One of their players was just jailed for domestic violence; another is out with a concussion. After the worst loss in the school’s history a few days ago (58-0), the school fired the football coach. Virtually no one attended that game, so UM has to figure out how to get someone – anyone – to buy a UM football ticket.

Plus they’ve now got to pay the coach his no doubt enormous buyout.

And meanwhile they don’t have a coach.

Why, asks this writer, is Temple University going to be the next school to screw itself over but good by building a new football stadium? Why? And why does no one ever ask why?

The question that we never seem to ask is why… What we won’t ask, what we never ask, is why a college such as Temple University – or any college, really – should care [so much about things like football and football stadiums]. We won’t ask how a Top 25 ranking or a visit from ESPN helps fulfill the mission of an institution of higher learning, or why such an institution should spend any of its resources pursuing them, particularly when those resources are financed in large part by taxpayer and student debt.

Take, for instance, the University of Akron’s stadium, “a $55 million project that would be funded exclusively by private donations and stadium revenues. When it hosted its first game in 2009, it was a $62 million project funded primarily by student tuition and fees… [This] year [Akron’s deeply indebted stadium] is attracting the lowest attendance in the MAC.”

David Murphy provides other examples. There are many.

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

But okay. Let’s go there. Why? Big stadiums and big football programs have nothing to do with (indeed they erode) the academic mission which defines a university, and they will almost certainly do terrible damage to everyone at the school (via deficits and scandals) except for the athletic department and whatever trustees own companies doing sports-related business with the university.

Some people will claim that the mystery of the new stadium is essentially a religious mystery, having to do with the “unchurched” American’s evolution away from houses of worship and toward football fields.

Clemson University coach Dabo Swinney is aggressively Christian, even letting one of his players get baptized on the 50-yard-line during practice, never mind that Clemson is a state school.

A Georgia public school is looking into a mass baptism on its football field that was posted on YouTube but later taken down.

If your font is a fifty yard line, you’re stadium-building on faith, not reason. The economics of New Life Stadium are simple: The Lord will provide.

But there’s more to the stadium mystery, I think.

UD suggests that at some universities it’s a combination of not being able to think of anything else to do, plus sexual fantasy. The two things are related, because when people don’t have much to do, when their lives seem kind of drifty and pointless and empty, they’re liable to do a lot of fantasizing.

I think some leaders of universities – presidents, trustees – don’t know what to do with themselves. A very high-profile professor, a leader, at the University of North Carolina spends years negotiating pretend grades for pretend student papers and thinks nothing of committing the grade-haggling to writing in an email. What was Jan Boxill thinking? asks the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The answer is absolutely nothing, just like her colleague Julius Nyang’oro; they were just sort of drifting along, lost in erotic reverie about their beautiful athletes for whom they would do anything, including destroy themselves and their university. An assistant coach at the University of Louisville comes up with the idea of turning an athletes’ dorm into a brothel. Why? Popped into his head one day during a sexual reverie. Popped into his head while he was thinking hard about how to make his beautiful athletes’ lives even more beautiful.

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

You have to have a high threshold of embarrassment to read people describe their feelings about football.

I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…

Look at the shirtless boys with faces and torsos painted in the school colors; look at the cheerleaders on the fields, the ‘waves’ surging through the stands.

These men, either of whom could have written “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” represent countless sports-factory denizens spending their days in a haze of university-hatred and hormones.

Is hatred too strong? What sort of emotion allows you to seek and destroy any vestige of intellectual seriousness?

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

One key here is hiring retired politicians as university presidents, good old boys who don’t give a shit about “academia,” whatever that is. The sort of men currently running, for instance, Florida State and Oklahoma University.

[The university’s academic unit can go, but] the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.

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

Listen to this song. It also asks why. Listen to its lyrics, and imagine them sung by a university president as he or she thinks about one of the school’s football players. You just tiptoe into all my dreams…. It’s the kind of passion that will not be denied, no matter how many hearts are broken.

*************
UD thanks Ian.

Christine Brennan, bless her, is an evolutionist. She thinks that if someone tried introducing football to America now, an America that has progressed significantly since the late nineteenth century, we’d all in unison say no.

For instance, on the high school level:

If parents and administrators living in a 21st century world without football were told [about the destructive violence of] this prospective new sport, they never would allow it to begin.

And on the university level? She doesn’t say, but you figure an intellectual institution informed of an almost-certain degree of brain damage, no less, to the student players of this just-invented game would shrink back, appalled.

I mean, that’s by Brennan’s reckoning… If you ask ol’ UD, she’ll tell you that things like football, hockey, and NASCAR are and will continue to be massively popular because they hurt people (“[Football] is literally killing the men who play it.”). Failing to see the matador gored is like going all the way to Tromsø and failing to see the Northern Lights.

But this is the first time she’s seen a doubleplusgood reverse Orwellian lay-up.

John Calvin (It’s a pseudonym because… I don’t know. Why would a person use a pseudonym to write about sports?) warns us that if we vacate the University of Louisville’s basketball championship just because of those ineligible receivers (if I may mix sports) everyone’s been talking about, we are ushering in Kim Jong-un.

[B]eware. History, like whiskey, is best served straight up, and there is something very Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong-un about rewriting an event that happened and giving it an alternate ending. Many are amused when Kim Jong-un Photoshops out Uncle So and So from all previous official images shortly after he had fallen out of favor with the Dear Leader and then executed. But don’t laugh too loud… Whether we are talking basketball, football, or a more serious subject matter the same principle of history should apply: the truth should be our barometer, even and perhaps especially if the truth is ugly.

The meaning of history is a powerful tool and George Orwell summed it up perfectly with, “He who controls the past controls the future.”

Lose the smirk. This is serious stuff. Perhaps you’ve not read Isaiah Berlin’s Basketball and Its Betrayal: Enemies of the Arena, which subjects foes of university basketball programs to a withering critique, and concludes with a famous warning: He who controls the free throw area controls the future.

Jalen Rose, on an ESPN podcast, said that such “bachelorette parties” are vital to the recruiting process. “As a 17-year-old, if I’m not getting (serviced), I’m not coming,” he said, pointing out that he visited UNLV, Syracuse and Michigan and “you know where I went (Michigan).”

Tacit? Thundering. It’s UD‘s Donald Trump point again (see this post). He’s doing brilliantly because lots of people in this country like despicable people and despicable business practices. Gordon Gekko’s an American icon, and so are all the despicable coaches that earn by far the highest salaries at our universities. The genius who came up with “Hostess 5.0” at the University of Louisville will be immortalized in case studies at business schools all over the country.

This much we know. But Gerald Gurney and Mary Willingham also touch on something UD finds of increasing interest:

Providing a quality education for all athletes has been sacrificed for a tribal fanaticism for college athletics.

Tribalism and fanaticism are precisely the sorts of things universities are supposed to stand against – to educate against. These profoundly anti-social and anti-intellectual motives have traditionally found a home in the private, peripheral space of the fraternities. How amazing, now, to watch tribalism and fanaticism infect entire American universities! To watch presidents and trustees who are just as brainless and belligerent as some of the school’s frat boys!

Recall Kevin Carey on the nihilistic tribalism of some American universities:

[The university’s academic unit can go, but] the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.

The source of the athletics fanaticism, from this point of view, is quite obvious. Increasingly, without the athletics, there’s nothing there.

******************
(Photo link is from a new sports cafeteria at the University of Oregon.)

…and has that ever paid off. Scenes from their most recent game.

There was booing …from the sparse crowd even before the first quarter ended, and the stands – where some fights broke out – were largely empty by the midpoint of the third quarter.

Miami, playing in an empty stadium, was held to 146 total yards and just six first downs. The 58-point loss was the worst in Miami’s history, surpassing a 70-14 loss to Texas A&M in 1944.

UM’s athletic director, surveying this empty stadium, blithely reminded everyone to “make sure we continue to support our team.”

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

Yeah, it’s all gonna be okay. Maybe we’ll get a new coach.

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

Miami’s AD doesn’t understand that if you want people to go to your games, you shouldn’t make them puke forever.

As Dave Zirin points out, it’s not the pimping; it’s the hypocrisy. Katina Powell readily admits to being a whore; why won’t Andre McGee and his boss admit to being pimps?

Instead of writing corporate how-to books, Rick Pitino and his ilk should be delivering seminars in Big Pimpin’. Katina Powell isn’t close to being on his level.

As for the NCAA:

[O]ne wonders why NCAA president Mark Emmert doesn’t elicit cries of “stranger danger” when he enters a room.

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

No one who has, like UD, followed events at the University of Louisville over the last few years, can be surprised that the first longterm official trade in women at an American university was uncovered at that school. Its board of trustees is cretinous, catatonic. (The only trustee with guts – Steve Wilson – has begged the governor to let him quit, and the governor has obliged.) Its president – who keeps getting immense raises onaccounta he’s doing such a bang-up job – is a fully owned subsidiary of Richard Pitino and Bobby Petrino. Its student body and faculty has responded to the brothelization of their school with silence, or with rage at outsiders kicking over the stalls at the meat market.

The eminently fuckable University of Louisville continues to thrill. The latest chapter in Whormitory Nights features a lawsuit against Katina Powell for writing that mean book.

The student would do better to direct her lawsuit against the UL trustees. They are the long-time proprietors of Mustang Ranch. And they’ve got far more money than that book’s ever going to make.

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

UD is told by reliable sources that a consortium of UL fraternities is planning to sue Andre McGee and Rick Pitino for copyright infringement.

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

UL’s in-dorm brothel contributes to the decline of an entire industry.

Today, pornography is free, and finding real people who are into exactly what you’re into has never been smoother. It’s not that we’re living in an unprecedentedly immoral age, but that we no longer need to drive to seedy brothels in rural counties to procure our poison.

[Rick] Pitino still has a job because he’s one of the best coaches in college basketball history. Bobby Petrino was hired — actually, re-hired — because his brilliant football mind takes precedence over an extensive list of despicable acts away from the field, capped off by that Evel Knievel impression with his mistress along for the ride.

Our universities’ latest nationally riveting sex scandal, second only to Penn State’s Sandusky thing, has started another one of those Is something wrong with our universities? conversations.

Richard Vedder takes note of “the financial excesses and corruption that pervade college sports,” and calls for the feds to form a national commission on the future of university athletics so we can decide whether we want to keep subsidizing pimps, pedophiles, and the coaches who love them.

Kansas University chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little, chief academic officer at Chapel Hill during years of the now-notorious Nyang’oro scandal, worries in particular about the future of public universities in America.

As well she should, given the way she did absolutely nothing throughout her UNC tenure about immense academic fraud at that school… But she takes no responsibility for all of that; she’s worried that public universities are going to die because of declining state support.

Whenever the heads of public universities condemn the stinginess of their legislatures, they loftily remind everyone that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Yet as Vedder suggests, when your school looks like a money-hemhorrhaging joke run by idiots (sample headline for the University of Kansas: Kansas Football is Doomed, and the School’s Other Sports are Paying the Price), you make it awfully easy for politicians to shrug you off. When your school uses “transactional sex as a method of recruitment,” when sixteen-year-olds enter the dorms and “are told by people in power and players they’ve seen play on national television that in big time college hoops, women are just another item to be passed under the table,” it’s a little hard for university presidents to maintain their lofty academic airs.

Throughout his tenure as president, [University of Louisville president James] Ramsey has deferred to [vp for athletics Tom] Jurich in all athletics matters. He supported Jurich’s decision to keep Pitino, without punishment, after the Karen Sypher scandal. He supported Jurich’s decision to give football coach Bobby Petrino another chance despite the sex scandal that got him fired at Arkansas. He supported Jurich’s decision to keep football recruiter Clint Hurtt even after he was tainted by his involvement in the recruiting sex scandal at Miami… Already national commentators have lumped together all of Jurich’s controversial personnel decisions and concluded that UofL is guilty of condoning sexual misconduct for the sake of winning.

Talk about rushing to conclusions! Does that seem to you the record of a university that condones sexual misconduct for the sake of winning? Whoa, Nellie!

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

But look. Louisville’s is not the record of a university at all, is it? The opinion writer I quote above argues that universities are about this and universities are about that and the University of Louisville has to toss out all its pimps and whores and remember it’s a university yadda yadda.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this picture. Think about Donald Trump’s huge success so far in the presidential campaign. The more Trump behaves in a way diametrically opposed to presidential, the more votes he gets. Because a lot of Americans loathe government and love people committed to trashing it.

In the same way, a lot of people loathe academic institutions and love people committed to trashing them. Bring in squads of scummy coaches to run your school, give them complete freedom and the highest salaries in the state, and they will of course run your university into the ground.

To the cheers of thousands of onlookers.

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

Where’s UL’s faculty? Have you heard a peep out of any of them?

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

The University of Louisville has a permanent hard-on. It’s difficult to think when you’re like that.

But that’s the whole point.

Could it be that one of America’s sleaziest coaches, at one of America’s sleaziest schools, will have to leave? Lots of people are saying that the University of Louisville‘s basketball program has tipped over into Too Sordid Even for Division I and will have to sacrifice its coach, Rick Pitino.

*******

Louisville’s problem is not that it turns its dorms into whorehouses. Big deal. Recruiting 101. Athletics is the university’s front porch. And back room.

“You’re not gonna get players by doing those types of things,” [said Pitino] … what was behind this? What was the reason? An educated person can’t think you’re gonna get a recruit with a stripper coming in. This is University of Louisville, you don’t need any artificial help.” Funny, because you know what the rest of the world assumes? That free, naked, older women in the dorms would be exactly the type of thing that may interest 17 and 18-year-old boys. Why would Pitino staffer Andre McGee set up hooker parties with recruits? To bore them?

No, Louisville’s problem is that the university’s tell-all madam turns out to be a pleasant, articulate, believable person. UL’s last hope was that this woman would be a raving slut rather than a research and publishing genius who could teach UL’s tenure track cohort a trick or two. That strutting pious fraud Pitino will have to go.

The great Sarah Vaughan ushers him out.

Perdido, we look for our coach he’s perdido
We misplaced our coach Rick Pitino
While chancing a dance fiesta.

He’s perdido!

*********

UD thanks John.

The latest econ professor to squawk about his or her university’s sports program – Colorado State’s Steven Shulman – reminds UD to mention that she thinks we’ll see, in a few years, at some schools, litmus tests for new hires in this field.

Are you an avid fan of football and basketball? Will you sign a pledge attesting to your intention to attend home games into perpetuity, your willingness to cancel class when a match-up will take place within 72 hours of a scheduled course session, your commitment to give C or higher grades to revenue athletes in your classes, and – most important – your promise never to subject the athletic program to economic analysis or talk to news outlets about your economic analysis of the program?

Econ professors are a seriously weak link in the American jock school chain. This blog has covered tons of economists who, with their specialized knowledge, subject their athletics departments to withering critique and then tell everyone about it. Here are some instances of professors, who, like Shulman (‘“Of course it sucks resources out of the academic side of the university,” Shulman said. “And it’s dishonest to deny that it does that… We are a land-grant university, and our mission is grounded in service to the citizens of Colorado. And to me what that means is keeping tuition low and affordable.”’), go after the game boys.

Remember Reed Olsen? Back in 2010 he told everyone at Missouri State University that their expensive new JQH stadium would not only not be profitable (the university insisted it would be profitable) but would hemorrhage money, and he caught hell for it. But of course he was right. As he explained in an email to UD at the time:

Let’s say that we are looking at a $2M ongoing loss in the arena. This is slightly more than 1% of the operating budget of the university. The university, because of a new state law, cannot raise in-state tuition more than [the] increase in the CPI. And for the last 2 years all universities in the state have agreed to not raise tuition at all in return for mostly stable state funding. So that means that most of this $2M must come out of cuts from other parts of the budget or the small increases in student fees from increased out of state tuition or other types of student fees. Students are assessed a fee for [the arena] which supposedly pays for free student seats at BB games. However, that revenue is included in the accounting, still leaving $2M left to pay. Faculty concern is that it comes out of our pocket.

If you’re Missouri State you definitely do not want people like Reed Olsen on your campus – people with the capacity to reason about the finances of your sports program. A simple interview questionnaire teasing out Olsen’s prejudice against sports programs would have saved MSU a lot of grief.

Then there’s Mark Killingsworth at Rutgers, a person just as persistent and tough-skinned as Olsen. Here’s a sample Killingsworth editorial. Excerpt:

The program is a financial disgrace. Since 2003-04, it has racked up $287 million in deficits. The university’s financial plan for sports calls for $183 million in additional deficits through 2022 — despite new revenue from the Big Ten Conference.

These deficits have been funded with subsidies from student fees (students have no say about that, of course) and university general funds. As even the university president concedes, athletics is “siphoning dollars from the academic mission.”

Then there’s Dick Barrett, once a University of Montana econ professor and now a state senator. He routinely offends UM regents by pointing out that their accounts of the athletic budget are full of shit.

Barrett called “bogus” the regents’ argument that millions of dollars in tuition waivers for athletes shouldn’t be counted as subsidies because no cash changes hands.

Tuition waivers for athletics totaled $8 million last year for all campuses, including $2.8 million at MSU, according to Frieda Houser, University System director of accounting and budget.

The university could have decided to “sacrifice revenue” in other ways, Barrett said. “It could decide not to charge other students as high a tuition.

“Students are subsidizing athletics, not just in their (athletics) fee, but they have to pay higher tuition so athletes can pay lower tuition,” he said.

There’s UD‘s pal Bill Harbaugh, econ, University of Oregon, exploding the myth of the program’s self-sufficiency. Vanderbilt econ professor John Siegfried is amusing on the subject of his and other schools’ prisoner’s dilemma. There’s Marilyn Flowers, chair of economics at truly sports-fucked Ball State:

… Ball State has more than $14 million budgeted for its athletics programs. Approximately 80 percent of the budget is paid for from student fees – almost $9 million – and institutional support – almost $2.5 million.

“When it costs so much for kids to go to school, and you charge them $800 a year and most of them don’t go to any games, that I think is really unfortunate,” Flowers said.

Even Auburn hears occasional squawks from its econ department. The chair of economics there warns that sports is so autonomously powerful on campus that it represents “a second university.”

As jock schools escalate their policy of robbing students and taxpayers to give multimillionaire coaches raises and pay back crushing stadium debt, the last thing they need is financially literate people exposing their … complex… bookkeeping. The entry interview is their only opportunity to head these people off at the pass.