Starts here.

“At the end of the day, I’m hoping that the NCAA and others will recognize that instead of punishing Baylor, they ought to be saluted,” [a lawyer for three Baylor University trustees] said. “I think they ought to be held up as a model for how to respond.”

There’s always a country or state or institution pretty nearby that looms as the embodiment of your fear that your proud local culture is just this far away from sinking into the depravity of that other place.

[M]any in Paris [anxiously note the] “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of [Silvio] Berlusconian squalor…

As in – France got this close to electing President Dominique Strauss-Kahn. (Dom and Don would have been great friends.)

Leave aside the details of the [rape and pimping] allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty). Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.

Money and sex sleaze is all over, of course (hence widespread Italianization fears), but let’s consider this warning to the University of Kansas (a public university) in the specific context of global elites and public money/general sleaze.

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First: The problem besetting Francois Fillon today is exactly DSK’s problem, minus the raping: Greed + Hypocrisy. Fillon is just as stern about austerity (for the common French; not for him and his family) as was DSK’s IMF. Now his decade-long extraction of roughly a million euros from the public purse – like DSK’s use of global taxpayer money for his hotel room and flight – has the French joking about le million de Fillon and referring to François Million.

Maybe the world should establish special austerity guidelines for elites: Spain’s Princess Cristina may soon be sent to prison for a few years – she’s accused of being her husband’s accomplice in taking six million public euros (he faces twenty years confinement)… Which really when you think about it makes Fillon’s takings seem very small indeed (one v. six million), and maybe they weren’t even illegal! DSK’s takings were even less (he wasn’t head of IMF long enough to raid it), and almost certainly they followed the letter of the law.

One reason to let most of the elites get away with it is that elite corruption that gets discovered begets much more corruption. Cristina’s father – the King of Spain when her story broke – apparently offered a two million euro bribe to some people to make her trial go away.

Having to deal with corruption is bad enough. Having to deal with corruption involving very rich and powerful people is a serious nuisance.

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Which brings me to the kings of America: our football coaches. It is they who assemble and – er – stabilize a roster of university or professional players, they who – at universities – command the highest public employee salary in twenty-seven of our states. (In other states, it’s basketball coaches.) They’re making scads more than the terrified president of their university, and, like Art Briles, they really get free rein. Everyone moves out of their way or enables them – campus police, town police, alumni, trustees, administrators, professors, presidents, chancellors, legislators… hell, governors — not a peep out of them. As for female students who may get beaten or raped by some of the players the coach has expensively recruited … Baylor’s football coach, Briles, allegedly “questioned why a woman was with ‘bad dudes’ from his football team after [he was told about] a gang rape accusation.” What kind of a dummy comes to a school that represents itself in this way and doesn’t know to expect gang rapes from bad dudes? Don’t women applicants read our admissions information? Baylor University seeks out bad dudes and deifies them.

Okay, so that’s the way of life. Like most corruption, it tends to feature elements of sex, money, and cover-up. I’ve always found it pretty remarkable that it thrives at universities, of all places – that bad dudes and even worse coaches dominate life on many campuses. But as with the Spanish monarchy, it takes far more than one disgusting eruption to bury the crown. You dump your current regent (he gets another job right away, maybe again at a noisily self-righteous Christian campus), take down his statue, and install a new royal house.

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So okay this article. This article is about what its author daintily refers to as “the situation in Lawrence.” He’s not very specific about it, but all of the links in this sentence begin to scratch the surface. He’s worried about Baylor-corruption contagion; he uses the fate of Baylor as a cautionary tale for Kansas.

Many universities have an alarming tendency of allowing sports-related problems to fester because they won’t deal with them head-on. Coaches become too powerful and too autonomous to challenge. Image protection overwhelms honesty and transparency. A toxic tolerance level for bad behavior and bad students builds up.

At Baylor, a basketball player murdered his teammate in 2003, and the coach at the time (Dave Bliss) maliciously smeared the dead man in order to cover up NCAA violations. Within the football program, the [last coach,] (Art Briles, may he never coach again) expended quite a bit of energy keeping accusations about his players from going public or reaching the school’s judicial affairs office, and in obtaining special treatment from the administration. Briles had allies above him in athletic director Ian McCaw and school president Kenneth Starr.

The writer urges Kansas – which, remarkably even by university athletics standards, boasts “six incidents involving Kansas basketball players, in some form or fashion, that have come to light within the past two weeks,” not to deepen its institutional corruption by acting like Baylor (he could have chosen Florida State etc. etc., but Baylor’s the most recent) and adding cover-up to corruption.

If the Kansas trustees are smart and conscientious and concerned about the university as a whole and not just as a basketball power, they’re pushing hard for all the facts – and, if warranted, for immediate and significant action. Public action.

Don’t spend more energy trying to hide problems than fix problems. Don’t, at any cost, follow the Baylor blueprint.

But of course it isn’t just the trustees, and anyway we have no reason to think that the same trustees who let KU turn into dreck will reverse course. (And look who’s running the place.)

And speaking of reversals – given the history, over the last decade or so, of the University of Kansas, I’m afraid the corruption-contagion arguably goes the other way: Kansas has stunk to high heaven for a long time.

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Update, Fillon:

[I]nvestigators [are] now also probing whether Mr Fillon awarded the highest French state honour – the Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur – to the wealthy owner of a literary review in return for giving his wife a well-paid sinecure.

From the student newspaper at … Auburn?

A coach’s work is never done.

A Baylor booster speaks.

Doctrinal missions?

Don’t make me puke.

Nocturnal emissions.

Hector Perla, late of UC Santa Cruz, hit all his marks. In class, he didn’t give a shit about being ignored – let ’em use laptops! – and outside of class… well… He just scored “one of the largest Title IX settlements in US history.”

Haha – I mean, his student did. The student he reportedly raped.

The claim centered on allegations that the student was sexually assaulted by one of her professors on June 13, 2015 and that UCSC knew for years that the Professor was a sexual predator. “It let the wolf roam,” Kristensen Weisberg, LLP alleged. UCSC’s failure to rein in the professor “only encouraged his ambitions. Like many other higher institutions, UCSC looked the other way when it became aware [the professor] was hunting undergraduates…The sexual assault and UCSC’s response is illustrative of the criminal neglect by a feckless administration that cannot even follow its own rules, and once it is too late, it tries to bandage up its prior malfeasance.”

UCSC had to pay out a lot of money – but that was just for one lone wolf. Here’s hoping the Baptist General Convention of Texas is real rich. The last football coach at Baylor University was recently described as “a free pimp” for his players.

Her sentence is maybe a little grammatically awkward at the end, but Sally Jenkins gets the job done here, noting first of all that corruption in university football is currently massive and growing. She notes more particularly that America’s most rape-licious campus – oh-so-Baptist Baylor – should get NCAA’s death penalty, but probably won’t cuz there’s too much money at stake. “[T]he death penalty is difficult to contemplate when major college football revenue is more than $3.4 billion.”

Plus, whether it’s Whorehouse University of Louisville or Sex Slave Baylor University (spiritual sex slaves, like what did they call those Greek temple prossies, hierodoulos), who are we to interfere with freedom of religion? It’s been said often enough – and it’s utterly obvious – that pro- and pretend-not-pro- football is a religion in America. The thick description here, as Clifford Geertz would put it, is that of multiple temple cults where worship of naughty haughty Player Gods means full submission to them. Full legal, financial, academic, physical and sexual submission. THERE IS BUT ONE GOD AND HIS NAME IS RICHIE INCOGNITO. We love steroidal fucks like Richie and want them to do whatever they want with us. They beat the shit out of our students, rape them, whatever, and the president of our university pleads Give them another chance! This is our holiest of mystery sects, full of blood and sex and brain spatter, and it all plays out, of all places, on our university campuses.

You know this. I mean, yes, a few campuses, like the University of Louisville, outsource to local professionals; but it’s more common for campuses to establish so-called hostess programs, in which twenty year old female students… entertain… eighteen-year-old recruits. Taking one for the team.

Now Deadspin is sending a shout-out to all university hostesses, asking them to get in touch because, you know, Baylor and all. (Says here “Baylor coaches encouraged members of Baylor’s hostess group to engage in sexual acts with players and recruits.”) Should be interesting.

… as UD calls Auburn University, now congratulates itself – well, a local journo congratulates it – on having avoided hiring the Beastly Briles Boys.

UD loves that. Auburn is – has long been – arguably the dirtiest sports program in the United States. (Put Auburn in my search engine if you dare.) And now it’s Oh look we kept our hands clean and didn’t hire rape-enablers! Aren’t we pretty!

They’re the only professors who consistently attack big-time university football. Almost all other professors, from other departments, keep their traps shut; but there’s always some guy in economics shooting off his mouth. Let’s analyze a recent letter to the local paper from a University of Colorado econ professor – James Markusen – and see why this is.

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The news that [head football coach Mike] MacIntyre just got a $16.5 million contract for five years passed with a shrug, so I’ll provide some background (all verifiable). [That parenthesis tells you all you need to know. Econ people are rationalists, and they tend to think other people are basically rational too. They tend to think that if you offer a verifiable, evidence-based argument about something, the evidence will count for something by way of convincing people in a certain direction. Even given prevailing social/political conditions in America, where all copies of George Orwell’s 1984 are currently sold out, econ people cling to the belief in rational suasion.] His yearly salary is what a top (not average) science professor earns in 22 years, or, the five-year total is what a top professor could earn in 110 years. Economists (my department) are among the highest-paid faculty. It takes a top economist only 16 years to earn MacIntyre’s annual salary, or a mere 80 years for his five-year total. [Here we’re getting at one of the reasons the econ department does the heavy sports lifting – they actually understand numbers. Yet the dolts who read this will say one thing and one thing only in response, and it’s a response UD has seen for decades: Markusen’s jealous! He wants to make $16.5 million! Shouldn’t he be happy with his cushy no-work academic job which gives him long summers, one course a semester (taught by TA’s) and a healthy salary? Fuck him.]

What is discouraging and deliberately ignored by university officials is that we now have extensive evidence [There’s that pointless evidence dealie again.] that explodes long-held myths about sports and universities. Rigorous and dispassionate statistical studies [Yawn. Pathetic.] show that successful sports teams do not generate financial donations to universities: added contributions are directed almost exclusively to the athletic department itself. [UD‘s been making that point forever. The whole increased contributions to universities thing turns out to be increased contributions almost exclusively to athletics.] Yet with only a couple of exceptions, NCAA Division I athletic departments like ours consistently lose very large sums of money which ultimately have to be paid for by students and their parents in higher tuition fees. To the latter: You might enjoy the game, but you’re paying a hell of a lot more than you think. References available on request. [Let me be clear about the pointlessness of all the perfectly solid points he’s making. He’s talking to a cultist. A desperate, inebriated cultist.]

I’ll end with one more thought. Economics is one of the most popular majors at CU. In 26 years of teaching economics at CU, I have had exactly one football player in one class. I have never had a basketball player of either gender, never had a volleyball player, never had a soccer player. In addition to our impressive inventory of evidence on sports funding, we could use a dispassionate and analytical study evaluating the reality or myth of the student-athlete. [Of course, we don’t need such a study. No one gives a shit about what its obvious conclusions are going to be. If they did, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Baylor University and the University of Nebraska and the University of Louisville etc. etc. would temporarily cease operations in order to figure out how to reconstitute themselves as actual schools. No argument will stop what’s happening with university football; what will alter the picture is the fact of legions of people deciding not to attend games. As the games become televised simulacra with empty stands, people will eventually begin to notice, and questions will start to be asked. Until then, no rigorous dispassionate evidence-based jobbie will make any difference. Trust me.]

Practice in the morning – throwing, blocks, and tackles –
Practice in the noontide, til the drunken eve;
Waiting for the hostess and the time of raping,
Waiting for the lawyers, toting up the rapes.

Going forth with weeping, losing field advantage,
Though the loss sustained our spirit often grieves;
When our weeping’s over, we’ll bid new recruits welcome.
We’ll regain position, toting up the rapes.

The lawsuit, filed by a woman identified as Elizabeth Doe, alleges there were 52 “acts of rape” committed by Baylor football player from 2011 to 2014. Doe says she was gang-raped by [two football players] on April 18, 2013. According to Doe, the school did not move to investigate or discipline the players, instead offering to “pay for her education in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.”

Three players, and you get a stipend too.

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Ouch. National reaction not very nice.

What if Baylor gets the death penalty? What’s it got left? A stupendously hypocritical Christianity, and the ruins of a university.

[Nicho] Garcia, 20, was identified through surveillance video more than a month after a 20-year-old man said he was punched repeatedly outside his apartment complex just west of campus by a man he asked to stop urinating next to him, according to a police report… Garcia admitted to being “really hammered” that night and said he often urinates outside when he’s drunk.

A slow but steady slippage in live attendance [at football games] doesn’t mean a precipitous slide is ahead for college football. Lucrative television broadcast contracts are a much more important source of revenue; strong TV ratings, which haven’t seen a similar decline, not ticket sales drive those contracts.

Venture capital, as UD has noted before on this blog, should be looking into animatronic-college-student startups: Firms that produce in bulk twenty-ish rah-rah student bodies that can quickly be shipped and distributed throughout empty stadium seating areas. Clients would be in charge of campus-specific ornamentation (local beer brews, hats with the name of the relevant school on them, team face paint); the firm would be hired to plausibly replicate and animate hundreds of generic fans.