… 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:
Let’s begin with this question: Does Mike Locksley, University of New Mexico football coach, make too much?
Well, before we reveal his salary, let’s consider what he’s contributed to UNM so far this year.
1.) The team’s record: 0 – 6. He’s in his first year, and has lost every game he has coached.
2.) He has an EEOC complaint against him for firing an administrative assistant because, he told her, he wanted a younger woman to “entice recruits.”
3.) He has a history of violent behavior, and has most recently beaten up one of his assistant coaches.
So… what seems a reasonable salary for this man?
Did you say $750,000 a year?
Bingo.
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.
Let’s drop our years of sympathetic support for this rugged and healthy campus pastime and finally forthrightly ask: Should schools like the University of Rhode Island drop football? Few schools have as violent and inept a team as Rhody, to be sure, but several other schools are in their league. At several other schools pretty much the only play the team completes successfully is ganging up on other students and beating the shit out of them.
And there’s an unfortunate synergy at work at schools like Rhody: When the team loses – and at Rhody it always loses, most humiliatingly – the guys go out looking for revenge, and they find it. They’re in a bad mood, see.
Just how embittered are these embittered motherfuckers?
[The] team is 0-5, having lost to Brown, 41-31, Saturday night after leading 31-27 in the fourth quarter. [The coach] is trying to revive a program that has produced only three winning seasons since 1985 and has lost 22 of its last 24 games. If opposing coaches on the recruiting trail this fall and winter need more evidence to dissuade recruits from considering URI, this is it.
If you’re on Rhody’s team, you’re a loser. If you were going to be recruited anywhere else, you’d have gone there. Other teams only want to play you because it’s a guaranteed big win. The university is giving you millions in scholarships so that you can put other students in the hospital.
Hm.
Hm.
Nah! Let’s keep football at the University of Rhode Island!
Excerpts:
When you’ve got all this stuff going on for such a long time, and it’s so loud — let’s remember, they were playing rap music and hip hop, and it was so loud. And nobody knows nothing? Yeah, OK.
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Let me tell you what I think happened, and this is strictly a theory… [Y]ou’ve got Andre McGee. He’s pretty young. He’s having a pretty good basketball career and so forth, but he’s not necessarily mature. He’s 23 years old. He’s on staff now, and he’s over in charge of this, that and the other. Some of the people he’s in charge with are his former teammates. So, maybe Andre is over at the barber shop or something, and someone says, ‘I know these women and they strip and stuff,’ and Andre’s thinking: ‘Beer and strippers, party time.’ You can go to a lot of dorms and Greek houses, and find that sort of thing. It’s kid stuff. It’s kids having fun. So, they bring them over. They have a great party. They find out there’s a little extra to be had and some people participate and so forth. It’s a great night. No one gives — ‘hey man, we had a great time.’ But you forget it. But it’s a big thing for Andre. It gives him some power. He’s tied in with some very interesting women that he can get whatever he wants, so they do it again, etc., etc., etc., and it gets out of hand.
If that theory is correct, and I think it is, who the hell was in charge of him?
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I read the other day that someone was going to get the registrations for the dorm, who comes and goes.
Well, yeah, they registered every time they went in: ‘Katina Powell, hooker.’
Was U Conn so desperate to recruit a new member for its ski team (the dude skis) that it accepted a drunk and disorderly shitski from famously drunk, disorderly, and riotous Zoo Mass? A student who was arrested twice at that fabled campus?
Was the guy expelled from U Mass? Is that why he transferred to U Conn?
By which UD means: Did U Mass, crawling with foul drunks just like this foul drunk, actually find Luke Gatti behaviorally unworthy of that puke- and booze-soaked campus?
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Guess it’s all relative. In the case of U Conn, when the highest paid, highest profile, most beloved person at your school produces viral videos like this (when U Conn coach Jim Calhoun retired, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house), little Luke’s viral video maybe fails to impress.
It has certainly impressed everyone outside of U Conn… Proving once again that it’s true what they say: Sports really are the front porch of the American university.
Rarely anything surprises me in college sports anymore but the massive recruiting scandal brewing near Churchill Downs may just replace the Albert Means story as the biggest recruiting scandal ever…
What has allegedly transpired at the University of Louisville in its storied basketball program truly stands out even in the ugly seamy world of college athletic recruiting.
The question now becomes whether or not the NCAA is able to prove any of what [Katina] Powell alleges happened in her book, and I think they have a pretty good chance of making that happen. What they’ll likely do — and what they have probably already begun doing — is to interview players that were recruited by [the University of] Louisville but that ended up at other schools, threatening ineligibility while offering immunity for the truth.