But at least it makes the trains run on time.
But at least it makes the trains run on time.
Twenty years of Julius Nyang’oro’s multifarious fake courses for athletes was fine by the University of North Carolina; one measly authentic course offered by Jay Smith made top administrators, as one, leap to the top of their desks screaming EEK. I mean, we can’t just approve every proposed course, and this one lacked clear and effective methods of keeping athletes eligible to play…
Oh but okay. I mean, if you must introduce meaningful content into the curriculum, I don’t suppose we’re in any position to stop you…
[T]here are a lot of people who, like me, are not used to showing school spirit through sports and don’t really see the point…
And I don’t understand why that is such a bad thing. [Why the] underlying assumption … that Penn “should” do something to increase attendance at sporting events and therefore increase school spirit[?]
The N.F.L. is a business enterprise where announcers are often capable of addressing the sport’s most pressing on-field issue only in tones of gallows humor. To wit: late in the Panthers-Bears game, the defensive end Akiem Hicks was slow to get up after the whistle. This prompted some brain-injury comedy in the booth. “They’ll take a look at him for a possible concussion,” said one announcer, proceeding to note that, “of course, [Hicks’s teammates] gotta pat ’em on the head.” His partner mildly marvelled, “It’s just part of the deal, Dan.”
It is a dark, unacceptable irony that an institution devoted to developing intellectual capacity would allow, let alone celebrate, the systematic destruction of what it works so hard to create.
Guy says universities should stop playing football – just because it knocks the stuffing out of students’ brains…
[T]wo vectors [are] colliding [at WSU] – football excellence and flagrant overspending. [So] WSU is at a crossroads. It will have to decide whether… any football expense is justifiable, or [whether it will] take another road, where some level of sanity and perspective about the role of sports within an institution of knowledge is regained… [WSU needs to decide if it wants] sports to occupy a place in the hierarchy of university priorities that is a bit less insane.
You better believe ol’ UD is just on the edge of her seat wondering which way Washington State University will go! I’m sure you are too! What a nail-biter!
Evil whoring assistant coach!
Evil whoring corporate roach!
Little boy innocent! Little boy blue!
Rick has no choice but to sue sue sue sue.
Indeed, we knew that was coming.
What you might not have known is the other big news:
Rick Pitino has just been named Academic Provost at the University of North Carolina!
This blog has long written about how big-time athletics infects a university, attracting to it scads of unserious students, jocksniffer administrators, and rich, control-freak, alumni boosters. Eventually the university is run by the two guys with all the money: the alumni booster (Boone Pickens; Phil Knight) and the football/basketball coach (JoePa Of Blessed Memory and Cached Statue; Still-Uncached Statue Man Nick Saban).
Every now and then one of these hopeless little North Koreas, with their Dear Leaders who take students’ money in order to play the pointless war games (KILL AUBURN!) that keep students in a stupor, decides to improve itself, to look more like a university than an experiment in repressive desublimation. But whether it’s Penn State or the University of North Carolina, the systemic sickness of the jockshop (Professor Emeritus Sandusky puts PSU’s leadership in prison; Julius Nyang’oro’s depravity ushers in mandatory class inspections for all faculty) will always – as the UNC observer in this post’s headline notes – overwhelm any self-improvement efforts and reveal the sick joke at the permanent core of the place.
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UD thanks an UNC insider
for this post’s headline.
Now that Rick Pitino’s out of commission, America’s filthiest, cheatingest, richest, college coach, John Calipari, struggles with the lamestream media:
Q. What is your reaction to the whole FBI investigation of college basketball? …
JOHN CALIPARI: Well, what’s out there right now is a black eye. But here is the thing for everybody here: I don’t want to come across as uneducated or dumb. None of us know where this thing’s going. So for me to really comment much on it, I mean, I don’t know where all this is going.
Obviously, what’s happened to this point isn’t good. At this point I don’t think me commenting without knowing all the facts is the right thing to do.
Q. How do you react to Mark Emmert’s statements yesterday? Do you think the culture of college basketball is so hopelessly corrupt that something has to change?
JOHN CALIPARI: I read the statement. I kind of liked it because at a point in there he mentioned about the students. At the end of the day, this is about the student-athletes.
I would say, again, this isn’t the format for me to go full boat in this. I would say if we make decisions about these kids, what’s right for these kids, we’re going to be right. If the NBA is worried about the NBA, and if the NCAA is worried about the NCAA, if each individual institution is just worried about themselves, and the last thing we think about are these kids, we’re going to make wrong decisions.
… Q. There’s a decent chance that next week Rick Pitino won’t be the coach at Louisville. Will you miss the rivalry in coaching against him?
JOHN CALIPARI: Look, it’s unfortunate, all the stuff that’s come down. But let’s talk about my team, please. Does anyone here have a question about my team, please?
Q. One more question about the FBI.
JOHN CALIPARI: Anybody have a question?
Q. Wait a minute. This is a Media Day, not Coach Day. I am entitled to ask a question.
JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.
Q. You cannot answer it, fine.
JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.
Q. The FBI reportedly has expanded into looking at Nike. Kentucky is a Nike school. What reassurance would you give your fan base, the Big Blue Nation, if they’re anxious about what this could mean?
JOHN CALIPARI: Again, you’re asking like you know something that I don’t know.
Q. That’s all I know is right there. If a fan would put two and two together…
JOHN CALIPARI: Wait a minute. We don’t know what you’re saying, if it’s true. Do we know if it’s true?
Q. It’s been reported.
JOHN CALIPARI: Oh, that makes it true.
I have no comment to it. I mean, we haven’t been contacted. The NCAA hasn’t contacted us. We’re going about our business of coaching this team.
How about a basketball question since it isn’t my day.
Did you click on that first Calipari link? The one that takes you to years of coverage of this vile, greedy, cynic? I think you should.
They’re in the comment section.
American football is already in serious decline, and I’m not sure a multimillionaire coach snorting coke with twenty dollar bills while telling his girlfriend he’d like to be “licking this off your pussy” (aka ‘Pulling a Puliafito’) is going to be good for business. I mean, maybe it will be. I don’t know.
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That’s but a trifle here.
One of the city’s largest corporate pillars has pulled out of the KFC Yum Center but denies that the decision is related to the University of Louisville’s serial dramas.
Spirits and wine company Brown-Forman canceled its luxury suite at the arena in May leaving behind about 315 square feet of prime real estate at the 22,000-seat downtown arena.
UD loves the little denial-dance the spokesperson for this massively profitable firm performs:
“We basically canceled it because of internal reasons that are kind of complicated to go into, but it had nothing to do with U of L.”
Uh-huh.
Arizona Football: Scottie Young Jr. Participating in All Team Activities Following Arrest for Domestic Violence
He can really beat the shit out of people!
The University of Arizona: Beautiful coach Rich Rodriguez. Beautiful team. A university sports legend in the making.
It was while reading his letter of termination, signed by the latest vague desperate interim nowhere man running the University of Louisville yet deeper into the ground. As she read the guy’s list of Rick’s evil evil deeds, which must be listed in this letter in order for the school to fire him with cause and get a forty-four million dollar discount on the transaction, the following exchange from Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? began running through my head:
George: You can sit there in that chair of yours, you can sit there with the gin running out of your mouth, and you can humiliate me, you can tear me apart … ALL NIGHT… and that’s perfectly all right … that’s OK…
Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!
George: I CANNOT STAND IT!
Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!!
George: (Quietly.). That is a desperately sick lie.
Martha here is ol’ Rick, hotly sought after by UL and paid seven million dollars a year because no one cheats their way to a championship like Rick; because Rick’s a winner who sees what he wants in a restaurant and fucks it right there on the table; he’s a guy whose recruitment coaches run whorehouses in basketball dormitories, and whose program pays the biggest bribes to high school players, and… Louisville married him for it!. It wanted a world of gin-pissed vulgarians and pin-striped dress for success hypocrites to keep the ball rolling, and it correctly identified and highly rewarded Pitino as THE man to provide it.
But now! Now, just because of a teeny DOJ and FBI crackdown, it’s suddenly ooh what a nasty unethical person you are! We cannot stand you!
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I’m afraid Rick is well within his rights, just as Martha is, to point out that these qualities and behaviors are exactly why UL fell so expensively in love with him in the first place. UL loved him so much that they let him sweep up most of the money available at the University of Louisville. It is impossible to find words to describe how much UL loved Rick Pitino, but it is quite possible to look at the immense money, power, and adoration they gladly gave him all those years. Because he won championships, and that’s all UL cares about and ever will care about because it’s Kentucky and it’s UL and that’s that. The next strutting multimillionaire fuckhead they bring on board to win championships will do exactly the same things to win them. Rick knows this, and has a right to feel aggrieved.
