Well, you’d think so.

With yet another University of Minnesota athletics sex crime, head coach Rich Pitino, of the distinguished sex crime family, calls for one of his private jets, a gift from the taxpayers of that state, to whisk him away.

**********
UD thanks Carl.

Parking lots outside stadiums and other major event spaces represent prime hunting ground for gun-hungry thieves, who can weave through cars trying door handles until they find one that’s unlocked.

1 Rich Rod is our shepherd; we shall not want.

2 He maketh us to lie to his wife: he leadeth us to his erection.

3 He bribeth our staff: he leadeth us to the path of visually enhanced underwear for his cock’s sake.

4 Yea, though we plead for jobs in other departments, we will get no response: for “Coach Rodriguez would be pissed.”

5 Our school preparest six million dollars for him to go away; yea, he will take the money and sue us for forty million more.

6 Surely his woman-beating players will follow us all the days of our life: and we will dwell in the house of The Rod for ever.

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

UD thanks David and John.

Puh-leeze. Get with the program. Nine coaches make over five million. Saban makes eleven million.

… FIFA’s association with corrupt behavior now runs so deep that [one observer suggests] the 113-year-old Fédération Internationale de Football Association should consider a name change.

“Why not? … They need to get bright thinkers to repackage the whole thing. There’s just too much baggage to carry. It’s just an absolute mass of information about corruption wherever you look. The word FIFA globally has got just the worst image in the world: If you are trying to sell the FIFA brand, if anything those four letters stand for absolute total corruption and it’s so unattractive.”

UD says go completely the other way: Transparency. Embrace who you are. Become who you are.

Steal Til You Can’t Steal No More

Ah. The lifeblood of this blog.

What else are you going to watch? “General Hospital”? “Young and the Restless”? “Rachel Ray”? “Maury”? The Liverpool-Swansea EPL match?

A song of praise for NFL football.

… The grunting, juddering, anti-flow of the broader game, the rote brutality and steak-headed backwardness of the action at the play-by-play level, the sudden blundering intrusion of all those honking commercials — for achingly sincere domestic macro-pilsners, for strapping trucks and their loud and swaggering drive-train warranties, for extremely emotional insurance companies and also weirdly ironic insurance companies — at every stoppage of play. In the most basic sense this is just what the average NFL game is, but more worrying for the lords of the league, it is also a description of what is an objectively not-great television show — one with the queasy pacing of rush-hour traffic, the jarring violence of a car accident, and the fuddy legalism of traffic court, and that somehow manages to be three hours long.

… In recent years, [these sorts of] games, resembling out-of-body experiences, have become worryingly common. The sudden glut of ultra-shitty games probably isn’t the greatest long-term problem facing the sport, but it’s also the most obvious and inescapable challenge to all the solemn covenant-pageantry of the NFL; it’s hard to civically sanctify the experience of being bored.

… The league’s signature corruptions have unmistakably diminished both the quality of the games and the broader health of the sport; things just can’t go on this way.

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UD thanks Dirk.

… comes from this Penn State student-run blog:

Grand Jury Appalled At University Marketing Of ‘Fun, Party Atmosphere’

For that’s the real story. Other news outlets are content to quote high-voltage words and terms from the “scathing” report on the lurid, protracted, public, death of frat pledge Timothy Piazza: fraternities are a cancer; Penn State showed shocking apathy in regard to large groups of sadists on its campus.

The Penn State student journalists correctly focus on the cold calculation schools like Penn State and West Virginia (read this; it tells you all you need to know about the death of Piazza) make – to market their schools as almost nothing other than places to drink and go to football games.

Quoting from Karen Weiss, a WVU sociologist, here.

[T]he party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy.

Of course, we could adopt, for the frats, the same model we adopt for university football. We could say that every year we will sacrifice the mind and body of a certain number of our players for the sake of everyone’s amusement. We could say that every year we will kill a certain number of our frat pledges for the sadistic pleasure of people who’ve chosen to attend our school in order to enjoy sadistic pleasure. Party schools could try being honest, and just saying Football’s a violent sport; some fraternities house gangs of sadists. We think a few student brain injuries and deaths each year represents a small price to pay to keep our enrollment numbers steady.

[Former University of Louisville AD Tom] Jurich has been stung by the backlash that came along with his dismissal, but he owes it to a remarkable tolerance [at UL] for scandal. Rehiring tainted football coach Bobby Petrino in 2014 dented the school’s reputation, as did the multiple issues with [Rick] Pitino’s personal life and basketball program. Fixated on justifying Louisville’s inclusion in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Jurich was willing to take all the hits to the school’s image in exchange for on-field competitiveness.

… But now the school that compensated [Jurich and Pitino] at the very highest levels of their professions wants to blame the employees rather than itself for the current chaotic state of the department. Pitino was the active wrongdoer; we simply gave him more power than a third-world dictator. Jurich amassed too much clout; maybe because we paid him $5.3 million in 2016, more than the entire budget of the English, Math, Biology and History departments.

… Everyone needs a boss, and neither Pitino nor Jurich were adequately bossed in recent years. Former school president James Ramsey was busy arranging stealth sweetheart deals for himself and other university leaders (including Jurich), which helped lead to his ouster. The Board of Trustees was a rubber stamp. Lacking adequate oversight, the whole thing spun out of control.

And so we reach a point where the University of Louisville blames Pitino, and Pitino blames [his underlings] Andre McGee and Jordan Fair, and we’re supposed to believe that this institution led by wealthy and powerful alpha males was brought down by the sorcery of a former director of basketball operations and a first-year assistant coach. Call it trickle-up corruption.

The bit at the end about the alpha males is interesting… Is there even one woman at UL? As Fanny Dashwood would put it —

I declare, I am beginning to doubt of her existence!

Ever since they hired one of the ickiest coaches this great country has to offer, UA’s football team has been hitting all of its marks (er, girlfriends) one after another, making a real name for itself in a crowded national domestic abuse field.

Scottie Young Jr… . Orlando Bradford… And as UA can attest, you don’t get there without a certain kind of coach, and teammates who watch it happen and don’t give a shit!

Newly released records from the Tucson Police Department reveal statements from witnesses and victims, stating a former University of Arizona Wildcats football player’s roommates and teammates were aware of, but did not report, violent incidents.

… Witness statements claim Bradford’s roommates, Arizona Wildcats football players, saw the abuse and heard threats of violence but never reported the behavior.

One of the witnesses recounted a February 2016 incident which alleged[ly] happened in Bradford’s vehicle. The witness said Bradford, one of the victims, a female witness and a UA football player were in the vehicle.

The witness told the TPD the victim said something to Bradford, which angered him.

“Bradford exited the vehicle, opened the door and slid the seat forward,” according to the report. “He grabbed the victim by the hair, pulled her from the vehicle and threw her on the ground.”

The witness also said Bradford, on several occasions, had “gone crazy, verbally yelling and screaming” at one of the victims and “threatened to kill her.”

According to the witness’ reports, Bradford would hit the victim “in front of the guys” and named the four football players who lived in the house.

A witness, who police said was in a relationship with one of Bradford’s roommates, heard that Bradford was, “telling everyone in the locker room what he had done (to the victim) and was joking about it.”

SONG OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE
BASKETBALL RECRUIT

‘Come,’ they told me
Pa rum pum pum pum:
‘Your dorm has whores for free.’
Pa rum pum pum pum.
‘You’ll play at KFC.
Yes! KFC YUM!
It’s facing bankruptcy.‘
Pa rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum

After bribery
Pa rum pum pum pum
We lived in luxury
Pa rum pum pum pum
They brought their gifts to me
Pa rum pum pum pum
Rick’s boys took care of me
And we all kept mum
We all played dumb
Rum pum pum pum

Feds came to talk to me
Pa rum pum pum pum
‘Bout our conspiracy
Pa rum pum pum pum
UL told Rick to flee
Pa rum pum pum pum
He sued, and they sued he
And everyone’s scum
Shitting their bum
Rum pum pum pum

Yes, I played for you
Pa rum pum pum pum
Feel a bit dumb

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.