There’ll always be a Clemson.

It’s a mental process we don’t know too much about yet, but we can sometimes see its tragic effects in the jock school’s chief executive. No one wants to depose the doddering old thing, but as the athletic deficits increase, and his or her tendency to give ever more bizarre public statements about them grows, faculty and students begin a popular revolt.

No one can predict the outcome of this volatile situation. At University Diaries, our obligation is simply to report its phases.

Rutgers University, having bled athletics money at a grotesque rate for some years, and now subsisting under a leader determined to hemorrhage yet more, has entered The Era of High Restlessness. Economics professors in particular, having run the numbers, have begun issuing denunciations (“To try to do any sugarcoating of the magnitude of (this) financial loss is just not being honest … We’re No. 1 in financial losses … by a mile, we lose more money than any other university on athletics.”), and the student newspaper, as in this article, routinely confronts the fond foolish old man with the ruins of his hopes and dreams. It cites such things as comparative loss charts and statistics on ranking (“After investing about $250 million [in athletics] across the last decade, the University fell down 12 spots in college rank, declining from No. 58 to No. 70, according to U.S. News and World Report. Rutgers also fell to No. 177 on Forbes magazine’s Best Colleges list, a collection of 650 liberal arts colleges and universities, a spot that gives the College of New Jersey a nine-rank advantage over the Garden State’s flagship state university.”)

President Robert Barchi has not yet started hiding out from the press (that will come), but his interviews have become strange affairs. Amid a nationwide trend of much higher foreign student enrollment, Barchi insists that the increase at Rutgers is because of the worldwide renown of their football games (“The University’s 40 percent increase in admissions applications from international students can be attributed to greater name recognition from Rutgers’ presence in the Big Ten, Barchi said.” — Hubba Hubba Hubei!). Amid a monumental financial disaster, he says, “If we were to not remain in the Big Ten, we would have a monumental financial disaster on our hands.” And though there’s no indication the alumni give a shit one way or another about belonging to the Big Ten, he says, “Administrators also feel the need to satisfy the University’s alumni base, composed of many who are interested in intercollegiate sports.”

What’s next? After the Era of High Restlessness, we can expect – as I suggest above – the Era of Not Available for Comment.

[R]esearch has shown that NFL trust has slipped to a point where the league is comparable to brands such as Malaysia Airlines and Wal-Mart.

No need to worry, universities! I’m sure none of this holds true for college football.

Cuz he’s so smart.

The heartland! The heartland! It doesn’t get more all-American than Nebraska – a state that, along with Missouri, UD (an evil coastal Jew married to Euro-trash) routinely forgets exists.

My headline quotes a commenter on an article about Lawrence Phillips, the latest proud son of that state’s university’s storied football team. Now that Phillips has murdered his cellmate, the University of Nebraska enjoys the same spate of publicity it did when its beloved Richie Incognito ran into some trouble.

The article’s a bit vague on the wonderful Nebraska coaching that brought Phillips to that school and kept him there –

Phillips was a superstar running back at Nebraska who was controversially allowed to keep playing for the Cornhuskers even after multiple run-ins with the law.

– but here’s a detail from another source:

[Coach Tom] Osborne reinstated Phillips in the same season the star dragged his girlfriend by the hair down a staircase.

Same sex marriage in Nebraska? Goodness me, no! But drag your girlfriend down the staircase by the hair and … instant football star!

And talk about coacha inconsolata. Get a load of the headline on an article about Osborne:

Lawrence Phillips Tragedy Continues to Haunt Former Nebraska Coach

Wow.

When asked about keeping Phillips on the team, the coach recently said that as a coach

“You take hits.”

Hit me again! That’s it, hit me again! What do I expect? I’m a coach! I can take it…

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UD thanks the many readers who sent her updates about Phillips’ amazing career, and the totally amazing University of Nebraska.

But he’s only one of so many glorious characters the University of Florida sports program can boast. Even if he’s otherwise disposed at the moment, there are so many other calendar models.

UD, as constant readers know, loves the rhetoric sports writers bring to these, um, unfortunate events.

Boise State Backfield Takes Another Hit with Recruit’s Arrest

The Boise State football team’s gaping hole at tailback grew a little larger Wednesday.

February signee Raymond Sheard was arrested Tuesday at Arlington (Texas) High on drug and gun charges. He won’t join the team, a Boise State official said Wednesday.

The Broncos need to replace the nation’s second-most productive running back in NFL-bound Jay Ajayi. They lost expected contributor Charles Bertoli last week when he decided to pursue other interests.

That leaves sophomore Jeremy McNichols, senior Jack Fields, junior Devan Demas and redshirt freshman Cory Young as the only scholarship running backs in the program. None has rushed for 200 yards in a season.

It’s all about the game! Throw a lot of players’ names and positions at me and drop the whole … what was it? Did our coach recruit a 19-year old about whom the good news is that “[An additional] charge of tampering with an ID number (serial number on gun removed) was dropped”? Poor coacha inconsolata! Can’t expect him to do due diligence… Of course, if the guy hadn’t been caught he’d have brought his special outlook on life here to Boise… You’d think an apology or something from the coach might be in order… An expression of regret…? Nah! “Guys have to step up, and that’s exactly what they did,” he said. Forward march.

An investigation by this newspaper found that college students at 10 of Ohio’s biggest public universities are paying more than $135 million for intercollegiate athletics through either mandatory fees or university subsidies – and most of the students don’t even know it.

Whoops. I’m sorry. Original sentence reads:

At what point does a head coach get held accountable for signing players with known criminal backgrounds who get arrested again for similar behavior?

America’s highest-profile, highest-paid university coach takes guys like this onto his team, guys whose penchant for choking women is so well-documented that even schools like we’ll take anyone who can hit hard Georgia dump them.

He says he’s giving the guy a second chance because he really wants to help straighten him out.

Actually, he’s giving him a third chance (one million out of Saban’s yearly seven is for overlooking trifles like theft by deception arrests) but this just makes Saban and Alabam’ yet greater martyrs. Never give up on these guys! Others might, but we never will! Because we’re not really a sports team! We’re a family! Choke away, lad! We’ve got your back!

And if Saban turns out not to be paid to give him a fourth chance?

“There are a lot of other schools that were recruiting him and would have admitted him,” [Taylor’s attorney] said.

University of Tennessee: I’m lookin’ at you!

Econ professor Mark Killingsworth is one of this blog’s heroes. He’s that rare faculty member who takes up arms against his sports-mad school’s arms race. Killingsworth happens to teach at Rutgers, which means he gets to witness both athletic scandals that make his school a national laughingstock and relentless wasting of student and tax dollars on football and basketball. He has now helped lead the Faculty Senate to issue a set of recommendations that you can read here.

Glance at even a few of the recommendations and you’ll see that there’s no way in hell jockshop Rutgers is going to take any of them seriously:

• Rutgers Athletics should design and enforce a five-year plan to eliminate all financial
losses;

• No capital investment (expansion or new construction of Athletics facilities)
should be undertaken until the Athletics deficit is eliminated;

• No allocations from student fees should be used to finance Athletics…

Yadda yadda. The list assumes the Rutgers leadership gives a shit about much beyond ball games. The president will thank the professors for their very interesting thoughts and ignore everything on the list.

And that’s why Killingsworth is a hero. He dreams the impossible dream.

It’s almost impossible to pull this many charges acting alone. It takes a village.

… (how could it be otherwise?) Baby Face Emmert.

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UD thanks Dirk.

[A]pplicants with lower-than-average SAT scores prefer schools with athletic success. Those students “valued” athletic success for longer periods than high SAT applicants.

That theoretically translates to loyalty, which translates to donations. That translates into long-term financing of the whole [university football] enterprise — even when it’s bad football.

“Academicians can talk all they want to,” [former Sun Belt commissioner Wright Waters says]. “The American public loves sports, period. It is what it is. We have a sports page, not a math classroom page.”

Low-scoring students supporting loser football: The recipe for success at so many American universities! Dennis Dodd sings its praises, and shows how you can bring this winning combination to your school.

Be as Philip cutting through The Forest of Thorns and heal the pains of thought!

Our native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with a pale cast of professors. Your state’s universities lead the nation in ruddy red-blooded, black coal’d, athleticism. As it is said:

Among the top seeds in the March Madness NCAA men’s basketball tournament is the University of Louisville. The public university is known nationally for almost nothing except its ability to translate its success on the basketball court into money.

As it is said:

Ladies and gentlemen, sports fans of all demographic ages, Nike jersey and sneaker sizes, your University of Kentucky Wildcats!

Finally, a team without false collegiate pretense, a team that plays on courts stripped of scholastic varnish. Finally, a team fronted by a major university that knows we know that this team now annually has the same relationship to college as pigeons do to stone soldiers standing in town squares.

No team, as politicians vowing partial truths say, is “more transparent.” No team has made it so clear that its full scholarship recruits aren’t “student-athletes,” but assembled to spend seven months using Kentucky as a luxurious basketball facility.

Kentucky, your universities are luxurious basketball facilities. They are almost nothing but sports-revenue generators. You waste barely a spikelet of bluegrass, barely a burp of bourbon, on the weariness, the fever, and the fret, of consciousness. You are the nation’s true Sleeping Beauty.

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UD thanks John.