… 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.”

This writer sets them out for us, in all their all-American glory.

…College sports at the highest level (meaning Division I revenue programs) is mostly about money. Those at the top of professional and major college athletics — whatever pure PR stance is taken, and has to be — understand gambling is part of why their sports thrive. Bottom line, it adds to the interest…

University of Toledo: You Can Bet on It!

Black will be played by Robert Zemsky, historian.

White will be played by Tim Curley, propagandist.

Dead All Over will be played by Michael Adams, president of the worst university in America.

Today’s meeting of the Knight Commission on university athletics opened with White, proud member of what he calls “the Penn State family,” where he’s Athletic Director.

White speaks:

College athletics is today the healthiest I’ve ever seen it. Everything’s looking great. Everyone here should be celebrating the positive values of university sports. We’ve learned we can be the great success we are and at the same time we can govern ourselves. We don’t need to be governed by outsiders. We’ve made incredible progress on all fronts. Enthusiasm and excitement and participation and profit is at an all-time high. Yes, escalating salaries stress the system. Yes, we continue to be challenged with our expenses. But these things are out of our control. Every one of these expenditures is necessary. We live in a market society, and we have to respond to market conditions.

Black speaks:

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.

Dead All Over:

I resent this negativity. Why, at the University of Georgia we’ve got a heck of a program…

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

Update: This post is now comment enabled.

… UD heads downtown for the Knight Commission meeting on university athletics.

She’ll blog about it later this afternoon.

… who now lives in Virginia, told me about Liberty University‘s plans for a snow-free ski hill some time ago.

It’s become a reality. Ski Channel reports:

And on the seventh day, God Skied.

Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian university in the world, will soon be home to the first Snowflex, snow-free ski hill in the U.S. Snowflex was a quantum leap forward for carpet skiing. The technology was invented in the U.K. in 1993 and has since been installed in a handful of facilities in Europe. The first Snowflex tiles, plastic mats that closely simulate the sensation of snow, were installed above Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia on May 1st. The 110 vertical-foot slope should be open by the summer.

Jerry Falwell, one week before his death, talked about why he wanted to remake the bald hill above the university into an all-year-round ski hill. “There are no beer bashes at Liberty, and no coed dorms, but it doesn’t have to be a monastery. We’re breaking the stereotype that Christian education is synonymous with boredom.”

Surely there will be new tricks and their corresponding trick names whose genesis will be traced back to the dry hills (pun intended) of Liberty University. How about a Jesus Air, Nicodemus Flat Spin, Switch Judas 180, or a Mute Lazarus?

… the idiots running university sports.

[An NCAA report shows] no connection between coaches’ salaries and winning. “The only category of spending that has a statistically significant effect on performance,” the authors say, “is ‘team expenditures’ .” — recruiting, equipment and other “game-day expenses.”

Co-author Jonathan Orszag, an economist who once served on President Clinton’s National Economic Council and as assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, says there are instances in which big salaries for coaches prove to be sound investments. But “on aggregate,” he says, that’s not the case.

“There’s a lot of pressure on university presidents to hire an expensive coach,” says Orszag, whose brother Peter is the new White House budget director, “but the evidence suggests that spending more on coaches does not bring the benefit to the university that they expect.”

Headlines like this.

But that’s just the latest.

… cynical recruitment strategies for its men’s basketball team produce all kinds of problems — including, most recently, loss of a scholarship. Having “fail[ed] to meet the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate cut score,” it is now “the highest-profile of three area programs to suffer penalties in the annual evaluation.”

… makes a sextuple play.

Dalton was arrested on suspicion of felony possession of a controlled substance, minor in possession of alcohol, possession of false identification and three traffic charges, including a lane violation and failure to provide insurance.

Extra point: Comment from one of the article’s readers:

I mean, come on guys, look at players at Ohio State, or Florida. Players on those teams get arrested/suspended often.

Yes. Why pick on him? He’s just a freshman. He’s just getting started.