’s tutors as nameless and faceless. They have names; they have faces. They’re human beings, and they deserve to be recognized for their part in the nation’s largest cheating scandal.
But what Bianchi also overlooks is that they were only little cogs in the big cheating machine that is Florida State University.
Why make it appear they acted alone? No one group of people can create an entire university devoted to academic violations on behalf of sport. There’s the music course’s professor, a notoriously negligent instructor whose course had served FSU athletes well for decades until something went tragically awry. There’s the university’s board of trustees, willing to do their part to keep everyone stupid and unethical. There’s the university’s coaching staff who recruited the players. And of course there’s Wetherell himself, who continues to preside over a massive joke at the expense of Florida’s taxpayers.
Give credit where it’s due, says University Diaries.
… a passage that captures my thoughts about The Blount Punch perfectly.
… I’m not thinking about the taunting that set him off, Blount’s own actions or the season-long suspension. What bugs me is our whole disingenuous reaction. Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.
The writer is David Fleming, for ESPN.
Athletics director overrules code of conduct, clears Mbakwe for practice.
Star basketball transfer accused of felony assault received permission to practice in the preseason.
These are headlines in today’s University of Minnesota newspaper (UD thanks Bill).
This is the article’s first paragraph:
Months after junior basketball transfer Trevor Mbakwe was charged with felony assault of a woman in Miami, University of Minnesota Athletics Director Joel Maturi gave him permission to practice with the team.
The decision announced Tuesday lifts the automatic suspension enforced by the University’s student-athlete code of conduct.
FAMU football fans shouldn’t be afraid to come to home games in the wake of a campus shooting that injured three people after Saturday night’s game, said FAMU Police Chief Calvin Ross.
“People should be alert but certainly not fearful to the point that they avoid games,” Ross said Sunday in an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat. “This is at best isolated. The involved parties had no affiliation with FAMU except for the victims.”
… to pathetic whining in the face of failure. The voice of the university athletics director.
The University of Minnesota is still hawking some of the priciest seats in its new, $300 million TCF Bank Stadium, long after it hoped to have sold out the first season.
… “If the economy was better and we had alcohol, I have no doubt we would have it all sold out,” said David Crum, an associate athletics director overseeing ticket sales for the stadium.
Oh, if, if, if, IF! Fiddle-dee-dee!
Two UW-Madison men’s basketball players were jailed Sunday on tentative charges of burglary and underage drinking in the thefts of portable music players, a cell phone and $400 cash from “numerous” dormitory rooms, university police said in a news release.
Diamond Taylor and Jeremy Glover, both 18-year-old students, were confronted by police as they left Sellery Hall, according to a news release. Police had been called to the dormitory to investigate a reported burglary.
University police said in the release that the men admitted to entering the unlocked dorm rooms without permission and officers relieved the pair of “numerous items, including iPods, a cell phone and over $400 in cash.”
Police said the students may be suspects in several other burglaries …
One home game… one shooting…
Live, from Tallahassee, it’s Saturday Night. Let the fireworks begin!
[I’m an alumnus.] I have no qualms with the UNIVERSITY, it’s the senseless youth and thuggish behavior at the games [and] campus … parties, and frankly [I] quit going to games because of fear for mine and my children’s safety and exposure to vulgar language and violence. You are right by thinking that it’s not fair to judge others for the actions of the few, but the few are becoming the many and frankly I don’t like the way the campus acts most of the time.
Campus gunplay after FAMU’s first football game of the season injures one of their running backs.
The quotations are comments from local readers on an article about the shooting in the Tallahassee Democrat.
… Robert Zemsky, a very intelligent critic of universities who has a post up on how not to reform schools at Inside Higher Ed. She heard him talk at the last meeting of the Knight Commission. Here’s her post about his remarks there. If you don’t want to go to the trouble of clicking on that link, here’s some of what he said:
Trying to describe the place of athletics in the larger context of higher education is like trying to describe a burnt-out desert. You see, this discussion today — it isn’t going anywhere. We came here to talk about cost-containment, and it isn’t going anywhere. And that’s because any sense of values is missing.
Since you people don’t have any values, you put the marketplace up as the only thing that matters. That’s why you’re not ever going to reform at all. You’re part of the general loss of aura, loss of particularity, at our universities in America. Football on your campus is just like the NFL, you say, and, see, you’re proud of it. So what makes you a college? Absolutely nothing.
Used to be universities were supposed to be like churches — separate, special places, dedicated to higher things. They’re not special anymore. They’re just like any other business. So why tenure? Why tax exemptions? Look at Harvard and places like that. University endowments aren’t charitable donations; they’re hedge funds. University presidents make million dollar salaries, just like other CEOs.
It all tears at the fabric of the specialness of the university. You’ve all helped make that happen. Since you’ve been in business, things have gotten a whole lot worse. The university athletics engine will certainly stop running. But it will never reform itself. It’ll just run out of gas.
UD of course loved all of this, though she was puzzled by the run out of gas thing. The university athletics engine is a massive SUV with guns and fists and phalluses sticking out of it. It’s barrelling down the road at high speeds and is equipped with no moral or financial brakes. Everyone adores it. Everyone’s mesmerized. ESPN has run the tape of the Blount punches pretty much non-stop since he landed them, and everyone adores it. Everyone eats it up. Violence!
As long as human beings enjoy enormous stadiums housing violent spectacles, big time university athletics will be fine.
Zemsky seems in fact to agree with this in his IHE piece:
It’s already too late to reverse the tide of athletic commercialism. The sums are too large, the constituencies too powerful, the absence of agreed-upon purposes all too readily apparent. Is reform necessary? — yes. Is it possible? — no…
[There’s been a] cascade of scandalous acts that, against a backdrop of institutional complicity and capitulation, threaten the health of American higher education.
… The best higher education can hope for is that eventually universities will cut loose their programs in football and basketball, making the university a sponsor rather than an owner of the enterprise.
I think Zemsky’s making one explicit, and one implicit, argument here. His explicit argument has it that it’s not worth universities’ time to try to clean up their football and basketball programs. Too much money and power is concentrated in those programs.
His implicit argument seems to be that if we just let the SUV keep barrelling down the road, eventually it will crash and burn. Let the programs get worse and worse, in other words, as they certainly will — Let coaches make twenty million dollars a year. Let players rape burn and pillage. Let university presidents become total castrati. Let students get so drunk they destroy downtown after every game, not just championships. In this way, university sports won’t run out of gas so much as implode under the force of its own vileness.
Her once-student, now-friend Courtney Wang played for a Washington team called Scandal (they did pretty well, too).
Courtney sends me this great photo of her in action that day.
It also generates such excitement and good will among alumni that they will want to make donations to the school.
These are two things we’re always told about football and basketball at our universities.
But it’s one thing to be told this. It’s another to hear about it from people who’ve been there.
Justin Sugg is a columnist for the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa newspaper.
[I had a] a phone conversation with an alumnus years ago. I was working for the UI Foundation and was trying to extract a donation. He interrupted my pitch and asked, “Is any of this going to the football program? Because I’m hanging up now if it is.” I told him no and explained all the money raised that day went directly to the students.
He wasn’t alone in his misgivings. Many people I solicited feared their hard-earned money would go toward what they believed to be an overly compensated program.
And that’s understandable, considering current football coach Kirk Ferentz is the highest-paid official working for a state-sponsored program, with an annual salary of more than $3 million…
On the other hand, Justin goes on to detail the many ways in which Iowa athletics does raise revenue, among them this one:
[W]hat I call the “drunk tax” — fines for alcohol-related violations — brought in $87,600 in 2008, according to a DI series last fall.
Yeah, the drunk tax is a good one… Iowa can look to other cities for similar sorts of taxes… solicitation tax… property destruction tax… When your municipality specializes in activities that make people act like assholes, sources of revenue enhancement abound.
Point Two: Nobody can hold a candle to the state of Kentucky.
Who’s gorgeouser — University of Louisville, or University of Kentucky?
Well, Louisville’s got Pitino. University of Kentucky’s got Calipari.
But UK also has Gillispie.
Don’t tell me he’s not there anymore. Every time he gets in that big ol’ Mercedes and starts weaving toward Lexington, the University of Kentucky gets a plug. Plus there’s his big ol’ lawsuit to remind us of his ol’ Kentucky home.
Gillispie [has] sued the university in federal court in Texas, alleging that the school’s athletics department owes him $6 million for firing him two years into a seven-year agreement. The university says he never signed a formal contract and the school doesn’t owe the money.
So – winner hands down – University of Kentucky!
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The New York Times elaborates:
It is an otherwise lovely state, known for the mint juleps and jaunty hats of its Derby, the bluegrass and the rolling hills, but Kentucky has an alter ego when it comes to college sports, and let’s just say that alter ego should be checking into therapy any day now.
In one padded cell, you could put Kentucky’s basketball coach, John Calipari, blithely humming away despite the complete shambles he left at his last college, Memphis, and the one before that, Massachusetts, two Final Fours that supposedly didn’t happen…
Meanwhile, Calipari’s predecessor, Billy Gillispie, was arrested early Thursday and charged with driving while intoxicated.
And all of that looked positively sane compared with Louisville Coach Rick Pitino’s calling an impromptu news conference Wednesday about his simmering sex-and-blackmail scandal to lambaste the news media for covering his simmering sex-and-blackmail scandal…
Rick Pitino just gave a news conference in which he assured the world that his tabletop indiscretion six years ago hasn’t scared off basketball recruits.
No surprise there.