If this gross miscarriage of justice doesn’t require the concerted attention of our elected representatives, I don’t know what does. UD would like to know what the commenter quoted in my headline thinks is an important use of our government’s time. Here you’ve got one of our nation’s great men, a great coach, dragged through the mud by some rogue organization…

Representative Katko is worried that Syracuse University’s fate raises “serious concerns that the NCAA standards are not applied in a uniform fashion nationwide.” Since virtually all big-time sports programs do what SU does, UD agrees with the congressman; but he needs to think about the logistical problems involved in suspending or shutting down all of America’s competitive basketball and football programs. To say nothing of what this will do to national morale.

Proud national emblem!

Yet another I Do But I Don’t true confession.

The lads are up to their pupiks in heartbreak.

When will it end.

Beautifully written, a model of reasoned concision.

But, at a school like Ohio University, ornamental only. Geisha-prose.

Our product is a killer – Great new slogan for university football.

You started the process in high school… continue it in college! … and finish it altogether when you go professional…

[Y]ou see all those former players with CTE on television, or in person, and you can’t help but wonder if you might be among them someday, and you can’t help but ask yourself whether it’s worth the trade-off.

In the end, this is probably a good thing for professional football, at least in the short term. It is a young man’s game for a reason, but in the longer term, it does make you wonder if the NFL can ever stem the tide, as the players themselves become increasingly disposable. What happens if the game continues to be more and more compressed by its own violence?

On that compression idea: Maybe you’ll start to see players retire during their university years. The need for fresh blood will make freshman players a hot commodity, while juniors and seniors will be shunted into special on-campus hospital/retirement homes once they’ve gone gaga.

The plus for the university community will be an increase in student opportunities for Volunteer Points.

John Shelton Reed,a UNC sociology professor for 31 years, sat on the special-admits committee in the mid-’80s and recalls three athletes – one a men’s basketball player – being admitted with rock-bottom SAT scores of 200. That was possible then under NCAA rules but far from the norm for most UNC athletes. Reed and two colleagues voted no, lost, and moved on. “To this day I regret that I didn’t blow the whistle right then and there,” Reed says.

Also see:

As the athletic budget was expanding from $9.1 million in 1984 to $83 million last year, no one in power saw that a department with that much weight would seduce, intimidate, or alter everything in its orbit.

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“I have hanging in my home office a framed Distinguished Alumnus award that the university was kind to give me about twenty-five years ago. It’s always meant a lot to me. But I look at it now and think, Jesus, do I really want that on my wall?”

The question isn’t even: Why does a school as desperately bad as Texas Southern University even have athletics programs? The question is: Why is Texas Southern University a university? Why hasn’t it been shut down?

Texas Southern University fell in the bottom 5 percent of all institutions on graduation rates in 2011, graduating only 11.8 percent of its full-time freshmen within six years of initial enrollment. Some 80 percent of Texas Southern’s freshmen are from low-income families (i.e., Pell Grant recipients); 90 percent are from underrepresented minority grants and many are weakly prepared for college, with a median SAT score of 800 out of 1600 and an average high school GPA of 2.7. But so too are the students at Tennessee State University and North Carolina Central University, yet they graduate at rates more than three times as high (35.5 percent and 38.4 percent, respectively). In fact, Texas Southern performs at the very bottom of its closest 15 peer institutions and has for many years.

Sickeningly corrupt TSU needs to lose its accreditation. Its pathetic, out of control sports program is only a small part – but of course the most notorious part – of its utter institutional failure.

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As for TSU’s sparring partner, Southern University, here’s how it did in a recent APR review:

Southern University received the stiffest penalty of all; the NCAA said its [academic progress for athletes] data was unusable and barred all of its sports teams from post-season competition.

Either have a great basketball program or have a lousy one with great students. Give me the great program every time. [I] don’t care if our starting point guard got a D in anthropology. I don’t care if our center cheats on an English lit test. That’s on them. These guys are here because it’s a step on the way to pro ball. If they want to apply themselves in the classroom and get something more out of the college experience, that’s great but I don’t care about that either. These guys aren’t here to learn how to fix the world’s problems. They’re here to entertain the fans and bring money into the school via tv and ticket revenue, as well as raise the school’s profile to a segment of perspective attendees.

A lot of people will disagree with me and that’s fine but I feel like I’m being realistic and honest and they are not. Look into ANY D1 school with a fine tooth comb for 10 years and you’re going to find dirt. Only difference between SU and those other schools is that for some reason our school and our coach were the subject of long-term NCAA harassment and they were not.

From the comment thread on this article (UD thanks Alan for the link to the article).

Mi Chiamano Jimi

Yes, they call me Jimi,
but my true name is Mother Teresa.
My story is short.
A championship team
I embroider on campus.
I am happy happy and at peace
and my pastime
is to make friends at the YMCA.
I love all things
that have gentle sweet smells,
that speak of love, of spring,
of dreams and fanciful things,
those things that have poetic names …
Do you understand me?
They call me Jimi…
Buds in a vase…
Leaf and leaf I spy!
That gentle perfume of a flower!
But the flowers that I make,
Alas! Vacated.
Other than telling you about me, I know nothing.
I am only your martyr who comes out to make your school a champion.

Syracuse can still stubbornly cast its basketball coach, Jim Boeheim, as a martyr because college revenue sports embody the Lance Armstrong principle: Cheating is a universal expectation, so the crimes of individual cheaters don’t have as much impact. Armstrong, once the winningest cyclists of all time, broke the rules in a sport where the rules barely mattered. (In fact, from 1996 to 2010, every single Tour de France champion except Carlos Sastre had either tested positive for cheating, confessed to cheating or been suspended for cheating.)

Unless you understand the tao you can’t understand. And you can’t understand the tao.

… can’t.

But he did.

He did it by calling it “threatening.”

Volokh: “[T]he speech wouldn’t have been taken by any listener as a threat against him or her.”

[Costas] said that the bottom line for [university] higher-ups is that the consumers of football and basketball games generally prioritize athletic performance over academic success.

“If they found out that half the team was composed of illiterates, but the team went to the Rose Bowl or to the Final Four — they had that choice — or they had the choice of a competitive, entertaining team, but everyone was a legitimate student, most of the alums and most of the people in the stands would choose ‘A,'” Costas said.

 

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… Boeheim is still number one among the Syracuse faithful … [and] any mere university administrator [had better not] even think about removing Boeheim as head coach.

As with most major college coaches, Boeheim is virtually untouchable and clearly a more important figure on campus than the university president. Indeed, there are many presidential careers that have crashed and burned seeking to control powerful coaches and booster organizations.

… The scandals at Syracuse and North Carolina, the shadows over Duke, the many scandals of the past and future will not vanish. The only thing that ultimately will vanish is the integrity of American higher education.

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[The Syracuse scandal is about the ways in which] perfectly nice universities with wonderful faculty and illustrious alumni turn themselves into trash bins.

…Boeheim says he’s “not going anywhere.” The question is why that’s his decision, and not school President Kent Syverud’s. The simple answer is that no one has the authority to criticize Boeheim, much less fire him.

Presumably Syverud, who has been on the job for only a year, is not an unethical man, nor [University of Tennessee Chancellor Jimmy] Cheek an amoral one. Both have respected records. Syverud is a legal scholar, and Cheek an award-winner for teaching excellence in agriculture who has worked hard to lift Tennessee into rankings of the top 50 research universities. (Full disclosure: I have met Cheek and like him and have occasionally donated money to Tennessee women’s athletics.) But no lone tweedy president or chancellor has the clout to stand up to coaches and athletic directors backed by power bases of rich fanatical donors.

The Soul of Man Under Southern Frat Boy Football Fandom.

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Mom gets in on the act.

[W]hat (the NCAA) did to Jim Boeheim, I think has really been sad, and I think you’re going to see an appeal process by him. What about the millions he’s raised for cancer? I don’t want to hear it. I happen to be a big fan of Jim Boeheim as a human being and as a person.