Baby, baby, baby don’t sue me
Ooh, please don’t sue me for forty mill
I’ve got this red-faced shame-faced flustered feelin’ inside me
Ooh, deep inside me and it hurts so bad

Baby, baby, where did our love go?
Ooh, don’t you sue me
Don’t you sue me no more (baby, baby)
Ooh, baby

… sets itself up as a moral arbiter of Greek soccer fans.

On this side, ladies and gentlemen, FIFA – arguably the world’s current most corrupt high-profile organization – and on the other side, waves of psychotic Athenians. Will FIFA expel the Greeks for their years of gunplay and bloodshed and bombings?

Oh, sweetie. Wake up and smell the money.

WSU’s athletic department’s deficit ballooned to more than $50 million the past several years [AD Bill Moos] was at the helm, and in 2018, it grew another $9 million…

This is in addition to the university’s $30 million deficit outside of athletics that has already led to budget cuts. Oh, and the school now needs to take on a $30 million project to install a computer system so employees can be paid on time, among other crucial university functions.

… The university tried punching above its weight in the Pac-12 by building a shiny new football operations building and hiring expensive coaches.

… Many are still mourning the loss of the university’s performing arts program due to budget cuts.

They don’t come no dumber than WSU.

You don’t need David Lynch to tell you that it’s always kinkiest in the heartland.

… about the sordid sell-out (“probably the most damaging thing I’ve seen personally”) its curriculum turned out to be in the exposure of its world-famous athletics scandal. The article is, in the words of Roger DeBris, drenched with historical goodies, including the altogether too fine irony of the provost lecturing UD‘s buddy Jay Smith on the ever-so-important business of curricular integrity:

I strongly believe that University leaders can and should maintain oversight over course offerings, which includes the right to participate in individual course selection decisions. [While faculty have the right to teach, investigate and publish freely,] the exercise of these rights should not interfere with the overriding obligation of an institution to offer its students a sound education.

This from the school whose leaders for twenty years oversaw hundreds of totally bogus courses. This by way of explaining why Jay’s course in the history of the scandal and the corruption of university sports generally just… wouldn’t do… wouldn’t be up to the strict intellectual standards of… oh, let Jay say it:

It’s so great. It’s a great irony, that we had such lax oversight for so long, that completely phantom classes just fell off the radar of the dean’s office and were allowed to propagate, and proliferate, for two decades. And that a course that, in part, examines the culture and the mechanisms that made that failure possible, and puts all of it in historical context, is regarded as suspicious.

It’s the Blanche DuBois syndrome down there, y’all. I mean, when you’re a totally broken down ol’ thing and not only do you not know it, but you’re flouncing around all superior-like…

And now they have another new athletic director! One of thousands!

Among [the new AD’s] first to-do items will be hiring men’s and women’s basketball coaches. The women’s program, coached by Angela Jackson for 15 seasons, lost a Division I-record 59 games in a row over the last three seasons before ending the streak in February. The men’s program let go of [its last coach] after the Cougars went 3-29 in his eighth season.

How do they even field teams?

Why does a school that’s so bad it’s practically non-existent have an athletics program?

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

Ask the taxpayers of Illinois. Maybe they can tell you why they’re paying for this guy.

In August 2012, [Chris] Zorich agreed in court to pay back more than $300,000 in unaccounted [charitable foundation] funds. In July 2013, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges for failing to file federal income tax returns from 2006 to ’09.

Stealing from Chicago State is certainly a tradition among quite a few of the people who work or have worked there. I guess Chicago State, and the taxpayers, appreciate traditions.

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

Or ask a philosopher. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it…

… in Italy.

Their absolutely massive and growing athletics debt is attracting a lot of press attention, especially after an audit which disclosed just the sort of greed, lies, stupidity, and desperation you’d expect from a humongous sports program humongously tanking.

But it’s not just about numbers: WSU crowned the… troubled Mike Leach king of the school (Mike absconded clutching most of the school’s money and trailing lawsuits); their football players typically rack up more arrests than any other team; and their professors? Don’t ask.

And of course there’s a brand new management team in place! Life will soon be beautiful all the time.

Somewhere in the distant inaccessible reaches of Washington State University lies the crashed alien spaceship from which the school will extract the $67 million they need to pay their athletics deficit.

Details here.

[A] violent hooligan culture [is] prevalent in Turkish football.

… Since we glorify … violent, macho and toxic hooligan culture, it will be prevalent in Turkish football and lead to many more matches like this.

The UNC Chapel Hill student newspaper’s editor says farewell.

Ever since the response UNC gave to the NCAA regarding our academic scandal, I feel like I attend a school trying to seem rather than to be.

I’ve read the documents pertaining to the case. I understand why UNC did what it did to protect the institution, but I can’t help feeling empty inside because of it.

Our moves make us seem like we did nothing wrong, when in reality we robbed hundreds of the education they were promised. There is no way you will spin it to change my mind. It was a bureaucratic technicality made to preserve the “Southern Part of Heaven” aesthetic of Chapel Hill, not a moral defense that righted the wrong done to the students in the fraudulent classes.

We’re going to let you pay him off.

Several [University of Cinncinnati] students were surprised to learn UC officials have been quietly forcing them to pay thousands of dollars each to subsidize the athletic department…

David Ridpath, associate professor of sports administration at Ohio University, said students at most schools are unaware that their pockets are being emptied by the athletic department.

… UC’s athletic department spent $2.1 million in severance payments in 2017. Approximately 90 percent of payments went toward one person — former UC head football coach Tommy Tuberville.

In October 2016, Tuberville signed a two-year contract extension with a $2.4 million buyout — more than double the buyout under his original contract, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. Less than two months later, Tuberville and UC parted ways.

In the end, the university paid Tuberville $1.9 million — over $900,000 more than payments owed in his original contract.

“It’s ridiculous,” fourth-year construction management student Ryan Burch said. “After the position Tuberville left the program in, he shouldn’t have gotten much of a buyout at all.”

Cincinnati finished 4-8 in Tuberville’s final season as head coach.

FAMU is a really interesting case right now. Like a lot of universities, it has for decades acted on the belief that a big noisy sports program is the front porch of the university. What do you do when the sports program at your school turns out to be the university’s front funeral parlor?

There’s no question that a program that beats people to death puts a damper on things. Fewer students apply. Very few students go to games. You’re losing so much sports revenue that you increase tuition big time, which turns off yet more applicants.

You remember. Its marching band beat a band member to death in a hazing ritual.

In 2015, there was no postseason play, because both football and basketball were under academic sanction.

Also at that time:

There have been four athletic directors and three head football coaches in the past 12 months.

For an approximately two-week overlapping period, the university had two entire football coaching staffs; this resulted in an additional $55,000.

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

How are things now?

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

Well, the marching band hasn’t killed anyone else. That’s the good news.

Otherwise, personnel turnover remains amazing, with a brand new prez and brand new athletic director and TONS of other departures.

And of course the perennial tendency of this jockshop as well as many other jockshops to use the athletic budget for … whatever… remains firmly in place. Let’s see…

[T]he university’s athletics department is facing $1 million in “unbudgeted expenses” for this fiscal year …

[These include:]

FAMU paying out $400,000 in annual leave money due to [its former AD], fired Head Football coach Alex Wood, eight assistant coaches, the budget coordinator/facility manager, compliance coordinator and others who left last year in athletics.

$300,000 in unexpected expenses incurred during last September’s FAMU Tampa Classic against Tennessee State.

$300,000 in added “miscellaneous” expenses.

… The department has de-activated purchasing cards, but it is not clear if that is effective across the board.

Read the whole article. You kinda have to piece things together, don’t you?

Bottom line: FAMU, a scandalously bad university, hands out purchasing cards to any random person they’ve just hired for an athletics department that’s tanking the school’s budget, and ignores whatever “miscellaneous” things they buy with it.

“The NFL has murderers that play for them. Men who beat their wives. Drug addicts. But a man who knelt in protest…”

D.L. Hughley, on NFL owners and Colin Kaepernick.

But it didn’t. It doesn’t. All over the world, the highest-level soccer matches – remarkable numbers of them – are big blood baths.

Isn’t it strange? Don’t you find it strange? I mean, that the whole affair – overseen by one of the world’s most corrupt governing bodies – just grinds on? How much slaughter will international football tolerate before it decides the body count’s too high?

Here’s what old UD thinks.

Murder and mayhem pay. Extremely well. Many fans attend games in order to enjoy these things. War by other means; and I reckon Hobbes is right.

Since everyone knows how significant numbers of international soccer gatherings are likely to turn out, audiences for them are increasingly composed of people already inclined toward mass violence. But given the sport’s popularity, and the money it generates, the situation will be allowed to deteriorate infinitely.