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?

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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…

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.

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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.

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 …