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.

Its staff linked to one of UD‘s Rich Rodriguez posts.

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.

.. Courtney Wang play frisbee in the Chesapeake Open.

She plays for Scandal.

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!

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

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.

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.