… 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.

America’s FIFA.

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.

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.

Absolutely.

… 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.

Donald Trump recently said football “has become soft, and our country has become soft.” He accused NFL referees of throwing penalty flags to impress their wives watching the games on television.

The Republican poll leader continued: “What used to be considered a great tackle; violent head-on. You used to see these tackles, and it was incredible to watch,” Trump said. “Now they tackle — ‘Oh, head-on-head collision, 15 yard [penalty]’ — the whole game is all screwed up. You say, ‘Wow, what a tackle.’ Bing. Flag.”

Trump asked, “It’s a Sunday, who the hell wants to watch these crummy games?”

And while you’re at it, bring back this graphic!

… its This Is Madness article and sticking it on Page 1A again. UD remains baffled as to why none of these articles (here’s a good one) (what the hell – go to town) tells you why this is going on — the degrading, bankrupting business of new stadiums, multimillionaire coaches, and expensive conferences.

As UD has pointed out before, it’s because the people who run these particular universities cannot think of anything else to do. They’ve already pretty much dismantled their universities as, say, teaching institutions… Everything’s online, or bogus… Their ideal student, their big man on campus, is Johnny Manziel, held up by Texas A&M’s chancellor as a model for us all. Or Richie Incognito, loved up as much by the University of Nebraska as Manziel was by Texas A&M. Did these universities help or hurt Manziel and Incognito, with their veneration and love and no classes and don’t bother graduating and feel free to beat up our students and sell merchandise and reel around being a drunk motherfucker? Have you followed these men’s subsequent careers in the NFL?

If these universities could think of anything to do with their money other than put on games and recruit criminals and destroy players’ lives, don’t you think they would? This is the only thing they can think of doing. This is what they think a university is.

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Since we’re all remembering David Bowie today, let’s remember what he told us.

On the whole, you know, this whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid. Frankly.

The highest profile, highest paid representative of the University of Louisville, the front man of that university’s front porch, the keeper of the keys to the UL whormitory, has now entered the moment in his long day’s journey when he wanders onstage and, like morphine-addled Mary Tyrone, speaks his delirium. It’s curtain-speech time for Rick Pitino.

As locker rooms full of guilty and embarrassed journalists look on, Pitino floats into – as the Chicago Trib puts it – “an alternate reality,” in which he confesses that he has had it with a world intent on sullying his purity. He has brought to university sports the same saintly ways of Joe Paterno, and, like Paterno, has been done in by Assistant Coach Iago Hitler.

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Bides there a university somewhere in this tumult? No. So editorials of this sort, which reference things like presidents and trustees, are a waste of time. The University of Louisville is an empty stage on which its coach struts his last.

… perforation.

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Details, if you’ve got the stomach for them.

This University of Central Florida student can’t help noticing she attends a really shitty school that spends all of its money on its total-loser football team. Oh, and on its hideous president – he just got a huge bonus for grinding this shabby, overcrowded, scandal-ridden (put University Central Florida in my search engine) wasteland into dust.

You have to wonder, though: If she’s smart enough to see the reality of the University of Central Florida, why doesn’t she attend a different school?

You got a problem with that?