In 2002, as a member of the UK Athletics Administration’s board of directors, [Robert Gene] Lawson cast the sole dissenting vote against hiring Mitch Barnhart as athletics director. Lawson said he didn’t object to Barnhart, but the $375,000-a-year salary UK promised him was “ridiculous” compared to the more modest sums paid to other UK faculty and staff. (Barnhart remains in the job and now makes $600,000 a year.)
Over the past 50 years, the UK Athletics Department evolved into its own universe with its own rules, Lawson said.
“They have become an independent entity, separate from the rest of the university, which is a problem,” he said. “Their budget is their budget. The athletics department regards the money that comes in for athletics as their money, not the university’s money.
“And I guess I have felt, watching it through the years, that they sort of lost what I would consider to be a reasonable connection of these students to the university as compared to athletics,” he said. “Let me just give you an example. When I first came here, the basketball season was 20 games. It’s now 40. I have my doubts about how they can be a legitimate college student when they’ve got that problem.”
UD has loved following the University of Kentucky on this blog. It doesn’t get any crazier than UK. And it’s getting crazier. It’s the sort of thing that keeps me in business.
Bottom line: A lot of your university’s sports heroes – coaches as well as players – are seriously scary people. That’s why even though many of them quite often do horrible things – crimes of violence – they almost never get prosecuted. Everyone’s too scared.
Some of these people are scary for obvious Richie Incognito reasons: They’ve been recruited because they’re humongous, violent motherfuckers and you really really really do not want to be anywhere in their way. Or in their vicinity. We all had a very good laugh when we saw this take on Rutgers coach Mike Rice (start at 1:05), but it’s kind of nervous laughter, isn’t it? It’s kind of like I cannot believe that a highly paid, high-profile representative of a university is a violent psycho… I don’t want to believe this…
I love my team! Want to cheer them on! Want them to win!
Oh. But in order to win a lot of teams seem to need psycho coaches who recruit angry motherfuckers like Richie Incognito.
Hm. Hm. Yes, it’s a problem…
Around midnight on April 12, 2014, Oregon State student Michael Davis said he and a friend had been arguing with some football players about cutting in line at a bar and he had fallen to the ground with one of them while fending off a punch. As Davis stood up, tight end Tyler Perry ran up and punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground, the police report states.
According to the report, Davis said a friend who played football told him that he “shouldn’t call the cops. We won’t have a starting lineup next year.” Another person involved in the incident said he “knew the males to be OSU football players so did not really want them in any trouble.”
Days after the incident, Davis said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.
Fuck, man. What did I tell you? Stay out of the way.
But hey. UD, qua professor, finds the bit about the professor really interesting. Look at the intriguing relationships and experiences you can have as a professor at a major sports school! There you are lecturing on Marcel Proust or the Burgess Shale, and you notice that outside your classroom door there’s all these big guys from the team milling about!
It’s like living in Naples, and I don’t mean Florida! It’s like – there they are! You know them. Your students know them. The police know them. The judges know them. Everyone knows them. They run the place, and they can do anything they want because they scare the shit out of everyone.
Yes, turns out there’s nothing sacred even about the classrooms at the big sports universities. Of course, we already knew that from Julius Nyang’oro’s University of North Carolina… Nothing sacred there at all… Nothing even semi-sacred… Professors are just as scared as everyone else.
***************
UD thanks the several readers who linked her to the ESPN article.
What can we say about Texas Tech University that hasn’t already been said? This is truly America’s university, with all of our, uh, more internationally notorious tendencies.
Violence? Wow. Yup. Look at their lineup of coaches over the last ten years or so. The ones whose contracts or lawsuits or whatever they’re still dealing with (UD assumes TTU’s huge legal expenses “related to football” are included in the $95 million). Some were dangerous drunks. Some liked to beat up on players. One even punched one of his assistant coaches. On camera.
Provincial? What other university in America would give a disgraced former attorney general/crony $100,000 a year to teach one course?
Un peu ivre? Sure. Tailgating is a bit of an issue.
Sports and nothing but sports? Well, it done got all that money (guess I should say it done spent all that money) plus all that big-time football and last time I looked it ranked #156. As a university, I mean! Ha ha. As an arena it’s doing great.
Bad, bad, school. Don’t you ever do that again. And we mean it this time.
Tennessee! And of course there’s the University of Texas too. The two schools are linked in today’s news stories because like virtually all sports factories, they’re both corrupt as hell. No one cares. Some random professor complains about some player in her class and, you know, people start sniffing around, but nothing comes of it. Coaches leave for similar salaries at slightly more sordid schools (but they’re all sordid); players disappear into obscure junior colleges.
Tennessee also had coach Donnie Tyndall, just the sort of appointment for which that august institution is known:
During [a] single season leading the Volunteers, reports surfaced that Tyndall was involved in a messy NCAA violation situation at his previous school, Southern Mississippi, and while that’s never good, it was triply bad for both Tyndall and Tennessee.
That’s because Tyndall already had been found to have committed NCAA violations at Morehead State a few years earlier. And also because Tennessee had been forced to fire the popular Bruce Pearl after the NCAA slammed him for violations as coach of the Vols…
And, you may ask, what is Donnie Tyndall up to now that he’s an ex-coach of the Vols? Managing a pro wrestling match Saturday. If that doesn’t secure sideshow status for Tennessee basketball, I don’t know what does.
The article says nothing about the Vols players, a number of whom, when doing armed robbery one night, wore clothing with University of Tennessee written all over it, giving witnesses a real leg up in identifying them.
Blatter just quit.
*******************
NO SEPP BLATTER ANYMORE
There you go and FIFA here am I
Well you left me here so I could sit and cry
Golly gee what have you done to me
Well you ain’t got Sepp Blatter anymore
There’s no use in me a-bribin’
I’ve done everything
And now I’m sick of trying
I’ve thrown away my nights
Wasted all my days over you
Now you go your way baby and I’ll go mine
Now and forever ’till the end of time
I’ll bribe somebody new and baby
We’ll say we’re through
No Sepp Blatter anymore
… due to mercenary incontinence.
The Clinic, a Chilean satirical magazine … ran popular internet memes on its website showing photoshopped images of Blatter in jail, Fifa as a mafia organisation, Maradona giving it the finger and the Uruguayan president, José Mujica, describing Fifa as a “manga de viejos hijos de puta” (a bunch of old bastards).
This came closer to capturing the mood on the streets, in stadiums and on social networks, where chatter was more of the nature of “At last!” and “The bastards had it coming!”
On Twitter, the Brazilian commentator Xico Sá called for a minute of noise at Thursday’s football matches to celebrate the arrests.
This is fun.
I hope Blatter has his Ceaucescu moment in public. Like Ceaucescu.
One Swiss lawmaker calling for [Swiss non-profit laws] reform has noted contemptuously that that a multibillion-dollar global organization like FIFA “still has the same status as a Swiss mountain village yodeling association.”