[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!

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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.

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

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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.

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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!

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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.

… as Tom Lehrer calls the south, and ain’t it the truth. UD loves her a good university sports scandal, and aint nuthin like a southern university sports scandal.

And hell. Even by southern scandals, the cast of characters at the University of Louisville, known to one and all as the U of Smell, is way past southern gothic.

UD’s own name for UL is Mount Louisville onaccounta most of its troubles got to do with men mounting women. Bobby Motorcycle Petrino, Rick The Table Pitino, Andre Dorm Couch McGee…

And now we can add the procurer’s procurator, the lawyer hired by Katina Powell, Counsellor Larry Wilder. Larry’s interior of choice, if you will, is a little different: He likes trash cans.

I think the problem here is that the University of Florida coach wasn’t precise enough. He needed to speak to his team about not shooting guns at your pregnant girlfriend.

… her gentleman callers.

“The UMass/Amherst campus has a game plan for this and I think we should see how it plays out,” said [president Marty] Meehan when we asked him about [the university’s football program] in an interview …

Does that game plan include continuing to play games at Gillette [Stadium] in front of tens of thousands of fans disguised as empty seats?

“Some have been attended pretty well,” claimed Meehan, but the record shows only two UMass games at the stadium have drawn more than 30,000 fans…” [The stadium holds 70,000.]

Whew! Finally a credible voice has come out to deny claims that the UL basketball program hired prostitutes to capture recruits. A former player sets the record straight:

Rick Pitino… don’t need to buy any kid pussy to get him to commit to the University of Louisville.

Ain’t it the truth. At America’s football schools, we li’l ol’ instructors don’t count for shit, man. The person who really counts, far as UD can tell, is the assistant coach.

Not the coach. The coach is kinda above it all (‘cept for that dummy Kyle Flood). His job is to take millions in compensation and let the assistant coach(es) do … whatEVer… Coach don’t know. Coach don’t wanna know. They say Rick Pitino’s assistant coach turned the dorm for basketball players into a whorehouse … Rick’s far too classy a guy to know anything about that. They say an assistant coach at UCLA sat on academic support staff to get professors to change athletes’ grades. They say an assistant coach at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette worked out a little conspiracy with a friend of his who supervised ACT tests to toss the lads’ tests and substitute passing ones.

And you know what I bet? I bet Steve Sarkisian’s assistant coaches at the University of Southern California have been working their asses off to help him hide the fact that he’s running a big-time football empire while alcoholic.

I bet his University of Minnesota coaching assistants knew that AD Norbert Teague drank too much and pawed women and all.

Yes, over the years it’s become clear to UD that the fixer, the dirty-work-doer, the facade-maintenance-man in the vast theater of the absurd which is this nation’s effort to meld professional sports with (wait for it) universities is the assistant coach. The assistant coach is the guy who runs after the horse-drawn wagon picking up shit and trying to make it smell like roses.

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UD thanks John.

… to Mike Locksley’s tenure as University of New Mexico football coach:

That was October 2009. Here’s a more recent version:

Locksley’s stint at New Mexico could not have gone much more poorly. He was 2-26, fired in September 2011 after an 0-4 start to his third season. The Lobos finished 113th and 116th nationally in scoring in his two full seasons, both of which ended at 1-11. Off the field, it was just as bad. Locksley was accused of sexual discrimination by a former administrative assistant in a lawsuit resolved out of court. And he missed one game in 2009 to serve a suspension for his involvement in an altercation with assistant coach J.B. Gerard. His final game at UNM, a 48-45 loss to FCS-level Sam Houston State, was played before an announced crowd of 16,313, the Lobos’ smallest since 1992, and came in the wake of a DWI arrest of a 19-year family friend who was driving a car registered to the coach’s wife and son.

Okay, so UD is proud and excited to announce that Locksley will now be Mr UD’s coach! Yes, Locksley’s the new coach at the University of Maryland, and Mr UD will be part of his faculty cheering squad!!

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More commentary on the exciting changes at the University of Maryland here.

He writes:

“Football makes a profit,” some claim. To that I would say, so what? Universities could make a profit running a casino too – should they do that?

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Let’s change this to:

“Football makes a profit,” some claim. To that I would say, so what? Universities could make a profit running a brothel too – should they do that?

“On the surface, it appears Louisville just skipped a sexy hostess program and went straight to the professionals,” [Armen Keteyian] wrote. “And given the high-stakes world of college basketball recruiting – and I’m not trying to be glib about this – it makes sense. This is like Hostess 5.0.“

It’s one thing when this or that fraternity pimps out women for itself (as when Indiana University’s already way-notorious Alpha Tau Omega hired women for one of its forcible-group-bonding sessions), or when this or that university sports team orders up prostitutes for itself, as the Duke lacrosse guys did (you remember how things got out of hand there). It’s another thing when the university pimps out women to recruits, as – allegedly – the University of Louisville athletic department did. With official approval and indeed organized by campus officials, the practice would tend, as the woman quoted in my headline suggests, to give teenage male athletes, uh, ideas about women.

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These 17 and 18-year-old kids are making one of the most important decisions of their entire lives, and an adult is purposefully using sex to affect their decision making. These are not the actions of a shrewd negotiator attempting to gain an advantage over the competition, but a predator, manipulating a young mind into making a decision that would benefit himself.

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If Louisville is guilty, the school has created a dangerous environment for women, and it has opened itself to lawsuits from all angles.

Yes, at a time when all American universities are pledging to act on sexual violence, you’ve got a school like Louisville – a school already as notorious as Indiana’s ATO for all sorts of officially sanctioned scummy behavior (put Louisville in my search engine) – acting, it seems, with a disregard for on-campus sexual behavior reminiscent of Sandusky’s Penn State.

Showers and dorm rooms and frat lounges oh my!

We’ll probably discover, pretty soon, whether Rick Pitino knew how his program recruited players. For the record, UD is quite certain he did.

[Pitino] did an interview today … that was really bizarre and ended up with him rambling about a lot of things and taking a subtle shot at the school president.

Yes now it’s every man for himself as the rancor’s wheeled out and the bloody civil war begins. Talk about an athletics arms race! The weaponry’s been redirected – from rival schools to your own evil meddling institution, which found your recruitment tactics perfectly okay until the evil media began paying attention and then it’s oh no we’re not pimps here we’re scholars and gentlemen and we have no idea who hired rascals like Rick Pitino and Bobby Petrino but we have nothing to do with them either…

As an extra bonus, watch for Pitino to go mad in public (rambling, bizarre) as his dictatorship begins to crumble…

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Pitino’s buddy does a full Coacha Inconsolata on him.

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Rancor, and sniping. This comes from a local comment thread:

I think if this was an institutionally sponsored recruiting tool we could have found a more upmarket supplier, maybe?

That whore’s profit-seeking screed, that pack of lies about Pitino’s University of Louisville basketball program and its recruitment parties – now some recruit has gone and confirmed most of it!

JaQuan Lyle visited the University of Louisville as a basketball recruit in 2013.

This week he sat down with NCAA investigators to talk about that trip.

CBS sports reports that Lyle confirmed the gist of allegations made in, “Breaking Cardinal Rules” that escorts provided him with sex and alcohol.

“You have to ask yourself, why would he lie about that? If he tells the truth, he’s not going to get in trouble, even if he took all sorts of benefits while he was there. It’s how the NCAA works. If he lied, and they can prove he lied, he won’t be able to play at Ohio State,” [a sports analyst] said.

In a hastily-called news conference, Coach Pitino said: “Well, what do you want? That’s what they pay me for.”

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No, no. UD made up that last line.