The University of Louisville athletics program, rotten to the core, doesn’t even turn a profit. If you’re going to prostitute yourself in every possible way, as UL has done, at least make some money doing it. But of course the corruption on that campus involves giving its coaches obscene salaries, building pointless sports palaces, bribing recruits, and anything else twisted and rotten you can think of. ‘Fraid there’s no money left over after all that to give academics, and in fact athletics gets immense subsidies from this beyond-pathetic university. UD wonders how it feels for faculty and students to sacrifice for decades, only to discover that all the money they’ve had withheld has gone to world-historical douches like Rick Pitino, currently preparing to sue the in-the-credit-gutter school for $44 million.

But I guess knowing how much of that money goes to disgraced ex-AD Tom Jurich makes it all better!

“Over the past seven years, through a byzantine array of longevity and performance bonuses, base pay raises and tax subsidies, Jurich collected total compensation of $19,279,710, an average of $2.76 million per year.
“Last year, his taxable income — enriched by the vesting of a $1.8 million annuity plus $1.6 million from the university to pay his taxes on it — totaled $5.3 million.”

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The university budgeted less for its Biology ($3.3 million), English ($4 million), History ($2.4 million) and Mathematics ($3.5 million) departments, the [Louisville] Courier-Journal’s research showed, and his listed income was more than double that of the next-highest-paid AD, Ohio State’s Gene Smith ($1.98 million).

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Much of the remaining money, after Pitino and Jurich took what they took to drag the school through the mud, was allegedly snapped up by disgraced ex-UL president, James Ramsey, and his cronies.

I know! I know! Pick me! Pick me!

Uh, yes, UD?

Legitimate!!

A++, UD!  We’re proud of you!

[University of Louisville Athletic Director Tom] Jurich’s pay was essentially ill-gotten gains taken directly from players such as first-round NBA Draft pick Donovan Mitchell, whose television appeal and jersey sales produce the revenue. Yet Mitchell must be content with whatever crumbs the school illicitly tosses him? Throw open the market. Let’s see who clamors for Jurich’s jersey. Or whether the public would rather see him in prison clothes.

Anyone really setting out to chronicle the endless history of filthy athletics at the University of Miami would have to use as their model the 200,000 verse Indian epic. But given modern journalism’s space constraints, the task instead is to summarize as briefly as possible the long venerable ages of trashiness that are UM.

UD thinks Jerry Iannelli does a respectable job in this New Times piece, written in anticipation of an FBI indictment against UM’s basketball program.

SONG OF THE TRUSTEES

We’re off to dump Pitino
The god of our campus that was.
We knew he was a bit of a scuzz
If ever a scuzz there was.
And now that he’s going to jail one day
We’ve got to make sure he goes away
For cause for cause for cause for cause for cause!
Because of the terrible things he does.
We’re off to dump Pitino
The god of our campus that was.

Interim Louisville president Gregory Postel sent a letter to suspended coach Rick Pitino last month saying the FBI investigation into college basketball corruption clearly implicated him and the program…

“The allegations contained in the complaint … insinuate a scheme of fraud and malfeasance in the recruitment of student-athletes involving you and multiple members of your coaching staff in violation of federal law and NCAA Division I Bylaws.”

Motto of Auburn University: NEVER ENOUGH.

How is one of this country’s major jockshops going to shake off its latest thing – the FBI bribery fraud and conspiracy thing? Decades of institutional misconduct have done nothing to blunt their teams’ championship ways; and if Auburn’s long history of corruption has destroyed any vestige of academic integrity, who gives a fuck? It’s a jockshop.

Still, when the DOJ and FBI come calling, it’s definitely a problem, and UD‘s gonna tell you Auburn’s short and long game in dealing with it.

They have a brand new president – hard-landing macho man Steven Leath, who did a bang-up job at major jockshop Iowa State – and Leath’s short game (very short – it’s kind of a placeholder until the other conspirators confess) is to deny that the bribery fraud and conspiracy is the work of anyone other than one singular bad person.

But UD sees a far more interesting long game here, involving Alabama’s next senator, Roy Moore.

UD thinks that if Auburn sits tight and doesn’t do much of anything, Moore will step in and solve its latest problem for it. As a United States senator, he will launch an all-out attack on the FBI and DOJ and their apostate assault on the twin pillars of faith down south: football and basketball. With Roy on their side, the University of Alabama and Auburn University are going to be just fine.

The FBI’s criminal complaint that shook the college basketball world Tuesday and led to 10 arrests included accounts of three meetings in Las Vegas.

… The Review-Journal on Wednesday reviewed the complaint and found three meetings in Las Vegas between March and July involving coaches from the University of Arizona, University of Louisville and University of Southern California.

During the Pac-12 men’s tournament in March, Arizona assistant Emanuel “Book” Richardson met for dinner in an unnamed Las Vegas restaurant …

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Las Vegas Review/Journal

Karl Marx once famously proclaimed, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The NCAA corollary is, if anything, a more corrupt, “From each according to his marketability, to each according to our whim.” “Need” has nothing to do with it. In practice, the few revenue-producing sports subsidize the less-popular programs, all while funneling billions of dollars into the NCAA’s coffers. This money funds a vast bureaucratic apparatus whose chief function is to make sure that all available money goes where the NCAA wants it to go — to the NCAA and to its members schools. Their profit motive is sacred. Their greed is boundless.

… All the sad sad pieces in the local rags ’bout how the University of Louisville was lookin’ so good and then hell all hell broke loose and now look at the mess we’re in… Boo hoo! Everybody’s cryin’ for UL, for Louisville, for the state of Kentucky… Everybody’s favorite current phrase: Fall from grace…

What state of grace? The school went from being a lowly commuter campus to a jockshop. All under the larcenous eye of the ex-president — a guy the school is likely to sue in order to see if it can recover some of the funds he, er, took.

No, UD doesn’t think valedictories are quite the right tone … For a university that… Well, let’s tell everyone what you did, UL.

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Short version: YOU WERE A VERY VERY BAD BOY AND THEN YOU GOT CAUGHT.

Longer version: You had a very long run as a bad boy and you made a lot of money. Your bad boy president and his cronies made a lot of money. Your bad boy basketball coach and his staff and some of his players made a lot of money. You won a lot of games by bribing the best high school players to commit to UL. You ran a house of prostitution inside one of your dorms and provided the prostitutes to sixteen year old recruits and their fathers. Bad, bad, bad. Naughty, naughty, naughty.

Still, for a long time you didn’t get caught, and your professors were silent and your trustees were silent and your students whooped at the games and your coach collected his annual seven million dollars and everything was great. And then you got caught.

That is, like bad boys everywhere, you gambled. You gambled that you wouldn’t get caught. You were Kentucky Gamblers, and this is the only valedictory you’re getting, courtesy of Merle:

… This Kentucky Gambler planned to get rich quick.

… But a gambler never seems to stop till he loses all he’s got
And with a money-hungry fever, I played on
I played till I’d lost all I’d won, I was right back where I’d started from…

We did it! We made the NBA look pure!

“There’s a reason I coach in the NBA. I never wanted to be a college coach,” [Golden State Warriors Coach Steve] Kerr said. “I don’t immerse myself in that stuff. The NBA is very pure.”

Thank you, University of Louisville, and all your great affiliated institutions.

Can they really have fired Rick Pitino?

And how many millions (buyout/defamation suit/other miscellaneous legal shit) is it going to cost them, now that much of UL’s endowment has been allegedly picked off by its last president?

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

And the capo di tutt’i capi too????

More buyout millions.

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To recap: The board of trustees is about to sue the last president of the university and some of his comrades in – er – missing fundism to try to get some – er – missing funds back from them. The eyes of the world, the Justice Department, and the FBI, are upon their indescribably filthy sports program. They’ve just fired their famous basketball coach and their athletic director. They can expect humongous lawsuits from them. They can also expect various sports business deals to collapse and cost them more millions. They can expect enrollment to drop like a stone, along with attendance at basketball and football games. They’ve got some desperate nonentity in there as interim president to handle all of this.

Time for UL to apply for federal disaster aid.

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[Pitino’s lawyer Steven] Pence promises that [the University of Louisville] ‘won’t fire Pitino without a bare-knuckle fight’….

According to Pence, Louisville would be in a legal fight over $44 million it would owe Pitino as part of his buyout clause.

Pitino’s always baring himself. A bare-knuckle fight; a bare-ass restaurant meal…

[If you didn’t expect this outcome, you’re like people who are still] stunned to learn that a game as inherently violent as football would lead to life-altering issues among players from repeated concussions and blows to the head.

Far worse, you’re like Louisville’s superscummy basketball coach, who says he’s “completely shocked” by the shocking corruption in university basketball. As completely shocked as he was by the whorehouse being run in a dorm lived in by basketball players and visited by recruits and their families.

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So here’s UD‘s take. American university students are being trained to be Italians. Italians are living the good life and they don’t give a rat’s ass that their entire world is howlingly corrupt. In a New Yorker article about the sordid Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, Adam Gopnik noted French anxiety about

what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor …

The University of Louisville is the avant-garde: Can you grow a university whose students heartily endorse, and fork all their tuition money over to, Rick Berlusconi Strauss-Kahn Pitino? His sextortion, his whores for sixteen year old recruits and their fathers, his stuffed envelopes for sports agents in Las Vegas hotel rooms? Can you guarantee a university whose students will rush to the bookstore and buy out Pitino’s many books about how to be ethical?

The entire financial foundation of the University of Louisville rests on a bet that there’s no bottom – that students and alumni will be able — FOREVER — to look at a guy who could give Jerry Sandusky a run for his money and say WE LOVE YOU RICK. TELL US HOW MUCH MORE YOU WANT US TO COUGH UP FOR YOUR SALARY.

It’s a solid bet. This is Kentucky, after all.

Why weren’t any head coaches implicated [in today’s university bribery scandal]? Christian Dawkins, who was working to start his own sports-management company, may have provided the beginnings of an answer in a wiretapped phone call: He said the best way to reach players was through assistant coaches because “the head coach … ain’t willing to [take bribes] ’cause they’re making too much money.“