A Potemkin Village is “a pretentiously showy or imposing façade intended to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.” The three Bloomberg writers who make this comparison – it appears in a long piece summarizing the ongoing national basketball scandal, which they call “the worst since college basketball players were caught shaving points for gamblers in the 1950s” – mean to suggest, I guess, that the glitzy University of Louisville basketball team masked whatever there was of the shabby non-basketball University of Louisville.

It’s quite a statement. Can we have gotten to the point where we’re not a tad astonished by it?

I mean, yes, one remembers the witty president of the University of Oklahoma back in the ‘fifties telling a senator he wanted to “build a university our football team can be proud of.” More recently, the president of Ohio State, “asked whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, … said: ‘No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.'” One has no trouble imagining how the puling little president of the University of Alabama feels about his stature vis-à-vis Nick Saban. And of course we know how the leadership of Penn State felt about that… curious couple, Sandusky and Paterno. Going to jail for them was a small price to pay.

Still…

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And does the analogy really work? For after all, as is the way with many big-time athletic programs, there was never a clear separation between the shabby embarrassing academic UL and the rich degenerate basketball UL. The squalor of college sports spreads itself all over the campus – literally, as in the way the University of Georgia campus for a long time looked the morning after big games; and figuratively, as in the establishment of a house of prostitution in a UL dorm for players, recruits, and the fathers of recruits.

It’s not really that you’ve got on the one hand the glitzy sports program and on the other the hidden humiliating university. The whole thing tends toward looking like the Calais Jungle.

Ah, shaddap. This is Arkansas. No one gives a shit.

Jose Maria Marin, the 85-year-old former president of the Brazilian football federation, is out on bail during the [FIFA] trial and is living under house arrest at his $3.5 million apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower.

…players it turns into vegetables.’

“The Texans QB visibly quivered and twitched
on the ground as an official stood over him…”

[Sing it.]

Everybody’s talking at me
I don’t hear a word they’re saying
Only the echoes of my mind

Everybody’s talking at me
Can’t hear a word they’re saying
Only the echoes of my mind

Just read through this update on FIFA
And I’m sure you will want to shout vifa!
Its governing body
Can be a bit naughty.
It’s the moral equiv. of a queef (ugh).

That’s the kind of logic we appreciate here at University Diaries.

And it’s what’s made the University of Louisville – “a sports empire on top of a midlevel commuter school” – what it is today: An object of intense interest on the part of the FBI and many other law enforcement agencies. A national disgrace. An international joke. Everything.

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With kings and princes and nobility and everything.

“I don’t think [the fired athletic director] gets this, and I don’t think [the jail-bird-in-waiting ex-president] got it,” says state Rep. Jim Wayne, whose district includes parts of Louisville. “The University of Louisville is a state facility … and it is not their kingdom. They are not the kings, and the princes, and the nobility in the kingdom. They’re temporary stewards of these programs. And instead of seeing this as something that they should be responsible for and hold high ethical standards as they execute their jobs, they’re doing just the opposite.”

In Louisville, “doing just the opposite” means shaking the school upside down and pocketing every little piece of coin and cash that falls out of it.

Kings have palaces!

[The school’s arena] required a bailout to keep it from defaulting on more than $300 million in bond debt. [The] athletic department agreed to pay an additional $2.4 million a year. The public, meanwhile, was saddled with another 25 years of arena-related taxes totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. In the end, the arena will cost more than $1 billion, with taxpayers funding most of it. Despite the bailout, some experts fear the FBI probe’s effect on the arena’s primary tenant could be catastrophic.

That seems like a lot when vanishingly few people go to the games.

[Johnny] Manziel … won the Heisman in 2012… Other recent Heisman winners with questionable off-field problems include Auburn’s Cam Newton, who was in the middle of an NCAA eligibility investigation when he won the 2010 trophy.

In 2013, Florida State’s Jameis Winston was being investigated for a rape accusation in the middle of his Heisman run. There are more than 900 Heisman voters, and Winston was left off 115 ballots entirely. He still won the award with the fifth-largest margin ever, and he was never convicted in the investigation.

Other Heisman winners include O.J. Simpson, who was charged in an infamous murder case and later convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping in a separate 2007 case. Then there’s LSU’s Billy Canon, the 1959 Heisman winner who later in life spent more than two years in federal prison as a result of a massive counterfeiting scheme.

But the only player ever to have to vacate a trophy was USC running back Reggie Bush, who was found guilty in an NCAA investigation of taking improper benefits from an agent while at USC.

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

[Last February, University of Oklahoma Heisman candidate Baker Mayfield was arrested for public intoxication.] In a dash cam video that went viral, Mayfield was seen shouting and cursing at police officers. When confronted, he attempted to run, only to be tackled into a wall. The video also showed him on the brink of crying in the back of a police car.

… Mayfield grabbed his crotch and shouted expletives in OU’s game against Kansas. Combined with the arrest and Mayfield’s flag-plant at Ohio State that caused a stir, Mayfield was forced to deliver his third public apology in less than a year.

There’s a reason [Texas] A&M hasn’t won. I think the reason is because they haven’t had a coach this good. When they had Bear Bryant in the 50s, if they hadn’t been on probation in ’56, they would’ve gone to the national title game then, or they would’ve been in the running for it…

I tell you what, and this is going to make [Southern Methodist University] fans mad, but if you want to keep your coach, if you really like Chad Morris then you’ve gotta get off the Boulevard and go to games… [H]ow are you going to bring recruits in there and the place is not even half full?…

I took my kids to the tailgating scene on the [SMU] Boulevard. It was amazing. We had been to Arkansas two weeks earlier and I would tell you that that was a better scene than what I saw in Fayetteville.

… It’s just as good as the one at Ole Miss that everyone talks about.

… It’s scenic with the trees forming that canopy. It’s great. The band comes marching down. And I’m looking around, there’s all these people, young guys and young girls, with dogs on leashes at these tailgating parties. I’m like who’s bringing their dogs to a tailgating party, and what are they going to do with them when they got to the game? Then I got my answer. Nobody goes into the game. They have got to find a way to get people from that tailgating scene into the stadium. How you get those people to take that five minute walk? I don’t know. But if they could, they could create a really nice atmosphere. The stadium’s nice. The tailgating scene is nice. You could sway some recruits. That grass berm behind the end zone. That’s all really nice, but they’ve gotta get people into the stadium.

… Listen, you people have gotta go and you’ve gotta fill up this place. That is a shame. It’s a disgrace.

… The disgrace is that you don’t walk five minutes off this boulevard to get in that game. If you’re not going to do that for your team, well shame on you.

In other words, at Sacramento State, it’s a win-win!

[A] Thanksgiving football game … ended in a bench-clearing brawl and led to at least one arrest… After a separate but seemingly related fight, Branden Diaz, 18, of Teaneck was arrested Thursday for allegedly assaulting a juvenile on Elizabeth Avenue, where the buses for the Hackensack Comets football team were parked… At a snowy Thanksgiving game in 2014, a Hackensack player intercepted a pass from Teaneck, going on a substantial run before veering into his team’s sideline. When Teaneck players who were trying to cut short the Hackensack player’s run also fell into the Hackensack sideline, a fight ensued… Also on this Thanksgiving, a fight broke out during the Eastside-Kennedy football game. Earlier in the month, there was a fight between the football teams of Pope John XXIII in Sparta and St. Joseph Regional in Montvale. Police also recently arrested an 18-year-old at a Ramapo High School football game. The 18-year-old was allegedly fighting an unidentified juvenile.

… “Our schools and the district as a whole recognizes that the behavior on the field on Thanksgiving Day is not the kind of behavior that is representative or reflective of the high standards we have for our students,” said [the superintendent].

Uh. Really?

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And how yummy is it that Pope John XXIII beat the shit out of Saint Joseph?

Cal football suffered a drastic year-to-year attendance drop this season after home games at California Memorial Stadium brought in an average of 36,548 fans per game — a 22 percent drop from last year’s average of 46,628.

… The drop in Cal football’s attendance comes as Cal Athletics faces huge interest payments from debt incurred by the 2012 renovation of Memorial Stadium and construction of its athletics complex. In total, Cal Athletics holds more than $400 million in debt, the most of any athletic department in the country.

… [One Berkeley student commented:] “If you see all these empty seats, you don’t feel a desire to go back.”

… at the University of Florida.

Watch closely.

[New South Wales] is planning for the likelihood that its new $700 million Allianz Stadium will be more than half-empty most of the time…

There are only three events that might draw more than a half-full crowd to the new stadium (and there’s no guarantee that its other events will fill even half of it), and Allianz will be competing to host those three with other, and in some respects superior, venues.

NSW plans to rebuild Allianz with two seating plans: a championship mode for the full 45,000-seat capacity and a “club” mode for only 30,000 where the upper stands will be blocked by a large advertising and information screen.

See how it’s done, every public university in the south? You simply block that vast empty acreage with vast advertising screens — a significant enhancement of the fan experience, for what fan doesn’t pant with excitement at the prospect of inescapable miles and miles of shrieking advertisements?