Tunisia’s sports minister coins the term “stadium terrorism.” The FIFA representative reviewing the situation in Greece (he’ll be lucky to get out of Athens alive) calls it “unbearable that people are scared to go to a stadium.”

You never see women or children at many world soccer games. Before (on transportation to the games), during (at the games), and after (on the streets; in the pubs), the host city is on fire with drunk, rioting, gun-bearing men. Despite the measures governments have introduced (games played in empty stadia; tv blackouts; massive police presence and massive arrests; physical separation of opposing fans; targeting of known thugs and gangs) everything’s getting worse and worse and unbearably worse.

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Only it isn’t unbearable. Scores die after games, and cities are torched; armed black-shirted gangs rush the pitch during the game and go after referees. So what. FIFA – a virtually all-male, ridiculously corrupt organization – will do nothing about the latest atrocity in Greece. It’s bearable. It’s all bearable. It’s all boys incorrigibly and escalatingly being boys.

And when it gets even worse – when players and referees are beaten to death during games televised all over the world – FIFA will still do nothing. Unfathomable amounts of money are being made, a lot of it by that organization’s corrupt officials. No one’s going to mess with a good thing.

The director of performance for UM’s football team receives $250,000 a year for knowing how to perform.

Recently, during a very long night of challenges, he hit all his marks and then some.

UM, a once impressive school, is now mainly known for drunks and Rich Rodriguez.

Hell, it isn’t even very non-weaponized thug-friendly.

Terrified spectators are scattering.

Greek soccer has been plagued by pitch invasions and violence on and off the pitch for years and authorities have repeatedly promised to clean up the game.

However, attendances have dwindled and this season only four clubs in the 16-team top division have posted average attendances of more than 5,000 spectators per league game.

In their own defense, referees will soon start packing heat, so that we can expect to see the kind of on-field fire fights that will, to be sure, remain attractive to a certain audience demographic (i.e., fans who also pack, and who can’t wait to join the fun), but will alienate any remaining non-weaponized spectators. Thus the 3,000 or so people who show up for most of the current matches will dwindle to a few hundred fully outfitted maniacs.

But hey. Gangs are people, too.

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Corruption, referee intimidation, fan violence has been pandemic for years in Greece.

Add a league match in one of the world’s most anarchic states.

Add a team owner who’s a paranoid, violent, Russian oligarch.

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I mean, so far, so good — no one cares that FIFA is hopelessly filthy.

No one cares that people routinely get beaten and killed in and around world soccer matches.

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The whole thing: FIFA, club owners, fascist fans — it’s just pigs happy in the swill, and no one wants to interrupt the fun because if you do these people will blow your fucking head off.

They’re Walter Sobchak, at 1:30

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But Walter’s so crazy that eventually his mad pistol-whipping ways get him in a little trouble, just like his real-life equivalent, eminent Russian statesman Ivan Savvidis. Ivan doesn’t go anywhere without serious personal weaponry and several heavily armed guards, and when a Greek team he owns ran into some trouble with a referee yesterday, he stormed the field along with his armed guard and with his hand on his gun and informed the referee “You’re over.”

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What a pretty picture. Look at this (scroll down): Proud fascist enforcers, all of them dressed in black, swagger fully weaponized onto the field of play to kill the referee. It takes you back.

And forward. Nihilist kitsch again becomes the way of the world. You can see its most naked return on the fields of FIFA.

Life of the mind, USA.

When Pittsburgh swooped in to snatch a likely-to-be-dismissed Kevin Stallings from an underachieving Vanderbilt basketball program, it raised eyebrows. When he failed to win a single game in ACC play in his second season as the Panthers head coach, it raised fans’ ire. And now that it looks like it will cost the program nearly $10 million just to get rid of him, Stallings is raising one last thing — a question.

Just how incompetent IS the University of Pittsburgh athletic department?

How the fuck do we not comply with this?

… dumb.

You knew we’d check in on Western Kentucky University again, right? We’ve been following the fortunes of that school ever since Professor Robert Dietel, way back in 2006, excited intense ridicule and hatred from the school’s trustees for warning that going Division I would destroy the school’s finances.

Now ruined, and a laughingstock, WKU does what they all do: It hires a new deer-in-the-headlights president, a guy who looks the part cuz he wears bowties, and they send him out to shut down what’s left of the school’s academic side. Enjoy his picture. Note the deer-in-the-headlights look. And the This is a Real University; I’m a Real President bowtie. The copyright holder on the bowtie thing is sports-whore supreme Gordon Gee.

The trustees insisted that Dietel was an asshole and that classy coaches like Bobby Petrino and an incredibly expensively recruited (but less carefully vetted) football team would make enrollments skyrocket…

That rocket went flaccid and now Bowtie Bambi meets the glare of national news cameras head-on…

Life of the mind, USA, 2018: An empty basketball court and a fan who argues that if it still worked…

… Torrey Green, who graduated with a top-ranked 7.0 sexual assault average, and on whom the school looks back with pride. No better time for the school to celebrate Green than now, when he’s on trial for “12 felonies — including kidnapping and rape — in seven cases, after seven women came forward saying he sexually assaulted them while he was a student in Logan between 2013 and 2015.”

Of course, they came forward years ago, but USU didn’t do anything. USU puts its resources into maintaining Torrey Green’s hero-page.

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USU’s finest is facing so many charges that his lawyer, in an act of editing-for-concision that Scathing Online Schoolmarm finds commendable, asks that all the cases “be merged to avoid ‘redundancy.'”

It’s so tiresomely repetitive, the details of one (yawn) rape case after another… You’ve heard one rape case you’ve heard ’em all…

This way we’ll save time and keep the jury awake…

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And after all, I mean… entre nous… it’s Utah, where a man can lose track of his sister wives… I’m sure it’ll be easy to convince a local judge that Green’s large blur of womenfolk can be herded into one trial.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm loves that genre of academic writing which is the outraged high-ranking campus sports-whore attacking legitimate professors and students at uber-jock universities. Before SOS talks about the email from an Auburn University dean that appears in my headline, she wants to share with you an earlier example of this classic clown-school missive.

In 2013, a women’s lacrosse coach at the infamous University of Louisville was informed that one of her players had been seen exercising her personal freedom by wearing a Michigan State sweatshirt. The coach left the following voice mail for the player:

Darby, change your clothes, don’t bother coming to practice today. Do you know that I just got a phone call about you wearing a Michigan State shirt? You obviously have no idea how serious athletics is at the University of Louisville. I do not want to see your face today until after practice, but your butt better be up in my office with a Louisville shirt on your chest when practice ends.

Schools like Auburn and Louisville are like this: They got nowhere else to go. They got nothin’ else. Nor, being game-cults, do they appreciate Winston Smiths who fail to conform to the cult. These schools got brain bashin’ ball or they got nothin’. They’re not about to go down without a fight when alien invaders like the New York Times expose their intellectual nothingness; they’re not going to let some random woman athlete introduce changes to their uniform; and they’re certainly not going to let some dissenting legitimate scholar get off scot-free. Me big macho school, on field and off!! GRRRRRRRR don’t make me mad….

It’s like… NCAA: FAAAAACK YOU.

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Auburn got so pissed at the econ professor on the faculty who kept complaining about its massive bogus course system – centered on the keep ’em eligible public administration major – that its president

took the highly unusual step of suggesting that the entire economics department be moved elsewhere.

In a memo written on presidential letterhead, [Jay] Gogue recommended that [Michael] Stern be assigned a new supervisor and that the department “no longer be a part of the College of Liberal Arts.”

It’s just what I’ve been predicting, mes petites, and Auburn will clearly be the first school to actually do it: The football cult’s economics department, with its expert financial review of the athletic program and its commitment to academics, must go. Exile. Banishment. Siberia.

And not only that – see again the email that I quote in my headline, from Auburn Dean Joseph Aistrup to the dissenting econ prof. Belitting; threats; a demand for recantation. The whole Orwellian number.

Indeed here is the model for the econ prof’s next step: Room 101, followed by I ask only for you to accept my love of Our Leader.

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[One Auburn professor] put a picture of Aistrup arm in arm with… the athletics director, on his office door, alongside photos of Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong-un.

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SOS thanks a reader for sending her Jack Stripling’s CHE piece.

The American version of Sophie’s Choice is playing out in Mississippi, and it is every bit as agonizing – more agonizing – than what Sophie endured.

Guns v Football. Guns, Football, Collide. Guns or Football. Guns, Threats, and SEC Football.

If a new bill fails to pass, you will have to choose between the two things you love most: Your AR-15 and the Rebels. You will not be able to bring your gun to university football games.

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Security officer, Vaught–Hemingway Stadium: You may keep one: football or the gun.

Snopes: Take my little girl! Take my baby!

… about his university’s athletics program. This blog chronicles tons of econ profs – people capable of actually running the numbers – who turn against their employers and detail the lies the schools tell about the money they’re spending on football. The latest guy is Colorado State University’s Steven Shulman.

[Student fees] have risen 45 percent since Tony Frank was appointed president of CSU in 2008.

Institutional support to athletics has almost tripled since 2008. These subsidies transfer resources from academics into athletics. As a result, CSU has not been able to increase instructional spending per student or protect itself from revenue declines.

Every time the state cuts CSU’s budget, the university is forced to cut academic programs. Only athletics is insulated from budget cuts.

CSU’s way-expensive new stadium hosts losing games attended by fewer and fewer people.

A commenter on Shulman’s column puts the matter well.

CSU [has] gambled $450 million (in bond repayments) on a sport that is a dying a slow death. Empty seats, phony bowl games, ethics problems – everywhere you look there are reasons to question the new stadium decision. The project can only be justified and supported by a few old alumni counting on tax benefits.

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That “old alumni” thing has UD thinking about how we might retrofit football into a truly twenty-first century university curriculum.

Pretty much everyone agrees football is over – dying a slow death, as the commenter notes.

Figure it’s got another twenty years as a professional sport, ten years at the non-southern university, and thirty years at the southern. (Down south, they’ll have to wait until the fan melee that turns into a mass shooting to really finish off the game.) It’s not too soon to start thinking about how we can excite our ahistorical students (postmodern Americans are ignorant of history, and live in what one theorist calls a “radical presentness”) in things antiquarian by featuring football, alongside, say, the Salem Witch Trials, as examples of pre-Enlightenment American ways of life. We might not be able to get our students to study Latin, but we can certainly interest many of them in the study of football, which will feature, for instance, field trips to massive rotting campus colosseums.

UD has long said that in a few years schools like Rutgers – run by jokesters and jocksters – will begin phasing out their economics departments, or at the very least introducing litmus tests for new hires.

Econ professors are among the very few on any campus who can actually run the numbers on athletics programs. The loudest among these professors often have access to the local newspaper’s opinion columns, and they can stir up outrage against massive sports deficits. The cleanest thing to do will be to shut them, and their departments, down. You could, short of that, hire only economists who have demonstrated that no amount of sports-related deficit is too great to outweigh their adoration of athletics.

Meanwhile, Rutgers has the curse of Mark Killingsworth, an econ prof who relentlessly, in opinion piece after opinion piece, chronicles what he describes as the brainlessness and insanity of that school’s president and board of trustees as they drive the place into incredible debt.

[The] real [athletics] deficit for 2016-17 can now stand up and be counted: it comes to a total of $35.4 million plus $11.9 million, or $47.3 million — the largest deficit in the history of Rutgers athletics. Despite [President Robert] Barchi’s oft-expressed pious hopes for athletics self-sufficiency, the program has now blown through a grand total of $193.1 million in deficit spending since he arrived in New Brunswick.

If you think this is bad … there’s worse. From the university’s response to another OPRA request, I learned that Rutgers currently has an outstanding total of $33.13 million in “internal debt” — the last of which won’t be paid off until 2030.

… The members of Rutgers’ Board of Governors have shown that, collectively, they are either too ignorant or too timid to do anything to restore even the most modest degree of fiscal sanity to Rutgers athletics: for them, anything goes. Apparently, they don’t understand, or don’t care, that athletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.

The only way to shut this guy up is to dump his entire department – call it a fiscal emergency, brought on by a temporarily high athletics deficit.