This is the first sentence of an article by Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post. The link simply takes you to the front page of the Post; but you don’t need much more than the first sentence, do you?
This is the first sentence of an article by Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post. The link simply takes you to the front page of the Post; but you don’t need much more than the first sentence, do you?
If I can be sure of one thing about the moneyed mess that college sports in this country have become, it is that I don’t feel sorry for the schools that have willingly made basketball and football coaches the highest-paid public employees in thirty-nine out of fifty states while maintaining their showy convictions regarding the sanctity of amateurism.
[H]is verbal SAT score of 420 was below the minimum required at Florida, where the majority of freshmen scored 600 or above…
[There was] destructive impunity, drugs, and the company of bad actors he met through Florida football. This was the time when he snapped a selfie that later went viral — posing in front a mirror, a raised Glock handgun in his left hand…
[T]he Gators had so much contact with the Gainesville police that [Urban] Meyer once addressed officers at roll call. A running tally of arrests compiled by the Orlando Sentinel during Meyer’s six-year tenure reached at least 31, for offenses ranging from firing an AK-47 in public to throwing food at an employee at a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop.
The Boston Globe revisits the University of Florida’s contribution to the tragedy of Aaron Hernandez.
T.J. Gassnola is the president and head of the board of trustees of the University of Kansas. He is the face of the school. The front porch of the school.
T.J. runs basketball at KU, and basketball is just about all you’re ever going to read about when it comes to KU.
More specifically, he runs KU’s players. T.J. is in charge of giving them and their families huge wads of cash under the table at Las Vegas hotels to play at KU. T.J. keeps KU all basketball all the time. He is KU’s VIP, MVP, and HRH all rolled into one.
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Everyone knows there’s nothing wrong with outfits like Adidas – for whom T.J. also works – giving money to future basketball greats. This wise investment often starts well before these players launch their adventures in university education… well before they decide to take advantage of the intellectual resources of places like Lawrence.
KU enjoys an extremely lucrative business relationship with Adidas.
Marc Emmert’s multimillion dollar NCAA salary is predicated on his absolute indifference to the transformation of once-respectable American universities into stinky petty hilarious crime gutters, places run by people like T.J. Gassnola.
So. All good. Everyone gets rich: The player, his family, Marc Emmert, the University of Kansas, and ol’ T.J.
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So… FUCK the FBI. What the fuck? It sashays in like it’s king of the world, drags T.J. into court and makes him sing in exchange for reduced prison time for the many many naughty things T.J. has been up to … Worse yet, it makes KU and Emmert scrunch up their features, take a deep breath, and blow out the very best horseshit they can come up with about how shocked and disappointed and eager to be helpful they are…
UD‘s only sorry this woman is no longer KU’s chancellor – she came to KU after running Chapel Hill into the ground cuz of their athletic scandal, remember? She’s just the sort of person you want running a basketball factory, and she’s still getting paid too.
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We had a nice tidy world here, see. Emmert and the whole “university” thing at KU did the work of shedding respectability-light upon the scheme so no one would think anything dark and criminal was going on. The players and the corporate suits and the coaches pocketed the money and kept their mouths shut. But now T.J.’s talking, and it’s… well, it’s Kafka, kiddies.
The most absurd moment of a most absurd day at the federal fraud case featuring one of college basketball’s most absurd characters had to be the following … well, actually, there are many contenders.
Maybe it was when Billy Preston wrecked his Dodge Charger on the campus of the University of Kansas. The fact a top incoming basketball recruit was driving such a car caused concern with the KU compliance office, which investigated who owned the vehicle.
Text messages later revealed Preston’s mother Nicole Player bragging about buying the car for her son, but … the car was … registered with “Nicole Player’s recently deceased grandmother” who lived in Florida.
KU was fine with this explanation. Who wouldn’t be?
[I]n the process of looking into the car, KU discovered a wire transfer to Player that came from a man named T.J. Gassnola. Player lived in Euless, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Gassnola hailed from Ludlow, Massachusetts, a little town a couple hours west of Boston.
There appeared to be no good reason for this exchange – and there wasn’t, at least by NCAA standards. Gassnola, a member of Adidas’ so-called “Black Ops” group and AAU team owner, detailed from the witness stand how he had plied Player with $89,000 over the course of nearly a year, including a $30,000 cash payout in a New York hotel room and another $20,000 brick delivered while in Las Vegas.
But wait, that’s not the best part.
Worried there was no proper explanation for the payments, Player texted Gassnola to inform him she had told KU officials the two had been involved in an “intimate” relationship, believing such activity would somehow make it NCAA legal.
If you can’t get enough of this stuff – and there’s TONS – go here.
Better yet, go here. This narrative, penned by Kafka after he dropped acid, is truly one of the greats.
An Auburn student explains why even that football factory’s students leave football games early. Or don’t go at all.
[T]he men going to trial [in the national basketball bribery scandal] are facing decades in prison for something that no one truly believes is a crime. We know that the victims in this case — the universities — are not actually victims, that they are willingly complicit in the deals that get done. If they weren’t, would Kansas have signed a 12-year, $191 million extension on their apparel deal with Adidas after Adidas victimized the university by allegedly funneling $90,000 to [one basketball recruit] and $20,000 to [another]?
If I may quote myself.
And damned if we don’t have a tradition. Now comes Hoss Willis (not his real first name, but see if you can watch this tv news report about all the people involved in this latest Baylor University story and not conclude that every one of them should be named Hoss) (as in Hoss) which some guys uh these two guys claim done said bad shit ’bout our womenfolk and plus you know blacks and Jews and all…
UD is curious about one small detail. Pussy singular or pussies plural? Here’s what one attorney charges:
“Willis made [a] comment to the effect ‘the reason Baylor has such highly qualified (black) football players is because Baylor has the best blonde haired, blue-eyed…’ and he used a very bad term relating to the young girls at Baylor.”
I’m thinking pussy singular.
UD also likes the way the news report, whenever it mentions that an investigator flew to France, shows us a picture of the Eiffel Tower with an airplane next to it.
It is because you are so entitled.
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It’s an age-old problem, and it’s hitting, of all places, ‘bama. The smarter your students, the less likely they are to do something as stupid as go to a football game.
So, you know, you make the argument that football deserves all this revenue cuz it’s going to make the school so much better, and in ‘bama’s case it does. It does make the school better. Much smarter students have been enrolling.
However: The fewer your drunken dipshits, the emptier your seats; and ‘bama’s student section is emptying out, man. Big-time.
I believe the pertinent phrase is victim of your own success. Hoist by your own petard.
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You know it’s getting really bad when the local press starts trying to educate ‘bama students in how to be fans.
[I]f Alabama fans really wanted to help create a home-field advantage inside Bryant-Denny Stadium on Saturday, then they wouldn’t drink (too much) alcohol before the game.
Most Alabama fans don’t know what it’s like to go four quarters in the heat, but it’s tough work. It’s a process, and that process starts long before game time. Look, it’s going to be dangerously hot on Saturday. Don’t be that fan passing out in the fourth quarter. Be safe. Drink something other than Pappy’s whiskey.
These instructions might be meaningful to the great-grandchildren of tenant farmers; I doubt out-of-state merit scholars looking for low tuition will make much sense of instructions about game attendance that involve fine-tuning your alcoholism so that you can withstand hours of torturous heat.
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Tsar Nicky’s anger with his subjects grows with each game. Eventually he will order a random group of non-ticket-holders lined up at the very top of the stadium and shot so as to fall ever so slowly all the way down to his statue. The rest of the students will get the message.
Instead of lying through his teeth about it forever, Jerome Allen has decided to admit that he took mucho money and goodies from stinky Philip Esformes to lie about the basketball skills of stinky’s son so the son could get admitted to U Penn. Once safely at Penn, the kid’s lack of basketball skills immediately rendered him useless to the team; but meanwhile, there he was, at Penn.
He’s a senior now, and, the story of his fraudulent admission having broken, is maybe embarrassed. But when your father’s about to go on trial for the largest welfare fraud in history, his having bought your admission to college probably doesn’t loom that large.
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Penn’s own coverage worries about “a confirmed instance where bribery benefitted a student’s admission into the University.”
Yes, American university football made it for one week without any criminal behavior. This may be a record.
But all good things must come to an end, and one of Penn State’s most revered players stole a bike and then dumped it because “he did not feel like walking back to his residence building that day.”
Since this is simply the sort of thing you do when you are King of the Campus, locals doubt he will suffer any consequences.