This local editorial says all the right things about the budget-stressed state of Wyoming giving millions to university football and slashing millions from public education. (See this post for details.)
We don’t believe for one moment that this money is going to improve UW’s chances of having a winning football team – which really is the goal behind this. At best, it keeps pace with other schools in the Mountain West Conference. And it does nothing to ease the impacts of UW’s bigger problems: Quality athletes are not going to play in Laramie, at least not consistently, when they have options with better amenities and climates.
This is a myth, a dream, that UW’s athletics department and its supporters peddle. It is time to move on to a smaller conference and perhaps even a different division – at least in football.
True, there is some value in seeing athletics as the “front porch” of the university. But in times of fiscal crisis, it is unwise to toss millions at trivialities when cuts are being made that hurt the public schools, and UW’s academic programs, and the state’s poor.
The editorial board even tries to make the argument that sports are less serious than study.
Athletics are an extravagance; academics are not.
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Wyoming is just like Oklahoma, where the University of Oklahoma’s president is yet again explaining to stupid us (“the public misunderstands”) that we shouldn’t even ask the question posed in this Tulsa World headline:
HOW DO [OU’S FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL COACHES] MAKE $8 MILLION AT A SCHOOL FACING A $20 MILLION BUDGET CUT?
We shouldn’t even ask this, because the money’s not coming from the state and hell that’s how people spend their money in Oklahoma! They don’t give a shit about whatever else the university does. What else does UO do? Don’t ask! Don’t even ask!
Boren misunderstands that the real question isn’t about state or non-state funds. Oklahoma and Wyoming are two of our most happily and severely concussed states. They don’t cotton much, round them parts, to thinking.
… meets in Fargo to discuss raising the student athletics fee 35.5%.
[Student] Conner Swanson … questioned why [the North Dakota State University athletics deputy director and senior associate athletic director for development] were requesting a fee increase when athletics and other organizations received an increase for a five-year plan two years ago.
“What has changed and why are you back two years later and not five?” Swanson asked.
“I’d have to go back and take a look at (that fee increase) and get back to you,” [the deputy director] said.
He’s outta there. They stayed in Division I.
Keeping them dumb in Wyoming.
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And okay – today’s theme on University Diaries seems to be stupidity. I mean, UD keeps reading more and more Americans worrying about how stupid we are. The context seems to be the GOP presidential front-runners, and it’s not confined to the left.
I don’t mean obvious stuff like Bill Maher’s. The Weekly Standard, which UD thought was Sarah Palin’s biggest booster, just ran a review of a book called Too Dumb to Fail. Excerpts from the review:
I had thought that Matt Lewis’s new book about the conservative Republican future, Too Dumb To Fail, had a title that was accurate but a bit ahead of its time. Then, on the eve of the book’s publication, Sarah Palin endorsed the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, with a rambling “speech” that thoroughly earned a New York Daily News front page headline “I’m With Stupid”…
[Southern evangelicals] as a group tend to lack intellectual curiosity and rigor. Bringing a decidedly unintellectual group into the [conservative] movement, Lewis contends, encouraged the movement itself to move away from its strength, its use of argument to explain America’s challenges and propose real solutions that solve them…
Pandered to by [media] “leaders” who profit enormously from keeping their flock sheltered, this has created a worldview in which conservatives are an embattled majority suppressed only by the betrayal of elites and their putative leaders. “Informed” by such falsehoods, it is no wonder when we ponder a future as I write of a Republican party led either by a demagogue or a charlatan.
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And here’s a description of the highest-profile student/athlete at one of America’s highest-profile public universities.
[Maty] Mauk isn’t just stupid. He’s a true hard working moron.
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There’s one thing UD likes about this sudden national freeing of stupidity from the closet.
When La Kid was a kid, she and I loved a series of books called The Stupids. Then we were instructed by a child-something specialist among our acquaintance that it was very very wrong to read The Stupids, very wrong to use the word, let alone laugh at The Stupids.
Of course UD and La Kid ignored this person. But it’s always sort of been in the back of UD‘s mind as an annoyance that this person said this to her and to her daughter. It makes UD happy to see how far we’ve come as a country just in the last couple of decades in terms of naming the problem openly.
… line.
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Yes, after the drunken bar fight and after the fleeing the scene of an accident thing and after other unnamed disciplinary whatnots, the seriously fucked up hero of the Mizzou gridiron seems to have crossed one line too many, even for the University of Missouri, one of America’s sleaziest jockshops. Let’s review:
Seven Mizzou football and men’s basketball players have been arrested eight times since January [2014]… That tally also doesn’t count an independent investigation scheduled to be released Friday about the alleged rape and eventual suicide of former swimmer Sasha Menu Courey… [A] football coach was suspended after a drunken-driving arrest two years ago, and [a] basketball coach was suspended last season by the NCAA.
There’s the other celebrated Mizzou football YouTube (Maty doing coke has gone viral) of Maty’s last coach trying to recite the alphabet. There’s the coach’s reward for generating this sort of publicity. There’s one of Maty’s recent predecessors as quarterback:
[Blaine] Dalton was arrested on suspicion of felony possession of a controlled substance, minor in possession of alcohol, possession of false identification and three traffic charges, including a lane violation and failure to provide insurance.
Sextuple play! Beat that, Maty!
At Mizzou, it’s not just about getting filmed. Look at the people who do the filming.
Director of video operations Michael Schumacher spent $7,605.50 [on a Mizzou corporate credit card] in a single night at Olympic Garden, a club conveniently located on the Strip that “feature[s] literally hundreds of the world’s most beautiful ladies (known as the Dreamgirls) in a relaxing and spacious setting.” One of those charges included a $2,000 tip on a $4,400 bill. Maybe I don’t understand how strip clubs work, but was Schumacher being extra generous, or is “tip” just how you say “blowjob” on a receipt?
The University of Missouri: America’s most amazing video operation.
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Hold on there a minute! The white line never moves!
We don’t really know what’s on the table. At first glance, if we had to make a guess, we know what our first answer would be. I would say cocaine, but we don’t know with 100% certainty. Also, I’ve watched the video at least 20 times and the white substance that is on the table, never really appears to go up Mauk’s nose. That white line never moves.
… State has settled a lawsuit in regard to their Jesus figure for about a million dollars.
Tucker Readdy, kinesiology and health professor and Faculty Senate chair, spoke for himself saying it’s unfair to only look at additional athletics monies and ignore the millions going to other [University of Wyoming] departments.
“In the short term, sure, it’s easy to question priorities,” he said. “But in the long term, we’re talking about the development of the whole university — we can easily be talking about why the Science Initiative is getting funding but other academic areas aren’t. I don’t think it’s a fair question to isolate athletics and say, ‘Why is athletics getting some money right now and these academic programs aren’t?’”
At a time of significant cutbacks in state funds, a UW professor warns against thinking of athletics as somehow … different from other parts of a university.
Reading it now.
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What does it mean that the most popular and unifying form of entertainment in America … features giant muscled men, mostly African-American, engaged in a sport that causes many of them to suffer brain damage?
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As Susan Margulies, a concussion expert at the University of Pennsylvania, explained to Charlie Rose, no helmet has been devised that can “effectively reduce the rotational acceleration, that sloshing within the head that’s happening in the brain itself.”
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Randle El is just one of many players to point out that the violent nature of the game — the focus of our guilty pleasure — is the same thing that breaks spines, shatters bones, renders middle-aged men demented.
In the years of running this blog, UD has become familiar with the local booster angle in the local press. As various hideously and cynically mismanaged university sports programs get worse and worse, their provincial scribes visit the latest miracle AD who’s got a miraculous new formula to fix it all. The provincial scribes then report back on their amazing visit with this amazing person. Scathing Online Schoolmarm takes a look at an exemplary piece out of one of America’s most scandalous universities, Rutgers.
Here’s its first sentence.
When it comes to bleeding money, Rutgers University has long had one of the worst-performing athletic departments in the country.
The writer means the opposite of what she has written. She means that when it comes to bleeding money Rutgers has long had one of the best-performing athletic departments in the country. Greedy stupid addled Rutgers, with its constantly shifting, constantly scandalous, athletic staff (its last football coach “was fined $50,000 by the university and suspended for three games after contacting [an] instructor about [a player’s] grade. He was later fired [cost of his buyout to the kiddies at Rutgers: $1.4 million] after a losing season that was also marred by the arrest of seven players for violent crimes in and around New Brunswick.”), is possibly the best-performing American athletic department when it comes to bleeding money.
The writer proceeds to take down, unchallenged, every bullshit statement the new miracle guy gives her, inviting us to be excited about what her headline calls his “new plan.” Her big piece of news is that “after years of financial troubles, Rutgers athletics may be poised to get out of the red.”
So what’s the new genius plan?
Try to get supporters to give the program more money.
Try to sell more tickets.
Sit on our asses until 2021, when Rutgers gets full membership in its conference.
Wow. Why didn’t the last forty ADs think of that.
Due to this amazing new formula, “we will,” promises the new AD, “be in the black.”
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Buried deep in this article is the economist on the faculty who points out that even with the thrilling new payments just around the corner it’s quite likely that anyone telling you the department’s going to be in the black is a fool or a liar (“They haven’t gotten rid of [the deficit] because they don’t want to and don’t need to.”)
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And speaking of getting rid of: When, in a year or so, they get rid of this latest miracle worker under pressure from students and alumni and faculty appalled at his real plan (dismantling most components of the university for the sake of the football team), the next Amazing Kreskin will assure this same reporter that victory is just around the corner. And she will faithfully transcribe what he says.
[H]is early run-ins with the law, instead of provoking interventions by the football coaches who comprised the adult authority figures in his life, only brought cover-ups, aimed to protect their golden goose: a kid who coaches and who, scouts said in hushed tones, ran the ball like a future MVP. In listening to a series of interviews with old teammates, you hear stories of violence conjoined with mental illness: of someone who “didn’t have all the tools in his tool box,” who could turn from kindness to anger on a moment’s notice, lash out, and then be consumed with regret. This was someone who needed counseling. Instead, he had people just hoping he would win the big game before his next arrest.
That took place most notoriously at Nebraska, where Phillips dragged his ex-girlfriend, Kate McEwen, a basketball player, down a flight of stairs. After pleading “no contest” to charges of misdemeanor assault, he was suspended for just six games. As for McEwen, she had her athletic scholarship taken away. An abhorrent message had been sent to not only Phillips but to a team that collected gender-violence charges like they collected conference titles.
Phillips’s coach, the legendary Tom Osborne, said at the time that he took Phillips back onto the team without further punishment because the young man needed “structure” and stability that only Cornhuskers football could offer. That “structure” was a college football program that, like so many others, was built on rank exploitation, with little care for the person under the helmet.
It’s even more insidious than that, isn’t it? Is it that hard to imagine a coach perceiving the twisted violence in a player, perceiving it play out astonishingly against women, perceiving the very same quality playing out against men on the field, and saying: Wow. Great. Let’s tap the football part of that violence… We only need it for a few seasons… Responsible people at the University of Nebraska must have known that wildchild Richie Incognito had a pretty empty toolbox too. I’m sure there have been plenty of other similarly exploited student athletes on that campus. Why hasn’t anyone at that campus proposed a serious investigation, conducted by an outsider, of its coaching and academic ethics over, say, the last two decades, in regard to its football players? I know that plenty of other universities behave the same way, but given the current spotlight on Nebraska, I think that school would be a good place to start.
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A similarly harsh attack on the University of Nebraska.
… the University of Nebraska.
[Nebraska football player Lawrence] Phillips was arrested [in 1995] for assaulting his ex-girlfriend, Kate McEwen, a basketball player for the Nebraska women’s team, and was subsequently suspended by head coach Tom Osborne. The case became a source of controversy and media attention, with the perception arising that Osborne was coddling a star player by not kicking Phillips off the team permanently. Osborne walked out on a press conference when asked “If one of your players had roughed up a member of your family and had dragged her down a flight of steps, would you have reinstated that player to the team?” Outraged Nebraska faculty proposed that any student convicted of a violent crime be prohibited from representing the university on the football field.
Some of Phillips’ heartbreaking letters from prison can be read here. He has killed himself.
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A fond look back at the Coach Osborne years.
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JND, a friend of this blog, points out in his comment that UD went and missed the best part of this article. Here it is.
“If I had to guess, [Coach Osborne] genuinely believed that he was the best person to address the problems a player was having—that with his strengths as a role model, as a disciplinarian, as a man with great moral turpitude, he could put these guys on the right path,” said Paula Lavigne, a reporter for ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” who was a reporter and editor for the Daily Nebraskan in the mid-90s.
Well. She learned her stuff at Nebraska.
With an $8 million budget, but no toilet paper in the bathrooms, broken air-conditioned systems and a lack of computers in the classrooms, students are beginning to wonder where all this money is going at [Los Angeles] University High School…
Following salaries and utilities, the athletics program requires a large portion of University High’s overall budget, estimated [at] between $80,000 and $100,000 a year. LAUSD had left University High with the responsibility of paying for all sports-related costs, causing the school to go bankrupt.