Machen’s obviously not fond of alcohol. Fine: as a dentist, he shouldn’t be. I am, and so are thousands of other people who will turn up in Jacksonville for the game this year and every year afterward. I don’t really remember all that much from my time as an undergraduate at the University of Florida, but I do remember enough statistics to remember that two [recent incidents] does not a trend make, and also enough from my econ classes elsewhere that if you restrict market access, you end up with people selling jello shooters out of coolers on the sidewalk in what is referred to as “a black market.” Most people get drunk at tailgates, anyway, meaning that unless Machen is willing to start trunk searches for 100,000 surly people in line to park at the game, he’s out of luck on breaking the enduring bond between booze and collegiate athletics.
A sharp rebuke, in Sporting News, to University of Florida president Bernard Machen’s dream of reducing the number of alcohol vendors at the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.
… scores this sort of thing. If the player is still just a signee, does it count? Fewer points?
Offensive lineman Justin Cabbagestalk, who signed with the [Vanderbilt] Commodores in February, was arrested Tuesday night in his hometown of Tampa, Fla., and charged with a felony count of burglary of an unoccupied dwelling and a misdemeanor charge of criminal mischief.
What? You mean they can’t handle the way American universities – the University of Kansas, in this case – become trampy little soap operas when recruitment season rolls around? Because they’re so so desperate to recruit one-year non-students who can throw balls that the schools’ anxieties over recruitment paralyze the campus?
The Henry guys, the two guys KU wants so bad it hurts, drive a Hummer and a Range Rover and live in opulence and really REALLY don’t want to go to class. They’d go pro and get rich right now if they could. KU means shit to them. But KU LOVES them. It’s just as excited as Alabama was when Coach Saban said Yes!! Yes, I’ll take six million dollars to coach your team! YES! We got Coach Saban!!!!
But will KU get the Henry guys? Today it looks pretty good, but yesterday… Man, yesterday I thought their father was saying something that sounded kinda negative… I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, thinking about it …
… The kids don’t want to be there. It doesn’t matter how pretty the campus is or how historic the arena or how good the team’s chance is at winning the national title.
For the participants, college hoops lost its cool points.
Pushing a Maybach, sporting the most dazzling ice and making it rain inside America’s top strip clubs long ago replaced hitting on the finest girls from Delta Sigma Theta and Xi Omega during psychology class.
You can grind your teeth and reminisce about how much better things used to be, but you’re not going to make kids (or their parents) buy into the current system. It’s a farce…
Shaddap. I LOVE these guys. Everything’s going to be GREAT. Go KU!
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UD thanks Dave for telling her about the events at KU.
I’m not clever enough. But the student journalists at Washington State University are.
UD thanks Dance for sending her this.
Yes. That’s it. Click on the word this. Click on it.
And enjoy.
****************
PS: SOS just wrote to the editor about the misspelling in the article’s title.
“Do I think that salaries are too high nationwide? Yes, I certainly do, but we can’t control the marketplace,” Boren said.
Boren is David Boren, current president of the University of Oklahoma. And what he’s doing is called passing the buck.
Actually Boren can, to a remarkable extent, control the marketplace. Rich brainless schools like his (see also the University of Alabama), who care only about sports and therefore offer millions of dollars to coaches are the leading edge of the salaries problem. They’re setting the pace, see.
Boren should check to see whether he still has balls. If he does, he should take a stand on the issue.
The problem is not that abstraction, the marketplace. It is that very real entity, the greedy coach and the greedy coach’s agent.
Now y’all sit down with those people, see. You tell them you’re a university, not a football field, and you tell them what you think a reasonable salary for a coach – as opposed to your university’s president, or, say, the president of the United States – would be.
‘Course, here comes another non-abstraction: Your paralyzing fear of your student body and your alumni. You’ve let their moronic passions overrule your sense of what the university should represent. You say to them I’m gonna stop the madness right here right now.
They say to you You’re out on your ass.
So what? So what, Boren? So you take yourself out of the president’s office and you write a book about how you were sent packing from an institution of higher learning because you wouldn’t pay a football coach five million dollars. You give interviews. You make a little documentary. Whatever. You piss off a lot of stupid people who, because they’re both stupid and pissed off, unwittingly reveal all sorts of other scandals at the university, sports related and non sports related. A big ol’ mess, like the one going on at the University of Illinois right now.
See now, that’s a good thing. That’s changing the world for the better, Boren, and I seem to recall you used to be a politician with a modicum of self-respect and a desire to make the world better.
But if you go here, you’ll find the best summary yet of this season in university sports.
Biggest scum schools this year:
University of Alabama
University of Kentucky
University of Memphis
University of Southern California
… Canes Times (Complete Coverage of the Miami Hurricanes). I hope you also enjoy my recent posts on Jurgen Habermas and Ralf Dahrendorf.
Twenty-four now and counting.
Gator joy is abounding
‘Cause we’re winning again.
Our yesterdays were blue, dear
Until that punch you threw, dear
Oh throw that punch again, dear
And make our dreams come true.
What a difference a coach makes!
Has an eye for the rap sheet.
Urban Meyer can’t be beat.
And he’s getting a raise.
But why just twenty-four dear?
You know there must be more, dear.
What are incentives for, dear?
Let’s hit at least thirty-five.
Yes, what a difference assaults make.
Twenty-four pending cases
Means we win all the races
Hope he lets us sit up front!
After a reported 21 arrests over the past four years, the University of Florida’s football team has been invited to get a new perspective on the cops through volunteer ride-alongs. The school’s University Athletic Association and the Gainesville (Fla.) Police Department have teamed up to show Gators football players what the other side of law enforcement is like, UF’s Independent Florida Alligator reports.
Players are invited to ride alongside officers on the night shift (5 p.m. to 4 a.m.), Gainesville Police Department spokesman Mike Schiubola told the newspaper …
… over, as one newspaper reader puts it, “the 24 arrests [on the football team] in less than 4 years and the fact that we are now being called the new THUG U and the University of Felons in Gunsville.” Another reader puts things in perspective: “[W]hen I was 18-22 I was also finding my way in life. Shooting AK’s, getting tased, and stalking ex-girlfriends is all just part of growing up.”
ROSE: SAT::
1. Student: Test
2. Player: Problem
3. Flower: Day
4. Verb: Verb
5. Dozier: SAT
But all I have to do is read the papers.
A headline from Tomahawk Nation:
University of Florida Cornerback Janoris Jenkins
becomes the 24th Gator arrested under Urban Meyer
Yummy details at the link.
Even UD wouldn’t go this far in describing big time university sports. I mean, there’s … Why can’t I think of anything? Maybe Murray Sperber’s right!
A Memphis paper interviews him about the recent unpleasantness there involving a basketball player at the University of Memphis who seems not to have taken his SAT. I mean, he didn’t forget to take it. Someone else took it for him.
He was a one-and-done student. This is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of thing where an athlete, because of irrational rules, spends a year at a university before entering professional life. The university’s thrilled, of course — unlike the professional world, it doesn’t have to pay the player four hundred million dollars a year. It has to pay the player nothing. And the player gives it its most amazingest winningest season ever!!! Until the NCAA takes all the wins away because someone else took the student’s SAT so he could be admitted to the university.
“The NCAA really insists on this ‘student-athlete’ thing,” said Sperber, the author of “Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education.” “And I assume the NCAA put pressure on (NBA commissioner) David Stern to institute the one-year policy. The NCAA ought to rethink the whole thing, but there’s so much pressure within the NCAA and from big-time coaches to keep it in place. A one-and-done player did get Calipari to a Final Four. But you have to wonder: Did it really help the University of Memphis at the end of the day?”
The negative impact of the past week on the school’s reputation cannot be measured, Sperber said. In recent days, the phrases “University of Memphis” and “major violations” got constant play throughout the media. Sperber said he feels certain there are Memphis fans who insist the ordeal is a small price to pay for a trip to the national title game, but the effect can be corrosive and lasting.
“I’m sure the Chronicle of Higher Education will report on this, and people in academic circles will say, ‘Oh, there’s Memphis again,'” Sperber said. “It just seems like a travesty forcing these players to go to college. And poor Memphis, it’s like a roller coaster. They got to the very top of the thing with the Final Four, and now that coaster is heading down and they may not even get to keep the banners. I guess the whole thing could have been avoided.”
I just thought you might like it.
The Belgian bodybuilding championship has been canceled after doping officials showed up and all the competitors fled.
A doping official says bodybuilders just grabbed their gear and ran off when he came into the room.
“I have never seen anything like it and hope never to see anything like it again,” doping official Hans Cooman said Monday.
Twenty bodybuilders were entered in the weekend competition.
Cooman says the sport has a history of doping “and this incident didn’t do its reputation any good.”
… of university sports.
A reader sent this in to Dave Barry:
Q. While viewing ESPN‘s Sept. 18 broadcast of the Indiana-Kentucky football game, did you hear an example of language usage so excellent that it caused you to spew beer from your nose?
A. Yes. The color commentator referred to a former coach as “a living legend when he was still alive.”