… they recruit to their already arrest-ridden football team a person with a long and ugly police record, and then they finally suspend him after, er, let’s see…

The charges stem from the April 5 beating of two men, moments after they kissed at 5th Avenue and 9th Street in Huntington. Criminal complaints charge Butler witnessed the kiss, exited a passing vehicle and proceeded to shout derogatory words toward both men related to their sexual orientation. Butler then struck the face of both victims with a closed fist, the complaints charge.

Put Marshall University in this blog’s search engine to feast your eyes on one of the scummiest campuses in Christendom. I mean, it’s not just the sports-only nature of Marshall. Marshall is hideous all around. Pity its poor faculty.

Football hero, gentleman. And now that Frank Clark’s in the news all over the country, all the glory goes to Michigan as he is universally described in these accounts as a University of Michigan player.

Why pick a player in round 2 (Michigan defensive end Frank Clark) who was kicked off his college team because of a domestic violence charge, a player who also was convicted of felony theft for stealing a laptop?

You might as well ask why Michigan held onto him as long as they did. Why his bio is still emblazoned on UM’s Go Blue site. If Michigan didn’t give a shit, why should the Seahawks? After all, you’re looking for a guy who can hit.

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Just Another Stat

But this is the sort of writing that makes it all worthwhile. See if you can spot the domestic violence charge!

Start with this account of Shirley Willihnganz’s catastrophic tenure as provost at one of America’s most sordid universities, the University of Louisville.

Then read of the great reward she reaped:

Late last year, tax filings for 2012 revealed that the nonprofit [University of Louisville Foundation] had awarded University President James Ramsey $2.4 million in deferred compensation, along with $1.8 million for the school’s outgoing provost and $1.3 million to Ramsey’s chief of staff. These payments dwarfed the administrators’ reported salaries by up to 4,000%. Provost Shirley Willinhnganz, for example, earned $45,646 in base wages from the foundation in 2012 — a package that climbed to $1,925,108 when the deferred compensation was accounted for.

Now see this here foundation of ours, which manages the school’s big ol’ endowment, operated perfectly well – perfectly well – for years. That is, until some fucking newspaper started getting nosy.

The foundation operated in secret until 2008, when the Kentucky Supreme Court [ruled] that its records are public after a legal battle with [a] newspaper.

But that ain’t bad enough. Oh no. Now some U of L trustees up and wrote a letter to the state auditor asking him to audit us!

The nerve! Why if you just type LOUISVILLE in this blog’s search engine, you’ll see we’re as pure as the driven snow down here.

… the running of the university athletic program numbers is an annual display at once shocking and idiotic.

Cleveland State University’s numbers are typical: Almost no students attend the school’s games, but “[a]n estimated 89 percent ($9,361,508) of the athletics budget is paid for by CSU’s students.”

Men’s basketball, without a doubt the most popular CSU sports team, averaged an attendance of just 1,996 people at their home games in the 2014-15 season.

The Wolstein Center, their home arena, has a capacity of more than 13,000. The 2015 budget projected that the Wolstein Center would operate at a $917,000 deficit this year.

You and I know what the next step is at CSU. We’ve been following university sports for a long time, yes?

CSU will announce that they’ll spend 60 million dollars to expand the arena and add 30,000 seats.

Lucye Millerand, president of the [Union of Rutgers Administrators], pointed to the $1.2 million in severance pay Rutgers made to Mike Rice, a former men’s basketball coach, Tim Pernetti, former athletic director, and John Wolf, former interim senior vice president and general counsel, after their departure following a public outcry over a video that showed abusive behavior by Rice toward players on the court.

“Rutgers’ budget seems to have money for crazy priorities,” Millerand said. “That 1.2 million would be about a 1 percent raise for my entire union of 2,300 people. If there is money to reward people that embarrassed the university so badly they had to go, why does management tell us they don’t have that much money to bring an equivalent settlement with Rutgers’ faculty.”

Rutgers’ masochistic relationship with its coaches draws some criticism.

… Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney on Wednesday reiterated reservations about how schools will implement the oncoming trend of providing “full cost of attendance” to scholarship student-athletes. He said that while he’s all for “modernizing the scholarship,” he opposes “professionalizing college athletics.”

Mr. Swinney’s defense of the amateur-athletics ideal would sound more convincing if he weren’t making $3.3 million this year to coach Clemson on a contract that runs through the 2021 season.

Absolutely. UD has said it for years – in the United States, you don’t need a university to have a university football team. Several American universities already are, for most purposes, football teams. Their presidents are their six million dollar a year coaches. Their trustees are ex-football players or football boosters.

So she’d suggest posing the question about the possible bankruptcy of Louisiana State University like this:

If there is no football team, would the school be able to field a fall semester?

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.