… as Simkin the lawyer says to Moses Herzog, and today’s just been a long long day of university sports corruption, topped off by the just-released big story about Ohio State’s Urban Meyer (what a beaut of a program he ran at Florida before he went to Ohio! OSU really knew what it was after when it hired him; and it got it.) probably having known about his assistant’s frequent domestic violence against the assistant’s then-wife…

Ohio State gives Urban Meyer more than seven million dollars a year to run a dirty program – even dirtier than that of his predecessor, the disgraced Jim Tressel – and everything works beautifully – the team wins games – but what are you going to do about ex-wives who give interviews blowing the lid off of everything?

OSU must be good at multitasking: there’s the sex scandal in the wrestling program too, with the lads routinely diddled by the long-serving team doctor…

University football, UD always says, is a class act. Students at Missouri State University spend a lot of money to give the AD there his couple hundred thousand a year plus country club memberships etc etc etc, and he by way of thanks attacks them publicly for being too smart to waste their time going to football games.

Stadium capacity: 17,500. Average attendance: 8,000 or so. Not a good look.

MSU even brought in liquor this year! The stadium is even named PLASTER. Could we make it any clearer? Get out here and get fucking plastered and I’ll get a salary increase cuz my salary is tied to game attendance, ya little shitskies.

When a liar writes a tell-all, what gets told?

When a salesman writes a memoir, what gets sold?

Dirty university, dirty coach:

A story that never gets old.

It’s been a long time since this blog has featured that genre of sports journalism in which the university football coach is cast as a pietà, an icon of purity and innocence suddenly and shockingly beset by evil.

UD thinks this piece, written by a Bowling Green football fan, qualifies as Coacha Inconsolata writing.

You tend to get CI when a football team is so vile – a complete loser on the field, with a heavy emphasis on criminality – that the choice for booster/journalists becomes very stark: Either contempt or sympathy. Either you allow yourself to acknowledge – and even express – the disgust that the sickening reality of the local team makes you feel, or you cast about for some way to redeem an unredeemable spectacle. You rifle (riffle?) the mythic-familiar and conjure a fallen world whose gratuitous malignity brutalizes Our Mother of the Gridiron, the coach.

Title:

Heat Rising on Bowling Green’s [Coach] Jinks as Arrests Pile Up

Not that Jinks recruited the heat; the heat just satanically piled up from Hades.

The team, the writer notes, is at “the bottom of the standings,” but “No. 1 in the country in offseason arrests.”

Off-season, mind you; there are almost always far more crimes committed during the season.

The writer pithily sums things up:

Six wins in two years.

Five arrests in six months.

Can we say the obvious? Can we say that this is the result you get with a really really shitty coach and program?

No, no. The writer goes on to praise the coach for dismissing the naughty players (what a saint: most coaches would keep dangerous people on campus), and for spouting the most amazing stream of sports cliches in his own defense that UD has ever seen — more even than that scene in Bull Durham. The writer actually quotes the coach’s entire statement in the piece.

The coach, he concludes, is “a good guy,” tasked with the “inherent challenges of monitoring more than 100 college kids.” Problem is, his “inexperienced staff” (another cross he has to bear) “is recruiting too many marginal characters out of self-preservation.” They’re doing it out of self-preservation, after all! Nobody else wants these dudes, but Bowling Green has to take them because … no one else will …

Students there know and respect athletic traditions. Even off-season, in the dead of summer, they gather to remind the world what has for so long made the school famous.

We can only wonder what they have in store for us once the season begins in late August. The excitement is building! Pity Aaron Hernandez can’t be there.

… to tell us what you really think.

“I am a UT graduate, and my offices have helped many students, professors and even sports teams in many ways over the years,” [Rep. John J.] Duncan wrote in [his] newsletter. “I have nothing personally against any coach and hope the new UT coach does well. But I am disgusted by [its coach] buyouts. We just finished paying one former coach $100,000 a month, not to coach, and now we’ll be paying over $8 million to the latest ex-coach.”

But let’s start with an April ceremony at another school: the University of Miami. There much fuss was made about the stellar, the great and the good Morris Esformes, who endowed a chair in medicine at UM.

At one point in the write-up, mention is made of another Morris Esformes chair in medicine, this one at the University of Chicago. But when Esformes’ son and nursing home business partner, Philip, was arrested for having run the largest health-related fraud in US history (he’s still in jail two years later, awaiting trial), the U of C seems to have decided it didn’t want a chair with the name Esformes on it anymore. Maybe the irony of sucking up all that money for medicine when said money came from generations of abused and neglected old people was a little too much for them.

The most recent holder of the University of Chicago medical school’s Esformes chair was suddenly and without comment renamed Louis Block.

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

Incidental among the many crimes sonny is alleged to have committed was the bribery of a high-profile basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania. The bribery was on behalf of sonny’s own little whippersnapper, Morris the Second, who, according to a report, got into Penn on said coach’s recommendation – the kid was a great basketball player, see, and it had nothing to do with the $74,000 in payments Philip made to the coach on the kid’s behalf.

Did the kid ever play on Penn’s team? Nooooo you silly reader…..

Admissions fraud, Medicare fraud, Medicaid fraud, NCAA fraud… This one’s got it all.

… left side high crotch.

It’s too good a last name for a murder mystery writer to pass up, and one Kennedy Killingsworth stars in a series by Betsy Brannon Green.

Meanwhile UD‘s buddy Mark Killingsworth, an entirely actual econ professor at Rutgers, continues his real world, who-did-in-Rutgers-University, investigation in a series of opinion pieces in the NJ Star-Ledger.

Here, though, the mystery merely lies in the numbers — as in, how does Rutgers lie about the athletics deficits that are doing it in? — not in the reason the numbers have added up over the years to a current $47.4 million.

You can of course list particular things that have happened at the school. A commenter on Mark’s piece nicely describes one part of the deal in this way:

[It’s the old] wash/rinse/repeat cycle. Hire expensive coaches. Give them extensions which are not warranted. Coaches under perform, teams are terrible, fire/buy them out and then repeat.

Or, in Mark’s words:

[A]thletics deficit spending makes bigger deficits and lots of embarrassments, including personnel decisions that led to four athletics directors in nine years, three football coaches in seven years and over $9 million in severance pay.

But as to the larger mystery: No mystery at all. Put a bunch of unsupervised guys together, give them funny money, and WHEEEEEEE…

There’s no surreal like big-time athletics surreal, but Ohio State University moves well past surreal all the way to dada. Its posthumously famous team doctor, Richard Strauss, has displaced the composer of Salome on Google’s search page now that there’s a big class-action suit from OSU wrestlers and others against the school that employed him for twenty years.

Despite plenty of evidence, apparently, that their players’ private parts provoked Strauss’s Merry Pranks, coaches and administrators at OSU took no action to stop the music. And because one of the people the players claim did nothing is now a congressman, the story’s getting a lot of play.

Pointing to a recent decision by the UW to hire a new vice provost and a dozen new business analysts to find ways to reduce costs, she said: “We seem to have more and more administrators, who are highly paid, whose job is to administer scarcity.”

Of course when it comes to the almost five million dollars a year UW’s football coach makes, it’s strictly hands-off.

… I mean… If you’re having trouble knowing where to laugh (there are many laugh-locations), UD will insert parenthetical LOLs to help you.

Ready?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Oh right. I need to remind you that … well, let UD‘s pal Mark Killingsworth remind you. Read this.

Ok? Now are you ready? Here goes.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

It’s been another difficult week being a Rutgers football fan. Keith Sargeant of NJ Advance Media reported on Wednesday that starting safety K.J. Gray and reserve linebacker Brendan DeVera had been dismissed from the program. On Thursday night, Sargeant reported as many as eight players were currently under investigation for credit card fraud [LOL] by the Rutgers police department. Sargeant’s colleague, James Kratch, also reported that Gray was recently charged for an incident in June that included driving with an open container and possession of marijuana. Training camp is less than three weeks away from beginning and the Rutgers football team already has their backs against the wall this season. For fans, this Friday the 13th certainly feels like another horror film sequel.

Shades of James Tracy, Mike Leach, and other campus conspiracists.

Rather than simply acknowledging the Sandusky/Nyang’oro Principle at our most sports-obsessed schools – university administrators can’t and won’t control anything having to do with big-ticket athletics – Jim Jordan and his fellow conspiracists deny the fucking obvious and the obvious fucking at one more degenerate American university sports program.

Called to account for what happened at Ohio State, they reach way, way outside the orbit of anyone’s moral responsibility.

Indeed the Deadspin writer I quote in my headline is right: Eventually Jordan and Louie Gohmert and company will determine that like the “dead” “kids” of Sandy Hook and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, their accusers from the wrestling team are all crisis actors.

… toddles along, universally lauded as financially and reputationally enriching, healthy for mind and body, and an epicenter of mainstream all-American manhood in a world gone mad. Massive incessant scandals involving psychotic team doctors, ancient horny ex-coaches in rut, and rampagingly rapist players discourages this nation’s enthusiasm for big-time college athletics not at all. Such things happen, to be sure; but they could happen anywhere – so why not at an institution of higher learning?

The current appearance on the scene of Jordan and Gordon – an ex-coach and an ex-jock school president (Gordon’s currently head of hopeless-drunk West Virginia University) – takes us yet again on a trip down memory lane as we revisit the notoriously sicko programs they oversaw.

Gordon Gee is of course famous for having said, when asked, as president of Ohio State, if he would fire the corrupt football coach: “I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.” He remembers nothing of any sexual abuse scandal involving athletics when he led that school. Jim Jordan similarly remembers nothing of Ohio State’s psycho team doc when he coached there, even though eight players have come forward to say Jordan knew all about the sexual abuse of players, not just from their doctor, but from random members of the Ohio State community who’d jam into the team sauna to masturbate at the sight of the guys.

Yes, it’s a kinked-up world, and the kinkmeisters go on to other presidencies and other leadership positions and nothing happened and away we go.

Ohio State University (OSU) is currently investigating the actions of Dr. Richard Strauss over claims he sexually abused male athletes at the university while he was team doctor for the school’s wrestling program, and other athletic teams, between 1978 and 1998. Strauss [killed himself] in 2005.

OSU have stated that they have received allegations of sexual misconduct by Strauss from 14 sports teams and from patients of the school’s student health services unit …

Mark Coleman, the UFC’s first heavyweight champion, wrestled at Ohio State in the 1980s and 90s…

Coleman is one of [seven] former wrestlers who have come forward in recent days to not only claim Strauss molested them, but that U.S Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican who represents Ohio’s 4th congressional district, had knowledge of these types of accusations regarding Strauss.