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.

Just days after the three Oregon players were released from hospitalization due to overexertion during workouts, there’s more bad news for Willie Taggart’s Ducks program.

According to the school, co-offensive coordinator and tight ends coach David Reaves was arrested and charged with driving under the influence in Eugene on Saturday night.

You’ll love the details, including Reaves’ history with hostess programs and impermissible contacts and all.

What does ol’ UD tell you over and over again? Football programs really raise the tone.

The long tradition of university football players wearing immediately identifiable clothes, or driving cars with immediately identifiable parking permits, during the course of their robberies is burnished once again in the case of the University of Oklahoma’s Parrish Cobb.

Here’s UD‘s favorite headline:

Oklahoma cornerback Parrish Cobb, burned for 2 Noah Brown TDs, charged in 3 robberies

You wanna get the important stuff out there first, and only after that get around to his off-field activities…

Some nice comments at Deadspin:

(spring practice)

Stoops: Is there any video?

Cobb: I don’t think so.

Stoops: Well take an extra lap. Wait, we’re in a new era. Make it two.

I’m not gonna do that thing where I say They started as monasteries and other religious-type entities and look how far they’ve fallen! I’m not gonna say universities – much less American universities – must continue to represent a higher, purer, realm of activity than, say, Myrtle Beach Bike Week.

No, no, let it rip. Let sex-scandal-soaked University of Minnesota produce as a finalist for regent a football player with exposure issues. Let UMN’s current regents grumble about having been left out of the hiring and compensation decisions around their incoming multimillionaire football coach (background on him here). Let the probable upcoming scandal and massive buyout of this guy’s contract also weigh heavily on the pointless dithering trustees. Fine. Fine.

Go ahead and make universities places where highly paid employees routinely injure students so badly they have to be hospitalized. Where brainwork means concussions. Football players with exposure issues are part of the grand legacy of American universities, as are sadistic-training hospitalizations. As are – at some of our highest profile schools – child rape, gang rape, and woman battering.

But consider this:

I don’t want to scare you, but more and more people are talking about a fundamental change in the higher education of this country. More and more people are talking about a minor league for football.

And American universities had better watch out, or it’s ave atque vale Richie Incognito, Johnny Manziel, and Peyton Manning. These guys are not merely the heroes of schools like Nebraska and Tennessee – they’re the trustees of the future. Their ethos is the school ethos. All the money and the passion and the very identity of the university follow them. What happens when American teenagers are able to go directly into a minor league system and bypass the university?

UD‘s friend David Ridpath is all excited.

For anyone that loves football at all levels and wants college football in a more educational setting along with providing more talent for the NFL, it is simply a no brainer.

A lot of people are excited. But if you’re a university, ask yourself: What happens to the trillion dollars you’ve already invested in new stadiums and all that shit? You’re already looking at seriously declining attendance at the games, and serious resistance to paying vaster and vaster student athletic fees. Much more fundamentally, you are football. Nebraska, Penn State, a hundred others – What happens when a few grade-conscious pussies tiptoe out on the field for you? As Mrs Dalloway put it – the death of the soul…

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UD thanks Charlie.

Anyone who blogs about universities – ‘specially university athletics – has the very same task Samuel Beckett describes. How do you make room for – make sense of – the mess? For the theater of the absurd production that schools like New Mexico State (and let NMSU stand for myriad others like it) stage every single day? Go here for background on this clown school with its budget-killing big sports program and its vast empty stadium. Then go here for an update, as the state of New Mexico pulls funding from the school and lets the big thinkers on campus figure out how to keep their players rolling around in a huge vacant shell.

But that’s just one state school, from a notoriously anti-intellectual state. Consider the sporty devolution of the University of Minnesota, of all places, where they pay coaches millions of dollars to preside over endless sickening drug and sex scandals. People are now officially worried that the state legislature might be too grossed out to approve UMN’s funding requests. You’ve even got some restive citizens wondering about – wait for it – whether athletics might compromise a university’s mission. They seem particularly upset about coaches’ salaries.

But UMN to the rescue! They’re about to appoint this guy as one of their regents. Good optics.

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The Washington state senate shows you what can happen to a university’s autonomy when it keeps fucking up its athletic budget.

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At least we’ve got the very top of university football, with packed stadiums and plentiful revenues, to admire. Dave Zirin describes these lucky schools.

[Clemson’s] head coach in 1981, Danny Ford made $50,000 that year (adjusted for inflation, that would be $140,000 today). Dabo Swinney takes home a base salary of $4.55 million. He also made $1.4 million in bonuses for a total salary of just under $6 million. As for players, their lot in life is the same as in 1981, except now they receive a $388-a-month stipend.

[Clemson coach Dabo] Swinney was asked about the idea of actually paying players, given the dramatically transformed economic landscape of the game, and he said that if players are ever paid, “I’ll go do something else because there’s enough entitlement in this world as there is.” To call the desire to end this rank exploitation “entitlement” is Orwellian in the extreme. He might as well write “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” on the locker-room walls.

If anyone has expressed an obscene amount of entitlement, it’s Swinney. Here is someone working on a refurbished plantation who makes millions of dollars off the sweat and head injuries of overwhelmingly black, unpaid labor, and yet when asked about the Black Lives Matter movement in September, he said, ”Some of these people need to move to another country.”

… College football is a septic tank of entitlement. It’s a fungal culture created by the head coaches of Big Football. Dabo Swinney is the very embodiment of that culture: adrift, clueless, and filthy rich.

Yuck. Another fine mess.

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UD thanks John and Carl.

“It’s going to continue to drain money from the core mission of the university. And there’s no end in sight. How many years do we do this?” keens a University of Massachusetts professor as the school’s ignorant padded armies clash by night…

It’s gotten quite lyrical, this national chorus of professors lamenting the tragic infinitude of university football — or, as the latest installment in Bloomberg’s series on the subject has it, “Football is Forever.” The author of the series points out that

Once a school fields a top-division football team, it’s nearly impossible to reverse the commitment.

I can’t go on, I’ll go on would be the more modern, tragicomic, version of this classic truth: The morally and financially rancid circus of big-time university football (toss in basketball, of course) cannot be dismantled. Eight times a year an addled elephant will be made to balance on its back legs in front of four rich drunks in the luxury suites and forty poor drunks in the bleachers, plus there’s the police and the littering tailgaters and the clean-up crew and that’s all folks. That’s the show. It struts its stuff forever and forever, signifying nothing, but royally fucking over your university.

Minnesota: Not just rape: Gang rape!

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Well, UM used to be a respectable school, and now that it’s going down the tubes the wise men are gathering (see this article and its various theories) to explain what happened.

The short version is of course reputational death by football. Like this:

ICK FACTOR ——-> INSTITUTIONAL FINANCIAL COLLAPSE

That is, your scummy team and its scummy coaches generate such massive alienation/disgust that the school hemorrhages money and reputation in every direction – ticket sales, coach buyouts, athletic facility debt repayment, lawsuits, SNL skits, declining enrollment, declining alumni support (see the comment in this post’s headline), blahblah.

Problem is, you can get this outcome in two wildly different ways: Through a president who’s nothing but a football coach, and through a president who is simply appalled to discover that a person of his or her cerebral delicacy is at a jock school, and who refuses to sully him or herself with the brainless assholes at Athletes’ Village. You can be Ken Starr of blessed memory (Ken’s still playing the last down); or you can be UM’s Eric Kaler. You can be President Booster (Oklahoma’s David Boren has held on the longest with this unremittingly nauseating approach) or President I’m Better Than This, Dammit! and you will still run an extremely high risk of implosion. Forces that transcend your provincial world (see this Bloomberg series) are in play, and only a genius tactician (like coach, president, chancellor, head trustee, and reincarnation of Jesus Christ Nick Saban) is going to be able to thread his way through the blockers.

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UD thanks Keith.

It’s a beautiful thing.

What’s even more beautiful is that, the way things are going on this country’s campuses, next year the cheer will be volleyed back and forth from one side of our universities’ stadiums and arenas to the other. Call and response.

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But hey maybe not. Maybe when you’re down to He Hits Women cheers, you begin asking yourself whether you want to be there.

Chicago State University.

Words fail me.

[There’s] the question of the board of trustees, the school’s accreditation, Foundation problems, including a forensic audit. Two football players were shot Saturday night at an off-campus party…

Then the athletic director issues a statement about a surreptitiously obtained game plan and the university again is back on the front burner, with the heat turned up.

This blog excitedly looks forward to 2017!

“On the Art and the Science of the Gun,” UD would title it.

It is a summation of American culture, AD 2016.