This blog is ambivalent about the predictable call for the University of Louisville to get the death penalty (it’d probably be curtains for the whole university, since without its sports programs …), now that its totally stinky irredeemable stinkiness (there’s a reason they call it the U of Smell) has yet again wafted its way across the landscape of this great country of ours. When it comes to Louisville, it’s very much as George immortally put it to Martha: There isn’t an abomination award going that you haven’t won. The only thing left for that university to win is the death penalty.

One observer claims that the career of UL’s super-louche basketball coach will “almost certainly … end in a fall of Shakespearian dimension.” (That should be Shakespearean.). But if you start in the gutter and end in the gutter does that count as Shakespearean? Tragic?

And why are we here at University Diaries ambivalent? Because without the sex drugs and rock and roll we get from UL we’d suffer a fall of Shakespearean dimension.

… on the big ongoing – and apparently expanding – university corruption story.

Okay, so it’s unnamed so far, so… uh… so… (thinking quick here!)… So here’s the description of U6:

University 6 is described as a public research university in Kentucky with an enrollment of 22,640. The University of Louisville is Kentucky’s only school that matches that description.

Here’s our play, guys. Listen up.

You’re getting hundreds of millions from Adidas in a sponsorship deal… In fact, you are

the highest-earning school in Adidas’ college portfolio.

Adidas sure don’t give a shit about that whole whormitory thing! Anyway.

Now, assuming the deal still goes through even though the FBI just arrested their head of global sports marketing, you take that money and with it you establish an entirely new public research university in Kentucky whose enrollment happens to be 22,640. This is an online university, of course… It’s all on paper… You recruit students (the names of students; no actual classes will ever be offered) the way many other online universities do… Hanging out at homeless shelters and offering bribes…

So anyway – this way you protect the U of L…

UD wondered why the U of Smell wasn’t one of the four schools charged by the US government in the current bribery scandal. But hold onto your basketball players’ university-provided whorehouse!

[In the case of the so-far-unnamed] “University 6” … the indictment accuses four people… of funneling approximately $100,000 to an All-America high school basketball player in order to secure that player’s commitment to the school. The player was then to sign with adidas upon entering a professional basketball league.

CBS Sports college basketball reporter Gary Parrish believes that player is Class of 2017 Louisville commit Brian Bowen.

According to a report by Louisville-based TV network WDRB, the money was wired to third-party consultants who then made cash payments to the player’s family in order to conceal the transaction from university officials.

Louisville gets extra points for having allegedly transacted this business even though it was already under probation for running a whorehouse.

Louisville received its punishment from the NCAA 6/11. A bball assistant was in a hotel room in Vegas w/Adidas conspiring to cheat on 7/27.

UL does not miss a beat. More details:

The indictments also indicate that Bowen was not the only player recruited by Louisville in this manner. WDRB.com reported that the FBI recorded a meeting in Las Vegas involving a Louisville coach recruiting a high school player in the Class of 2019.

In the meeting, one of the participants noted that the school was already on probation with the NCAA and would have to be “particularly careful” about how the money was passed to the high school player and his family. The coach agreed, saying, “we gotta be very low key,” according to the indictments.

UD keeps thinking this school can’t go any lower. Then it goes lower.

(Watch it here.)

Lamont Evans, associate head coach for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, Chuck Person, associate head coach for the Auburn University Tigers, Emanuel “Book” Richardson, assistant coach for the Arizona Wildcats, and Anthony “Tony” Bland, assistant head coach of the University of Southern California Trojans, were all named in the complaint.

How did “Book” get his nickname?

Arizona assistant coach Emanuel Richardson was nicknamed Pocketbook by his grandmother because she would catch him riffling through her purse. The name was eventually shortened on the basketball courts…

Whooda thunkit. This country’s institutions of higher education host criminal gangs getting rich off of their students!

Haha I mean our universities pay criminal gangs to get rich off of their students, as in the latest FBI raid of … Oh let’s see… If you were going to guess what name would be first on the massive university athletics corruption hit parade, what would it be?

Well, if you’ve been reading this blog for more than ten minutes, you’d be choosing between Baylor and Auburn… Auburn and Baylor… Yeah, let’s start with the A‘s… Let’s go with that glorious public university in the state of Alabam’… Ruled for decades by King Bobby Lowder, it is now the fiefdom of – among other sporty types – basketball coach Chuck Person, currently

facing six charges, including bribery conspiracy, solicitation of bribes and gratuities, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and travel act conspiracy, according to court documents.

Oh, but it’s so much bigger than one Person. Tune in today at noon for an update on America’s amazing big time university athletics programs.

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UD thanks dmf.

Of course in principle no one here at University Diaries cares about professional football and its increasingly empty stadiums; we’re interested in how college football destroys American higher education. But as California goes, so goes the campus – though in fact things are far worse on campus… We have so many schools, and so few students give a shit about the game…

A writer at The Big Lead, one of many sports pundits now specializing in The Theory of Nothing, explains:

[W]hen fans aren’t at games it has a detrimental impact on the product. It sends the message that games are boring, uninteresting and that people don’t want to have anything to do with them in person.

UD Says: Not boring. That’s not the problem. The problem is that amateur and professional American football is disturbing.

Put aside the parking and the expense and protecting your kids from squads of the obscene shitfaced. Instead try a close phenomenological account of what it’s like, moment by moment, Being There. Start with the stadium-length Godzillatron, shrieking gargantuan nonstop ads at you. Should the ads stop, they will be replaced by gargantuan images of men getting their heads bashed in. You can’t not look – your entire field of vision has been captured. The only place to look away is the field, where actual men in real time are getting their heads bashed in. As one after another goes tottering unsteadily off the field, the names Aaron Hernandez and Junior Seau etc. unavoidably go through your head, and you start worrying about the guys still on the field getting their heads bashed in. I mean, okay – boxing, NASCAR, yes, fine, I like to watch guys get hammered… But… is it fine? What exactly am I watching here?…

And now, instead of screaming and having fun like everyone else, you’re suddenly effing Epictetus or something, and all you want is to go home and go to sleep.

… at a better time.

The University of North Carolina’s strongly expressed preference for professors who teach completely fictitious courses (which Nyang’oro did for years) over professors who want to teach courses that have actual content and class meetings and all means that history professor Jay Smith has been unable to teach his course in the history of college sports.

After all, this course, offered by a distinguished historian, is weighed down with actual intellectual material, whereas UNC prefers that its students earn their degrees by floating through sheer beautiful lovely fakery.

Kevin Guskiewicz, a dean who oversees the department, and Jim Dean, UNC’s previous provost, said that academic freedom “does not give individual faculty members the right to unilaterally decide what courses they will teach in a given semester or academic year.”

So true! The dean’s job is to make sure UNC maintains its strong brand as the go-to school for athletes who want to cheat their way to a degree; Smith represents legitimate academic activity, and therefore must be quashed.

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Alas, the eyes of the world are still upon UNC onaccounta their latest fake courses scandal, and UNC has ultimately had to cave and allow this real course into its curriculum. Bummer.

MORE

More than the buyout clause that makes us pay
More than the perks we give you every day
More than the students’ heads you bashed to bits
More than the seasons full of lethal hits

More than you’ll ever know
Our arms long to hold you so
Our school will be in your keeping
Waking sleeping laughing weeping

Longer than always love will never fade
Yes far beyond forever you’ll be paid
You are the coach we do adore
And our heart is very sure no one else could love you more

… and the result shows you American higher education and sports culture at its very best.

So pause a moment to think what University of New Mexico instructor Daniel Barto’s daily life at that benighted school (in a benighted state) is like. He opens the paper and reads the following opening paragraphs:

University of New Mexico athletics has projected ticket revenue for the current 2017-18 fiscal year that it didn’t come close to reaching this past season.

And this comes after the recent retirement of its athletic director, the launch of two state investigations related to … possible fiscal mismanagement and the reality of failing to balance eight of the department’s past 10 budgets.

In fact, UNM has budgeted to spend about $1 million more from ticket sales this year than it actually brought in last year from its three revenue generating sports of football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball.

Read the whole thing. It gets more delusional with every paragraph. Barto reads things like this every day.

This blog has spent years documenting wild wacko wastrel UNM. (The link includes non UNM posts – jump around.). If you want to know what its like to actually belong to the UNM community, read Barto’s letter in the student newspaper. After reviewing the serious financial difficulties of many people on campus, he notes:

This [financial difficulty] pertains to us all — except one certain delusional department that seems to think that the hard math of budgeting does not apply to them.

I am talking about the Athletics Department, the department that has the most paid administrators of any other on main campus.

This department was headed by director Paul Krebs (salary $319,262) until he “resigned” after committing fraud. Paul used UNM money to fund a personal golfing trip to Scotland. This trip ended up costing New Mexico taxpayers even more, because Paul failed to get enough people to lock in for the discount group travel rate.

Pathetic Paul, so much money to embezzle but too few friends to even embezzle with.

Of course the Athletics Department claims, “We bring in the most money!”

But this is a lie of omission. The department wastes more money than it brings in. According to the ABQ Journal, since 2007 the Athletics Department’s expenses have exceed[ed] their revenue every year except two. As of 2016, the department has a $1,525,257 deficit that the University must cover.

Barto is angry. Of course he concedes that the state of New Mexico itself is one of the most dissolute in the nation; he understands that public universities in our most corrupt states are royally screwed. But he still can’t help hoping for things to change.

His letter hasn’t yet attracted any comments. If it does, UD feels pretty certain they’ll be abusive, semi-literate, and deeply deluded.

All aboard the college train! Where we take your brain for quite a ride… And some people don’t want to get on… Yes, some people want to get off…

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UD thanks dmf.

… as you may know, the winner of Michael Kinsley’s Most Boring Headline contest. Less boring, and just a bit tweaked, is a headline to accompany the recruitment news out of the Canadian Football League:

SOMEWHAT SHORT OF WORTHWHILE CANADIAN INITIATIVE

Yes, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats recruited (briefly) Mr Baylor-Rapes Art Briles; it also seriously considered (before rejecting) Johnny Manziel. Deadspin‘s indispensable Emma Baccellieri reports:

Manziel was charged with domestic violence last year for allegedly hitting his girlfriend and threatening to kill her; charges were dropped several months later after a plea deal. He also has a history of partying and drug use that repeatedly threatened his career. [Briles oversaw] a football program where players were accused of up to 52 rapes in four years …

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UD thanks Jack.

But, as Mike Bianchi points out, it’s only Wednesday. We know this team can do better.