The University of Tennessee gears up for another great season.

But take heart: There’s still enough for the governor and his friends to fly to university football games on the public dime.

A local commentator in Oklahoma says there’s almost nothing in that state “to cheer for.” He says that by almost any quality of life standard Oklahoma looks terrible.

Instead of asking what in l’esprit d’Oklahome might account for this outcome, the writer proceeds to thank the state’s lucky stars for its football teams.

OU and OSU football have become sources of state pride at a time you can scarcely find them anywhere else.

But… Shouldn’t the guy be asking how it was that Oklahoma got stuck with 70,000 square miles of meh plus two university football teams?

Ask any chancellor, elected official or traveling businessperson and they’ll tell you — nothing has a bigger impact on the perception of universities or the states in which they educate than their sports teams. In Oklahoma, that means their football teams.

The general perception of Oklahoma, for reasons the writer lists (terrible schools, horrible health indicators, over-full prisons… he didn’t have time to mention stuff like the fact that the state’s senior senator showed climate change is a hoax by bringing a snowball to the senate chamber), is bad. If football teams had the biggest impact imaginable on the public perception of a state, Oklahoma would be right up there with Massachusetts and its… university football teams?

I mean I dunno. Some problems with logic here.

The later it gets in the summer, the closer it gets to college football season, and UD‘s following Nevin Shapiro’s University of Miami with special eagerness. UM, with its history of spectacular on and off field violence and equally spectacular rules violations (put MIAMI in my search engine), is just now, just barely, coming off of its latest NCAA suspension (all them prossies drugs cars cash bets etc. Shapiro provided), and everyone’s watching to see whether this off-season’s flurry of player fuckups will keep them suspended.

In the case of UM, the NCAA should probably institute a Permanently Suspended status… Something that’s not quite the Death Penalty but conveys the idea that this majorly criminalized institution will never be able to join that venerable community of nations which is America’s Football Nation…

This time around it’s all about a local dealer giving Yukons and Escalades to a bunch of players which, speaking of venerable, is truly one of the very old-style violations, truly one of the fuckups that goes all the way back to the birth of college football.

One of the players currently being, er, investigated by UM

missed 2014 due to suspension. He was reportedly involved in an altercation with his roommate, who is said to have broken his nose in the incident.

UD appreciates the writer’s delicate, passive-voice, way of putting it… Not that his fellow player smashed his fist into his face and broke the guy’s nose… That would be, description-wise, rather unseemly… No… He is said to have somehow who knows how have experienced an outcome from the incident which involved his apparently having broken his nose… Or some such thing…

“Reportedly” (which doubles up on the said to have) and “altercation” are also very good. The lads had a bit of a set-to. Bit of an altercation.

Arrests and apologies… Losing much of your university football team because your recruitment staff is incentivized to bring people with a propensity toward violence onto college campuses has become so much part of the story of American life that sports writers are getting downright poetic about it.

WACO, TEXAS

Waco’s lost in the wilderness
It’s lost in bitterness
It’s lost, lost somewhere in this, in loneliness

The University of North Texas athletic department is paying $90,000 per month to buy out the contracts of three former athletic department employees…

The school hired [a new football coach] heading into the 2011 season and saw him provide the program an immediate boost…

[It] quickly signed [the coach] to a new five-year contract in March 2014.

[He] coached only 17 games under the terms of that contract. [The school] fired him after an embarrassing 66-7 loss to Portland State University left UNT at 0-5 last season…

UNT has been paying out [his] salary since…

And you know what’s interesting?

McCarney hasn’t taken a full-time job since leaving UNT. He recently spoke at a clinic at Iowa State and has spent time visiting his former assistant coaches who now are running their own programs.

Petersen has not returned to a full-time job in college coaching, while Villarreal said he would take time off after leaving UNT to evaluate the next step in his career.

None of the three guys getting full salary for doing nothing is looking for a new job! Weird, huh? They seem content to pull down all that money and not do anything.

Or, I mean, you know … It’s great to see Villarreal slowly chewing on that all-important next step…

It’s like university presidents on corporate boards. Nice work if you can get it.

… but somehow the upcoming tax evasion trial of Jerry Sandusky’s lawyer (he also steals clients’ money) just kind of puts the cherry on top of the whole big classy world of Happy Valley.

***********

Update: See the comments for a correction.

[The University of] Tennessee hosts the mighty Appalachian State Mountaineers on Thursday, September 1st. Big things are expected of the Volunteers this year, and to ensure a raucous crowd the alleged university has cancelled classes on that day.

… football.”

Uh-huh. And also

…

Student [game] attendance would likely drop off [without a new stadium] and the tailgating experience would be compromised.

Now the school’s in darkest deficit doodoo, game attendance is tanking, and the UW trustees, whose job it is to be trustees, are sniping at the ex-athletic director onaccounta he didn’t tell them how he was spending the students’ money.

UW trustees want to know: Who’s the steward of student and state money around here anyway?

Well, let’s just go down that list, shall we? Horrible hideous shit can happen anywhere, especially in a country where everyone has at least two guns. We’re getting the list now because of the latest entry on it – the nation’s premier Baptist university, and that university’s local police department, spent years ignoring rampantly raping football players. That’s Waco’s latest claim to fame.

Okay, so four things on the list are about Baylor, basketball, and football: The murder, the cover-up, the NCAA sanctions, and now the rapes. If you ask ol’ UD, who’s been covering big-time sports mayhem at America’s universities since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, there’s nothing reigniting or even igniting about that list — homicidal raping covering up and heavily sanctioned university sports programs are not uncommon in the United States.

Admittedly most of the murders take place shortly after the player has dropped out of the school.

Since 2007, [Aaron Hernandez has] been charged with, or linked to, the shootings of six people in four incidents. Three of the victims were gruesomely murdered. One survivor, a former friend named Alexander Bradley, has had multiple operations and lost his right eye. The other two survivors were shot in their car outside a Gainesville, Florida, bar after an altercation involving Hernandez and two of his teammates his freshman year at the University of Florida. While in Gainesville, he sucker-punched a guy and shattered the fellow’s eardrum, and reportedly failed multiple drug tests, though he was suspended only once for those offenses.

But who’s counting? It’s your beloved suspension-averse alma mater we’re describing here, and right this minute you’re loading up the Bud Light in anticipation of tailgate season for you and the young’uns.

So is Waco problematically special? Only stuff special on the list is the two cults – the Davidians and the Pagans.

I’m sure Texas gets more than its share of violent cults, just as Utah and Oregon do, because these states get all goose-bumpy over guns plus they hate laws and shit cuz that’s the state and fuck the state.

No, by prevailing big-time university athletics standards and prevailing state standards, there’s nothing special about Waco.

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

UPDATE: UD thanks Derek for pointing out
that this is about basketball as much as football.

… The Olympian, via the AP. UD reproduces it in its entirety:

A Wisconsin regent questioned Friday whether it’s worth continuing athletics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the face of a massive deficit.

Regent Tim Higgins challenged UW-Milwaukee Athletic Director Amanda Braun after a presentation of a report on Panther sports that she gave to regents on the school’s campus. Higgins pointed out to her that the athletic department finished the year that ended on June 30, 2015, nearly $11 million in the red. According to the report, the deficit began building around 2000 due to the rising overall costs of Division 1 athletics.

UW-Milwaukee athletics are heavily subsidized by student fees; they made up more than two-thirds of the department’s revenue in fiscal year 2015 and are projected to make up a little less than two-thirds of revenue in the upcoming fiscal year.

Higgins asked Braun how she can justify continuing sports at the school. Braun seemed taken aback by the question, initially responding that she believes student-athletes make a positive impact on the university.

At Regent Gerald Whitburn’s prodding, she added that her department faces no serious NCAA sanctions and the deficit is no longer growing. According to the report, the athletic department finished fiscal year 2015 with a net balance of $604,400 and should finish 2016 about $107,284 to the good.

She also said that the department has a plan to eliminate the deficit. According to the report, the plan calls for balancing the budget on an annual basis for multiple years.

The regents took no action and moved on to other agenda items.

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

With its fierce concision and unemotional address, this masterpiece of the postmodern surreal owes much to Beckett and Stoppard — as is obvious when you transpose it into Waiting for Godot.

____________________________________

Vlad.: WHY GO ON? THERE’S A MASSIVE DEFICIT AND WE’LL NEVER GET OUT FROM UNDER IT. IT WILL JUST GET WORSE.

Est.: WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU TODAY? IT’S ONLY A BLOODY ELEVEN MILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT. SAME DEFICIT WE’VE HAD SEEN WE STARTED WAITING FOR A BALANCED BUDGET.

Vlad: YOU’RE KILLING OUR STUDENTS! IT’S UNJUSTIFIABLE.

Est.: [Taken aback.] Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labors of men that as a result of the labors unfinished of Testew and Cunnard it is established as hereinafter but not so fast for reasons unknown that as a result of the public works of Puncher and Wattmann it is established beyond all doubt that in view of the labors of Fartov and Belcher left unfinished for reasons unknown of Testew and Cunard left unfinished it is established what many deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation wastes and pines wastes and pines and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin and succedanea in a word I resume flying gliding golf over nine and eighteen holes tennis of all sorts in a word for reasons unknown in Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham namely concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown but time will tell fades away I resume Fulham Clapham in a word the dead loss per head since the death of Bishop Berkeley being to the tune of one inch four ounce per head approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara in a word for reasons unknown no matter what matter the facts are there and considering what is more much more grave that in the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman it appears what is more much more grave that in the light the light the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman that in the plains in the mountains by the seas by the rivers running water running fire the air is the same and then the earth namely the air and then the earth in the great cold the great dark the air and the earth abode of stones in the great cold alas alas in the year of their Lord six hundred and something the air the earth the sea the earth abode of stones in the great deeps the great cold on sea on land and in the air I resume for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis the facts are there but time will tell I resume alas alas on on in short in fine on on abode of stones who can doubt it I resume but not so fast I resume the skull fading fading fading and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones Cunard

Vlad.: I REALLY FIND THIS MOST INTERESTING.

Est.: WE HAVE A PLAN. ALL WILL BE WELL… GODOT…

[The regents take no action and move on to other agenda items.]

The voice of the people, from the comment thread of an article about poor lil University of Kansas, one of America’s most comprehensively disgusting sports factories. All KU wanted to do was recruit a person who can win football games! So what if he also likes to rape everyone in sight? Penn State put up with Jerry Sandusky doing that for decades. But nooooo… KU’s too lah dee dah for that. You’ve got all these raped women filing lawsuits. What’s the matter with Kansas?

They’re not just big and bad.

If coaches, they may be the highest paid people in the state.

If players, they’re sports heroes. They get huge scholarships plus under the table payments. Bogus professors and bogus disciplines are invented just for them. All of the best buildings on campus are off limits to everyone but these students, with some interesting results.

The big and bad people – and of course not everyone on your big-time college team is a bad person – may bring a new kind of violence to campus, often working as the team that they are to beat the shit out of male students and sexually assault/film themselves sexually assaulting female.

The president and trustees of places like the University of Nebraska seem to consider what people like Richie Incognito do to their students acceptable collateral damage, and students seem to agree it’s worth it because you need people big and bad enough to beat the shit out of opposing players, and you might not be able to confine to the field or the court the generally violent disposition of big and bad people. Here’s a Rutgers scholar (Rutgers has distinguished itself for coach and player violence) showing his stuff.

I mean, lots of people drink and carouse and get into trouble in college. C’est entendu. But these guys are built like brick shithouses and they work as a team. You do the math.