The University of Louisville has inspired the current number one bestselling sports memoir on Amazon. Katina Powell’s detailed account of her Dance Appreciation course at the school (or was that Rutgers?) has clearly touched the hearts of sports and dance fans everywhere.
… nobody came?
(I know, I know. They came like mad at the University of Louisville.)
[T]his scandal, if the allegations are true, reveals a sordid underbelly to college recruiting which is not altogether shocking yet may nevertheless be altogether damning for the university IF (a) parents become leery of sending their kids to Louisville…
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And remember Cam Newton’s dad! Another model for the big-time university sports family.
This advice, culled from one of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino’s many motivational books, seems to have been taken to heart by Katina Powell:
Powell kept five journals with details of her escort escapades, sexual encounters, murdered relatives and activities at the University of Louisville. Most of the U of L services she provided took place in the men’s dormitory where basketball players reside. Her main contact and the man who paid for her services–the school’s former director of basketball operations and former graduate assistant, Andre McGee–kept Powell and her girls busy from 2010 to 2014. She has hundreds of text exchanges with him to set up her services as well as pictures of her girls with players and recruits.
She seems to have recorded everything.
One other note of interest as we begin to, uh, bone up on this story, is the fact that the journalist who first reported the story, Pat Forde, co-wrote a book with Rick Pitino and is (was?) apparently his buddy. Hm.
I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me, as Lady Bracknell says… Is attendance at games, as this University of Virginia student editorialist argues, really a reflection of any kind, poor or rich, on a university? You could argue that the school in question here, UVa, should be proud of its low football turn-out, suggestive as it is of things like independent mindedness and studiousness. Perhaps some UVa students don’t like thinking of themselves as subjects in a long-running experiment on how to stimulate your rats into finding boring bone-crushing sports events interesting.
[UVa needs to be] building new stadium video boards … enhancing sound systems….
Buy a state of the art Adzillatron to shriek car dealership ads at them! Trap them in a stadium for hours, unable to turn off, or even turn down, incessant messages!
But UD says: Nothing will work without liquor. Only schools willing to soak students in booze are going to get anywhere with the national nightmare of tanking game attendance. Once your students are really shitfaced, they’ll do anything.
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Now with university players, it’s different. If you want to motivate them, try Coach Kermit Blount’s approach: starvation.
But she figured that whenever it did take off, the leading edge of the scandal was likely to be the University of Louisville. (Put Louisville in my search engine.) The only real competition for Louisville would be the University of Miami, but, post-Nevin Shapiro, UM is lying low.
What other American university features a trustee who tried to resign but was forced to stay on the board by the governor of the state?
[Steve] Wilson, who is co-founder and CEO of 21c Museum Hotels LLC, said he has been unhappy with the effectiveness of the U of L board and had offered his resignation to Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, who declined to accept it.
Bet Steve wishes he’d risked… what? what can a governor do to you? … and gotten out while the getting was good…
Go ahead and read this first article of many. The details are titillating, the taxpayer money impressive, and I promise the accounts will get even better after they interview the players. The school people call the U of Smell is at it again.
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Louisville’s coach, Rick Pitino, has had his own … uh… Here’s UD, back in 2009, posting on Pitino’s… er…
… somewhere way below that, there’s Southeast Louisiana University, a public school where the taxes of the good people of that state are funding new football recruit Jonathan Taylor.
Taylor, so determinedly criminal-minded that even the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama dismissed him, has been welcomed with open arms by SLU.
Outside the Lines asked [a school spokesman] what SLU’s admission process is for students with criminal records and/or a pending felony charge, to which he responded, “Southeastern Louisiana has no specific admission policy regarding an individual’s police or court records.”
But actually SLU does. Basically, if you haven’t been convicted… of anything … super-serious (murder?) and if your court proceedings are still ongoing (i.e., if you haven’t been convicted yet), c’mon down y’all!
“While we are aware of past controversies, Jonathan has not been found guilty for the incidents he was accused of that led to his dismissal from his prior institutions,” Southeastern Louisiana said in a statement Wednesday.
So here’s Taylor’s student profile.
Domestic violence charges in Alabama against former Georgia defensive lineman Jonathan Taylor were dropped Tuesday as part of a plea agreement.
The 6-foot-4, 335-pound Taylor, who was dismissed from the Bulldogs’ football team last summer, still faces an aggravated assault charge in Athens-Clarke County from a July 2014 incident in which he reportedly choked and struck his girlfriend. He also faces a misdemeanor case of theft by deception in Athens for a cash-checking scheme that involved other Bulldogs players.
Taylor pleaded guilty in Alabama to a misdemeanor count of criminal mischief stemming from an altercation in March with a different woman. The woman, however, recanted her story.
[The University of] Georgia, which had a string of players suspended or dismissed over the last several years for various incidents, has stayed fairly clean and has not been associated with any major discipline problems since the start of the 2014 season.
UD has said it again and again: online is the salvation of big-time university sports. You can cheat like hell with online courses.
UD has no idea how Southern Methodist University – famous for having so filthy a sports program that in 1987 it got one of the very few death penalties the NCAA has handed down – its entire football season was cancelled that year – got caught. It apparently did what a lot of schools with this sort of program no doubt do – signed a player up for an online course and had someone else take it for him.
Once SMU got caught, it didn’t help that the school is just a longterm rascally ol’ give-a-shit sort of place.
In a conference call with reporters, [an NCAA representative] noted SMU’s history of violating NCAA rules. The school has been called before the NCAA infractions committee 10 times since 1958. The basketball program last ran into trouble in 2011, when it admitted that coaches sent impermissible text messages to recruits. [This] history of violations was taken into consideration when this year’s punishment was issued.
Or, to put it less delicately;
SMU is the NCAA compliance version of Old Faithful. Just a matter of time before it erupts again. The infraction dates: 1958, 1965, 1974, 1976, 1981, 1985, 1987, 2000, 2011 and now 2015. And for all that rule violating, the Mustangs have one football national championship it can claim, from 1935… SMU is historically corrupt.
I think this guy is getting at the fact that corruption is SMU. That’s it. That’s the school.
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This puts SMU’s coach “3-for-3 in putting programs on probation.” If you’re shocked that a death penalty school hired a coach who put his two previous schools’ basketball programs on probation, you’re not reading this blog with care.
[T]he students “regret” what happened, but would not have harmed the referee unless they were told to by their coach.
It is funny, and UD has long known that one reason many readers come back to University Diaries again and again is that this blog distills the best and only the best academic achievements of our highest-profile, most awesome scholar/athletes.
Things are hotting up on and off the field between longtime foes Texas Christian University and Baylor, with TCU’s coach boasting that his assaulting players are making far better moves than Baylor’s raping player.
[The coach’s] reference to Baylor during his press conference [about two players who allegedly beat a group of TCU students] did nothing but stoke the rivalry between the two traditional rivals who are both in the top five of this week’s Associated Press poll and are about 90 miles apart.
“… [W]e’ll find out what the facts are. It’ll all come out. I just hope when they all come out, you report it just as strongly as what you’ve done here because it’s not even close to what happened south of here.”
[The coach] was clearly referring to the Baylor situation where [player] Sam Ukwuachu was convicted of sexually assaulting a former Baylor soccer player.
The Battle of the Coaches is on! What will Baylor’s coach say in response? Stay tuned.
… is one of UD‘s favorite headlines, and the claim had at least a spliff of plausibility: Back in 2012 members of the Texas Christian University football team ran a sufficiently notorious drug market that one recruit “declin[ed] a scholarship offer because of the drug culture.”
UD looks forward to more great TCU headlines in the aftermath of the sort of incident so common on big sports campuses that eventually it won’t even be covered by journalists: A couple of football players got angry and drunk and beat the shit out of some students. Eventually all students who choose to attend big sports schools will understand and accept that getting the shit beaten out of you by football or basketball players is simply a risk you run.
Until that day, we at University Diaries can … I don’t want to say enjoy, but there’s definitely something intriguing in the details of these incidents.
The theme of this one is familiar from the story of the University of Idaho Vandals who were caught shoplifting in the bookstore because players are
1. “visible on [security] video and identifiable” and because
2. at the time “the store was open only to members of the football team.”
Similarly, in the TCU case, not only did security cameras apparently catch every punch, one of the players left his cell phone behind. As the police examined it, it flashed the full name of the player.
What’s amazing is what goes on before university athletes go to jail.