A Federal Trade Commission attorney criticized a controversial Anheuser-Busch …marketing campaign that features Bud Light cans decorated with college-team colors, urging the brewer to drop any plans for similar promotions.

Janet Evans, a senior FTC attorney who oversees alcohol advertising, says the federal agency has “grave concern” that the campaign could encourage underage and binge drinking on college campuses. Dozens of schools have protested the promotion, with some threatening legal action over trademark issues.

“This does not appear to be responsible activity,” Ms. Evans said in an interview Monday. “We’re looking at this closely. We’ve talked to the company and expressed our concerns.”

… On Monday, Michael Van Wieren, legal counsel of Licensing Resource Group LLC, which represents 160 colleges and sports organizations, said a dozen of its members have complained to local beer distributors. Last week, Collegiate Licensing Co., which represents about 200 colleges and other sports organizations, said at least 25 schools formally told Anheuser-Busch to stop distributing the themed beer near their campuses, citing trademark issues and concern about student alcohol abuse…

The writer, Brian Cook at The Sporting Blog, explains how the NCAA handles the criticism that it’s the most profit-driven non-profit this side of Harvard University.

When its greed becomes so rank that the national legislature smells it and starts threatening to take away its tax exemption, the NCAA shifts from, as Cook says, its basic money money money orientation to a we’re all about educating America’s kids orientation …

Amazingly, this approach continues to work, even in the face of a system that schedules farcical football games like the one coming up between the University of Florida and Charleston Southern. Point spread: 73 points. Why does Charleston Southern do it?

Two reasons.

One, as Ron Morris points out, Florida will pay Charleston Southern $450,000 to play with it.

Two: It’s an act of God. “There’s a lot of parallels you can use with regard to faith, and for us to be in this position [the speaker is Charleston’s coach] is an act of God, first and foremost.”

What sort of loving God would allow that point spread?

Do we really want to read the three hundred page transcript from “an October 2008 hearing in Indianapolis, attended by [Florida State University] President T.K. Wetherell, at which FSU and NCAA officials discussed the case involving 61 student-athletes who cheated, many in an online music class.“?

Some judge just ruled that the NCAA’s decision to hide the transcript from us is “clearly contrary to the broad interpretation given to the definition of public records in Florida courts and legislative language.”

So now UD will have to read – at least skim — at least read other writers’ excerpts from — a conversation about an instance of academic fraud so enormous that FSU has had to “vacate … 14 football victories from the 2006 and 2007 seasons and two national championships in men’s track and field.” Wetherell’s a clueless, sports-mad fool; the NCAA … well, you know.

It seems to UD that Florida has grotesquely overbroad notions of what’s in the public record. It’s in no one’s interest to have to read these men. I say keep it sealed.

… but pretty much everyone else is cool with the latest alcohol promotion campaign in America, timed to coincide with the beginning of the academic year. Supermarkets near football schools now stock Bud Light cans with each school’s team colors on them.

“Show your true colors with Bud Light,” the company says, according to copies of internal marketing materials obtained by colleges. “This year, only Bud Light is delivering superior drinkability in 12-ounce cans that were made for gameday.”

Sure, there’s a little controversy. There’s a little embarrassment among some administrators at so … vivid a demonstration of the college football / alcohol synergy … I mean, campuses are even as we speak preparing to hit incoming students up with mandatory online you shouldn’t drink so much classes, and with stern admonitions about the unacceptability of wall-to-wall booze on campus; and yet here’s school pride stamped on case after case of beer lining the walls of the local supermarket. Funny.

UD will let the citizens of Minnesota do the talking on the subject of their big beautiful new university football stadium and its money problems.

They express themselves on the comment thread of a recent Pioneer Press article. That’s one of the citizens up there, in my headline.

First you need to know the latest on the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium, the cost-overrun, unnecessary stadium that was going to bring in all sorts of revenue for the university.

For those who don’t click to the article, the deal is that because they can’t serve booze, the university’s not selling its luxury boxes.

You will need a few drinks after a couple seasons of watching the Gophers play football. Heck who am I kidding? You need to be smashed right now just to stand em.

[The team it’s all for, the Gophers, suck.]

Does it hurt not to drink for a couple of hours? Poor little football jocks can’t have a beer whaaaa whaaaa whaaaa.

[This guy doesn’t understand that the luxury boxes are bought by corporations plying potential clients with alcohol. No ply, no play.]

So … seats aren’t selling, the place is hemorrhaging taxpayer money and bleeding whatever educational mission might be left at the university.

It’s not so much that drunks must have their football. If it’s going to pay for itself, football must have its drunks.

Excerpts from a Minnesota Public Radio conversation about this:

Murray Sperber: The breathalyzer’s a good idea…. [The stadium will have mandatory breathalyzer tests at the gate for students who have been drunk at games before… What? Why the tests and security cameras everywhere etc. etc. if the stadium will be alcohol free? Are you really asking that question??? LOL.] I’ve been appalled by the behavior of young drunk male students… It’s dangerous… I’ve never understood why universities don’t control tailgating… It’s on their land… Part of the reason is they don’t want to piss off alumni… Many of these people tailgating and drinking are not in fact alumni; they’re local fans of the team… The schools can’t unburden themselves from bigtime university sports and the various myths that say they’re helping the university.

Toben Nelson: Division I football games are drinking events… Alumni are a major barrier to making any serious changes to alcohol policy on campus…

After the Pitino anomaly, things are back to normal.

Nothing a brain cell or two couldn’t fix.

Ron Prince can teach you, too, how to demand $6.2 million with a 17-20 record…

… The university’s [legal] case [against the football coach] is undermined by the apparent fact that quasi-secret, extra-contractual deals seem to have been the norm for KSU’s top earners: An internal audit released in June found 13 payments totaling $845,000 to [athletic staff] Snyder, Krause and former AD Tim Weiser that had “no supporting documentation” and raised possible conflicts of interests and/or tax issues (a revelation that left Snyder rather nonplussed, as it might a few other coaches around the country as well), adding to Prince’s claim that it was Kansas State’s idea both for him to enter the deal as an LLC rather than an individual party and to effectively keep the agreement off the books.

… With his possible termination looming off a losing season, multiple, sane adults in positions of authority at Kansas State actually agreed to pay Ron Prince an exorbitant salary nearly a full decade into a very uncertain future. And now, by attempting to cover it up, may owe him nearly twice as much in the very near future…

KSU: Dumbest school this side of … anywhere.

The Gadsden Times:

… Jacksonville State will play the 2009 season under a one-year, post-season ban by the NCAA because … JSU [failed] to meet standards on the NCAA’s Academic Progress Report for a third straight year and the school’s appeal [was] rejected.

“That penalty is historic,” [football coach Jack] Crowe said. “This team is getting penalized for the history of somebody else. These guys that you’re going to see play for us, they all are going to graduate and they’re all on track.”

Being ineligible for post-season play and for the Ohio Valley Conference Championship left the Gamecocks “playing for pride,” said senior nose tackle Brandt Thomas, an OVC preseason all-conference pick.

… “Obviously your goals have to change when the whole APR thing came out, but the attitude and the mood throughout the whole team is every game is going to be the same,” Thomas said. “We’re going to step on the field with the same intention, the same tenacity. We still have a chance to prove that we’re one of the best teams in the country. We don’t need a magazine or a TV station or somebody to tell us that we are or we’re not.”

… Crowe stressed it’s within each player how he handles the season’s adversity of playing under the ban.

… “It’s sort of like we got over it and went on, which is what grown men do,” Crowe said…

After all, September’s around the corner.

Tailgaters at this season’s Texas Tech football home games could see changes to the university’s alcohol policy and will have to seek alternative parking spots as the campus accommodates stadium construction.

A proposed change to the university’s alcohol policy would ban kegs from the campus…

… The university already bans alcoholic beverages from the campus, but Student Government Association President Suzanne Williams said that hasn’t stopped tailgaters in campus parking lots from consuming alcohol before and during football games.

“It’s become where policy and practice are very different things,” she said. “We’re trying to make sure the policy is up to the practice.”

Some reader comments:

I would be for anything that could bring some class to what has become a black eye for the University. I hear too many first hand reports of ill-treatment of visitors like vehicle vandalism,verbal confrontations of people wearing opposing jerseys from drunks and don’t forget the classless profanity laced altered fight song. I hear more people say that the Lubbock experience is just not worth the trip.

How about enforcing the rules you have now and throwing the drunks in jail. The TTU police have their hands tied because heaven forbid they throw the wrong guy (big donor) in jail…

… I’ve seen an older drunk Tech fan punch and knock down a sober opposing fan, just for cheering for his team. I’ve also had that turned towards me and my family. It was so bad that none of my family will go back to Jones for a game….

Here’s TTU’s problem. You want to keep them drunk enough not to notice that Alberto Gonzales is on the faculty earning $100,000 for teaching one course, but not so drunk that they attack visitors.

Four Kentucky State University football players are facing charges of robbery and now their coach says he’s been fired without cause.

21-year-old Cordell Key, 23-year-old Jemario Dorsey, 19-year-old Jerrel Noland and 21-year-old Nathaniel Mills of Louisville were all arrested.

The players were arrested at a restaurant near the UK campus after allegedly trying to steal the restaurant’s tip jar.

Meanwhile, Fred Farrier, the head coach at the Frankfort University says he was fired over the weekend.

… to an important lawsuit that’s brewing between the NCAA and a group of former university athletes. Kevin Arnowitz explains:

The debate over whether college athletes should have their images used by the NCAA for commercial purposes has been percolating for years. With the emergence of the video game industry, commemorative championship-season DVD and other merch, the NCAA profits greatly from the likeness of amateur athletes.

Yesterday, one such athlete — former UCLA basketball standout Ed O’Bannon, along with thousands of other former college athletes — filed a class action lawsuit against the NCAA in federal district court.

A loss could cost the NCAA hundreds of millions; such an outcome would also probably mean a radically new relationship between players and the organization, with student players routinely given more legal heft in their dealings with the NCAA.

O’Bannon, whose professional basketball career didn’t pan out, is rather eloquent:

Every student-athlete – past, present and future – wishes to get paid when they’re in school. Let’s be honest about that…

My biggest thing right now is, once we leave the university and are done playing in the NCAA, one would think we’d be able to leave with our likeness. But we aren’t able to. If you don’t take your likeness with you, you should at least be compensated for every dime that is made off your name or likeness…

The NCAA has been doing people wrong for a long time. It’s about time something changes…

God put me on this earth to do something. And it obviously wasn’t to play NBA basketball, which I thought it was. I thought I was born to play the sport. I thought born to be a hall-of-fame ballplayer. But that didn’t happen….

Arnowitz ends with the following thought for the day:

I also wonder if an ancillary benefit of the suit might be broadening the conversation toward the universities themselves. It’s hard to voice this opinion without coming across as priggish — particularly when you write about basketball for a living — but is it possible that quasi-professional sports maintain too prominent a place at public universities?

If merely voicing the opinion makes you priggish, what does that make UD?

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

Update: Roundup of some of the bigger pending lawsuits against the NCAA.

That’s the student newspaper at the University of Oregon. UO’s new president, who seems to discern the link between universities and education, has reversed the former president’s decision to move the date of graduation ceremonies to a ridiculous time in order to accommodate a really cool sports event on campus.

Students graduating in spring 2010 will now be able to walk in June’s commencement ceremony knowing they have completed their required courses, because University administrators backed out of a plan to hold the ceremony before spring term final exams.

Students will now turn their tassels June 12, 2010, the date for which commencement was slated before the University announced in December that it would move the ceremony to June 5 to accommodate the NCAA Track & Field Championships scheduled for Hayward Field on June 9-12.

… Critics enfiladed the University for the original date change, saying it was an inconvenience to students that would cut into the hours available to take exams. Biology professor Nathan Tublitz went as far as to write a commentary in the Register-Guard saying the move evinced what he called then-University President Dave Frohnmayer’s commitment to athletics at the expense of academics.

“This decision to prioritize athletics over academics, inconveniencing thousands of students and their parents, might have been excusable were it not the latest in a long line of similar decisions,” Tublitz wrote, going on to question Frohnmayer’s salary and, by implication, his integrity in accepting $265,000 in payment from an unnamed donor through the UO Foundation.

Frohnmayer responded with an angry commentary of his own, accusing Tublitz of factual inaccuracies. “This is not just any track meet,” he wrote, “but the NCAA National Championships – an event that will pump millions of dollars into the local economy and is part and parcel of the rich track and field heritage of the UO.”

The response drew national attention, with Frohnmayer criticized by Inside Higher Ed blogger Margaret Soltan, who accused Frohnmayer of a “tendency to twist or try to suppress the truth.”…

Delaware News Journal:

Mark Duncan, the University of Delaware football team’s top returning wide receiver, has been charged with two criminal offenses in the wake of his May 30 stabbing.

Newark police charged Duncan with falsely reporting an incident and hindering prosecution. Duncan had gone to Christiana Hospital and told state police he was stabbed while playing basketball on campus that Saturday. Police said he later changed the story and said he was stabbed while walking on Cleveland Avenue and knew his attacker, but would not name the person. Duncan checked himself out of the hospital without being treated and a Newark police officer who had been called to the hospital convinced him to go back for treatment. Duncan later changed the story again, claiming he’d been jumped by four unknown assailants on Cleveland Avenue, according to police.

Newark police issued an arrest warrant after determining that he’d switched his story too many times…

Alberto Gonzales, thoroughly disgraced Attorney General, will get $100,000 for teaching one course at Texas Tech.

No one who reads this blog will be surprised that, having exhausted efforts to find a higher paying job, a once-well-known person rigs a do-nothing deal at a university for a pretty fair sum. Even Michael Jackson’s doctors will eventually be taken up by some university to teach Medicine in the Age of Celebrity. Compared to the crumb bums who land on campuses after no one else will employ them, Gonzales is a saint.

Still, people outside Texas Tech are pretty outraged. There’s this guy, and there’s this guy, both of whom recount the new political science professor’s many outrageous misdeeds as Bush’s lackey at Justice.

Both writers also make much of Texas Tech having not long ago hired the psychotic Bobby Knight late in his psychotic career.

First guy: “The disgraced former official finally landed a job outside of government—he resigned in 2007 — and now (for one year anyway) will teach political science – ‘contemporary issues in the executive branch’ – at a school most recently known for hosting basketball coach Bobby Knight.”

Second guy: “Chancellor Hance’s unilateral hire constitutes academic welfare for a government wash-out. It is even more brazen than Texas Tech’s decision, in 2001, to sign Bobby Knight as its basketball coach, six months after he was fired from Indiana University for ‘uncivil, defiant, and unacceptable behavior.’ Before his invitation to lead the Red Raiders, Knight had repeatedly abused players, fans, and furniture, but, unlike Gonzales, the temperamental coach did not do violence to the authority and impartiality of American jurisprudence.”

See how sports decisions can play into your university’s academic reputation? The point both guys are making about Texas Tech as a university is clear: The place is clueless, cynical, and desperate enough to do just about anything.

… of many on that campus about the academic difficulties of two students at the school.

We are hearing tonight that [University of Washington tailbacks] Brandon Johnson and David Freeman have flunked out of school according to the Seattle Times Bob Condotta.

Before you start to panic neither of these guys were in the four deeps after spring ball. Johnson was injury prone and wasn’t really into conditioning. He quit the team 4-5 times if memory serves me right since he has been here.

Freeman flashed a lot of potential early last year but congenital ankle problems plagued him for most of the season…