The Cougar teams increasingly find themselves
Playing in a mostly empty gym that,
By the end of the men’s game,
Can be eerily quiet.

… in which it’s vaguely noted that some university seems to have gotten itself into a bit of a fix money-wise… but oh well…

Southern Methodist University will lay off 100 employees by the end of February as the school attempts to cut up to $35 million in expenses.

SMU President R. Gerald Turner said in an email to SMU faculty and staff that the eliminations will allow more money to the university’s academic mission…

That’s right, just quote the man on that big ol’ academic mission at Southern Methodist University… Somehow (let’s not say how) Turner and others fucked up so badly that they’re firing people and they’re freezing hiring big-time… Texas-style big…

Perhaps an outsider’s perspective on SMU would help us get a grasp on things.

[SMU has] been notably vile ever since its long-ago death penalty, a signal distinction within a national landscape of dirty sports programs. SMU has not let the fact that the program remains moribund stop it from accumulating … a one hundred million dollar athletic deficit.

Nor has the fantastic campus culture of the sports factory faltered in the wake of SMU’s misfortune. Secrecy about the budget even as they soak the students for higher and higher athletics fees? Check. Sodden frat boys befouling all they touch? Check. Violent hazing? Check. I mean, that last one – hazing – hit the news today, but it got lost, since hazing and sexual assault and all that seem de rigueur, comme il faut and la chose normale at SMU.

How much more sordid can SMU and schools like it get? What can we expect in the next few years? Local journos will keep their traps shut, yes (here’s one local who tried gamely, as it were, to speak truth to the school’s booster-in-chief, but note how his questions keep provoking Soviet-era-style answers), but any significant newspaper outside Texas bothering to track SMU will easily expose yet another massive university scandal. Because keep in mind the context here. Even the local rag can’t help tacking this on to the very end of this article:

SMU in particular is feeling a squeeze from expenses including changing the school’s athletic conference, work to improve the school’s national presence and salary increases.

Those aren’t three different things. The fools think athletics is how you improve your national presence, and the crippling salary increases are largely about coaches.

So… in the new normal, which includes a deficit-ridden University of Texas athletic program, where’s SMU heading? A recent Chronicle of Higher Ed piece describes the now truly desperate financial situation for big-time university athletics, in which there’s a whole load of big new costs and

“States aren’t coming through with any more dollars, and student fees are largely tapped out,” [one observer] said. “It’s going to be a real challenge to figure this out.”

SMU isn’t going to figure it out. SMU is simply hopelessly stupid. It will keep doing what it’s always done – finance football games, throw tailgates, stagger about hazing people – until it runs out of money. Eventually its booster-in-chief (see above) will be forced to flee creditors. They will find him hiding out in a hole in the ground in his native village, à la Saddam Hussein.

But it doesn’t sober this writer up enough to draw the obvious conclusion. Oh no. He’s a little stunned, a little daunted. But no.

Rentschler’s capacity, by the way, is 40,000.

UD has long felt this too. The NFL never presents itself as anything other than a whore. Watching its leader smirk his way through his role as The Voice of Moral Outrage during the Ray Rice thing was oddly reassuring, in a Popeyesque, I yam what I yam, sort of way.

The NFL is like Germaine, Henry’s favorite whore in Tropic of Cancer:

Germaine was a whore all the way through. … However vile and circum­scribed was that world which she had created for herself, nevertheless she functioned in it superbly. And that in itself is a tonic thing.

The NCAA, on the other hand, is untonically complex – a whore that must pretend it’s a university student. Take Penn State, featured in the recent film, Happy Valley:

[Happy Valley] is not really about a sexual predator and his enabler. It’s about what their downfall illuminates: a nation so drunk on sports, especially on big-time college football, that it has lost the ability to think and feel. America has become a nation, as one reviewer of Happy Valley wrote, “put under a spell, even reduced to grateful infantilism, by the game of football.”

Grateful infantilism – pretty much the perfect opposite of what universities are about.

[T]here are people who actually dislike football and openly criticize many of its institutions.

A columnist in the University of Tennessee newspaper (Tennessee! Athletics! A blog like this one couldn’t survive without UT athletics!) shares some of his shock and awe at the presence of football haters (He doesn’t really mean football haters. He means people who don’t like or who don’t care about the football program at UT.) on his campus.

People who mainline booze up their ass and then hold surrealistic press conferences about it – now that’s nothing to write home about at UT; but people who fail to come out for the games… Are you fucking kidding me? Actually??

Tennessee’s athletic department, along with most other large football schools in America, is historically very profitable. [Yes, the lad believes most large football schools are profitable. I mean, look no further than the king of large football schools, the University of Texas.]

The unpleasant tendency of newspapers to cite statistics – and put them in high-profile editorials – has yet again reared its ugly head. The Boston Globe casts a rational eye at the U Mass football program and makes the obvious call: kill it.

So, you know, here’s the paper of record for that team’s city saying shut it down.

UMass had to assure many more football scholarships, meet minimum attendance requirements, and make facility improvements. But instead of leaping into glory, UMass hurled itself into a money pit. A program that cost the school $3.1 million in 2011 in direct support and student fees is projected to cost $8.6 million next year — even after projected revenues are taken into account — according a recently released faculty report. The school has precious little to show for it, with a 5-31 record in the last three years and a fan base in suspended animation. The Minutemen averaged 16,008 fans this season, barely more than last year’s home game average of 15,830.

Pushing athletes to enhance the university’s brand on the field often leads to problems in the classroom, and that pattern held true at UMass Amherst.

… Football losses are nearing $10 million a year… [T]axpayers can’t be expected to pay for an extravagant football program indefinitely, especially as the changing economics of college football make it even more expensive for UMass to stay competitive.

Franchement, here’s the worry on the part of the school. U Mass Amherst has arguably the most violent student body in America. The post-game riots there are terrifying. But if you take away that important emotional outlet for the large numbers of drunken bullies who go to school there, who knows what they’ll do instead? (Put amherst in my search engine for many posts about that school’s long history of riots.)

It’s … taxing.

In response to huge gobs of student audience routinely leaving football games early and embarrassing the school with their obvious indifference to the proceedings, USD coach Joe Glenn said, back in 2012:

… [The] legacy of a fan base lies on the shoulders of the students.

“If students get to know their players and learn to cheer them on, then the longevity of the fan base will extend,” Glenn said.

This comment boasts some high-dollar-value words (legacy; longevity) but it’s basically saying what all pathetic, athletics-run universities say to their students: We didn’t admit you to this university for you to be a student. It’s on your shoulders to sit in bleachers for hours, screaming and pulling your hair out at the sight of your football team.

Just get to know them!

So… let’s take a look…

In 2012, even as the coach was insisting USD students get to know their team, no fewer than six football players had an active conspiracy going (teamwork!) to commit big-time tax fraud. They

gather[ed] names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other identifying information, federal authorities said of the scheme, which went on between June 2011 and May 2012. They used the data to file fraudulent tax returns, using addresses that weren’t associated with the identity theft victims so that members of the scheme could retrieve the refunds.

So, with the help of federal authorities, Coach Glenn got his wish. University of South Dakota students have gotten to know their team, gotten to know that a significant part of that team, working together, stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is a high level of organized crime for a group of twenty year olds, and, as sentences are handed down, their activity is attracting high levels of national attention…

So now you know the sort of people you’re cheering for, kiddies! Get out there and scream your head off!!

******************

And spare a cheer for the team’s impressive recruiting staff. These guys found six tax fraudsters! Six identify thieves! Now they need your support as they work night and day to repeat the magic…

That was Washington State University’s athletic director, doing a little damage control in 2012. It’s now 2015, and the school lucky enough to hire Mr “lock [his] fucking pussy ass in a place so dark that the only way he knows he has a dick is to reach down and touch it” Mike Leach to coach its football team now has not a 6.6 million dollar athletic program deficit, but … let’s see… how profitable have they become…

Oh. They’ve now got a thirteen million dollar deficit.

But Bill Moos is still at it, promising the suckers at WSU that if they’ll just sit tight for another two or three years…

Moos said all Pac-12 schools will see significant increases in television money …

Just hold on, dammit! Another couple of years! I swear it’ll be zillions from tv!

Well, a little over a million. Maybe.

******************************

But… wait a minute!

“We expected a sizable deficit as we put our numbers together and then we decided to make it even larger to take care of some things that we felt needed to happen…”

You expected? But you told me back in 2012…

Ben Carson or Dartmouth College, the irony’s getting a little thick around here. Coughcough. UD‘s having trouble breathing.

One quick bit of advice from UD, by the way: In general, avoid the word integrity. People who use the word integrity seem to get themselves slapped down a lot. Find another word. Better yet, try to be honest about who you are and what your local culture is.

Carson’s majorly lifted book included cautionary tales about how important it is to have integrity, the way he has integrity, and how people who have integrity do not, for instance, plagiarize… Dartmouth College, which pretends to believe that people like this are chockablock with integrity, allowed some floating lamblike being from the religion department to offer not only a course designed for athletes about sports ethics (in the direct footsteps of America’s best-known sports ethicist, Jan Boxill) but a course featuring that most perfect of ed-tech devices, the clicker.

The clicker boasts all the advantages of today’s cutting-edge classroom devices:

1. It’s expensive to the student.
2. It’s so easy to cheat with that even students inclined toward honesty will be tempted to use it in that way.
3. It’s dehumanizing.
4. It allows lazy professors to avoid any interaction with students.
5. It has zero educational value.

I know you don’t want me to pile on, but the full name of the course was Sports, Ethics, and Religion. With Dartmouth rapidly becoming the nation’s epicenter of vile fraternities and cheating classrooms, UD recommends that it continue offering these classes as a smokescreen (rather in the way Bernard Madoff put himself on the board of trustees of an orthodox religious institution) but add to their names. Next semester: Sports, Ethics, Religion, and Patriotism. After that, Sports, Ethics, Religion, Patriotism, and … Integrity! Und so weiter.

Put Out More Flags. Put a Bird on It.

***************
UD thanks Dave.

Which, strictly speaking, I guess is true. What they seem to be doing there – UD‘s just speculating – what they seem to be doing at the University of Alabama for special categories of student – is reviewing footage of their woman-beating…

Maybe, say, they’re comparing the recently admitted Jonathan Taylor’s woman-beating to that of Ray Rice… How does Taylor stand up next to a more seasoned pro?

I’m figuring that only when they’ve completed a comparative review of domestic violence footage (not of football plays, because that would involve athletics in the admissions process) does the admissions committee get down to the hard work of determining which woman-beater most fully meets the academic standards of the University of Alabama.

These proceedings are of course hush-hush. So, as I say, this is pure guesswork.

**************************

There are a few naysayers:

I don’t think handing out athletic scholarships to two-time offenders who have felony assault charges pending qualifies as just giving a kid a second chance.

… but the melody lingers on.

Florida State University will miss its hero! But it’s got a rape-related lawsuit to remember him by.

University Diaries has been tracking this meme for about a year. A guy recounts in lurid detail this lurid sport that – as described – only a moral degenerate would follow, let alone get excited about every week.

[L]ast year was uniquely disastrous for the game. Heisman-winner Jameis Winston’s off-the-field behavior—rape allegations, petty theft, a brief suspension for obscenity—stalked a league already burdened with lawsuits from former athletes … [T]he best running back was suspended for whipping his son with a branch, domestic abuse cases seemed to materialize weekly, and the Ray Rice saga exposed the commissioner to be exactly as dense and cynical as many already feared…

Then the guy comes up with elaborate theories as to why he keeps excitedly watching the game anyway. But, as in this latest article, one really obvious explanation doesn’t occur to the guy. He loves violence, and the more violence the better.

After all, as he himself notes, football is more popular than ever.

He said that academics and athletic success have an inverse relationship.

Yet another American university – this time it’s Temple – is up against the CAB (Cock And Balls) problem.

In response to its president’s decision to build a football stadium, a local writer slowly, painstakingly, in the manner of a kindergarten teacher, explains why it’s total madness…

Temple has nowhere near enough money to compete in the big leagues.

In fact (let’s put this as simply and slowly as we can…): State taxpayers already hugely subsidize the money-hemorrhaging program, and the stadium will add another hundred million of debt.

At best, Temple would play six or seven [poorly attended] home games a year at the new stadium — even if it doubled as a track-and-field site, you’d still end up with a hulking facility (and, probably, parking lots) that go unused the vast majority of the year.

*************************

So how do we account for the president’s absolute conviction a new stadium will be great, great, GREAT?

Well, it’s like answering the question Why does the University of Nevada Las Vegas president think a billion dollar stadium will be equally great?

It seems clear to UD that these men are thinking not with their big head, but with their little head.

UD proposes a clause in the president’s contract mandating, upon a majority vote of the faculty senate, a regime of Depo-Provera.

Now that’s pretty, ain’t it? You can always count on the profit motive to generate people like Jeff here, who explains La Nouvelle Vague for us.

Empty seats in all the student sections? Big deal. Universities don’t care whether people who have anything to do with them go to football games! Especially since students are poor. Not to mention sloppy drunks. Plus, as an economist at Temple University (which will probably build a new stadium although virtually none of its students attend football games) explains:

“[T]oday’s students aren’t coming to games. That’s a problem all over college football. Even at Minnesota, student attendance didn’t increase from when they played at the Metrodome.”

It’s a national trend, see. We’ve been following the trend on this blog for quite some time. But who cares? Why should Temple care? Only the silent invisible corporate guys in the luxury suites produce any real revenue; the whole show’s for them.

I mean, the whole show’s also for tv networks – they set when the games start, how they’re run, etc.

It’s a beautiful synergy, when you think about it. Players who aren’t students perform in front of local businesspeople who aren’t alumni. These two groups also have in common massive subsidies from… uh… from the students who don’t go to the games. And from all the rest of us.

And listen – if the only two audiences that matter are the guys in the upper decks plus the national tv audience, why build a traditional yawning stadium at all? UD proposes introducing what she calls boutique stadia, on the model of boutique hotels: Small, luxurious, extremely expensive, with vastly more amenities which would include an expanded bar, a gym and a spa and … hell… bedrooms.