UD‘s pal Dave Ridpath talks about it.

By far, the largest student fee is … the intercollegiate athletic fee – which can be upwards of 80% of the total fee amount at many institutions not in Power Five conferences.

Conventional wisdom says that intercollegiate athletics is a boon to colleges and universities; that it’s wildly profitable; attracts new students; enhances fundraising; and boosts the university’s profile. Yet these are myths…

… [S]tudents [are] largely unaware of these fee amounts, and how much [of the fee is] allocated for intercollegiate athletics.

The athletic fee wasn’t obvious (in fact, it wasn’t even itemized) on university bills. Furthermore, getting the exact number from MAC institutions proved exasperating.

Considering the total fees assessed to fund athletics at [Mid American conference] institutions, it’s clear why schools weren’t exactly transparent about the fee. Once the actual fee amount was detailed to the surveyed population of students, over 90% were either against the athletic fee or wanted it substantially lowered.

Legal duty? Or moral duty?

You take a school like James Madison University, a school no different from tons of others in this country… A school which recently spent tens of millions of dollars spiffing up its football stadium, and hundreds of thousands of dollars bidding on a home playoff game.

JMU is a U. A university. All that money might have been directed to education.

The last game played in JMU’s 25,000-person seating capacity stadium drew how many students? Let’s see:

Only 1,622 students came to Saturday’s game, despite JMU opening residence halls and dining facilities earlier than usual after Thanksgiving. JMU had estimated in its bid [JMU paid $200,000 for the privilege of holding this game] that 6,200 students would attend the game. Because the NCAA doesn’t allow host institutions to offer complimentary playoff tickets, JMU athletics sponsored all of the student tickets to keep them free. Documents provided to The Breeze [the campus newspaper] show that the price for each ticket was set at $10, and JMU budgeted $62,000 for the student tickets.

So let’s see if UD (notoriously weak on math) is getting this right. Correct UD if she’s wrong. In 2011, this school spent sixty-two million dollars increasing the number of seats in its football stadium to 25,000. We are now 2014, and at the last game fewer than 2,000 (non-paying) students showed up (even this figure might be optimistic, since schools typically count tickets picked up rather than human beings present). (Counting all non-student fans, the stadium was half full.) Again, this was a play-off game. Students tickets were free.

Let’s go back to that 1,622 figure. Look what the school estimated they’d get. 6,200. Off by a rather significant figure, no? You’d want to ask – where did the highly compensated athletics department at JMU (“[In 2013,] three of JMU’s top seven salaries were those of coaches.] get that figure? Out of their ass?

Where’s Nate Silver when you need him? But even so, aren’t there one or two statisticians at JMU who might have been consulted? After all, the – let’s call it the tanking pattern – is well-established…

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

Tiens.

Et alors.

Ecoute.

That student up there… that JMU student going on about the duty of all people admitted to James Madison University to attend football games… She’s the cutting edge. She and her school represent the future of university football.

One option of course is to shut the program, as the University of Alabama Birmingham just did. Almost no one else is going to choose that option.

Most everyone else is going where JMU’s headed: After the endless campus newspaper articles and official statements from the coaches and angry articles in the local booster press full of threats, bribes, and recriminations, will indeed come the punishment of those unwilling to assume their duty to take one of the 25,000 seats.

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

Okay, so here we go into numbers again: Figure about ten thousand locals show up at the games. James Madison has close to 20,000 students. So to fill up the stadium something around 15,000 JMU students will have to step up and do their duty.

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of boredom*
Rode the fifteen thousand.

—————————–

* “Football games are fun,
but partying is more fun.
I may go for the first half,
but it gets boring after a while.”

You think sitting at a stupid three-hour football game is boring? Try sitting in a jail cell for a week.

The editorial board of the New York Times reminds us of a prevailing reality at increasing numbers of American universities — what a writer for the New Yorker, in a long piece about Duke University, calls “the coarsening of undergraduate life.”

At the bottom of the university hierarchy, business-model party schools desperately seek to maintain tanking enrollments through the massive availability of booze, drugs, frats, and sports. Any location dominated by this mix will see assaults and riots; any location whose life virtually depends on these things will see an increase in assaults and riots. Places like these, as they become notorious, draw unaffiliated disorderly people from the towns and cities around them, so that we see the phenomenon of huge tailgates composed of drunks with no intention of attending the football game attached to the tailgate; we see riots at Keene State College attracting hundreds of random non-Keene State people who like violence and know they can get some there; we see growing numbers of sexual assaults carried out by non-student opportunists infiltrating frat parties.

At the top of the university hierarchy, schools attended by the “cubs of some of our most successful predators” (UD loves this phrase, but can’t find its source) feature the same booze, drugs, frats, and sports mix — not because they need to in order to attract applicants (everyone wants to go to Duke, UVa, Vanderbilt…), but because the schools are modeling the work hard/play hard thing that their graduates will need as they prepare to become competitive in hedge fund culture. Some of these students, like poor George Huguely, show up on campus already well-bred, well-soaked, alcoholics; others learn the life.

In a New Yorker article about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, Adam Gopnik writes:

[F]or lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing [in] … what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor...

You don’t have to gaze at the shit-strewn post-tailgate campus of the University of Georgia to know that the Italianization of the American university campus is an achieved fact in plenty of places, and that there’s too much money at stake (consider, among many examples, the disquieting fact of fewer and fewer students attending football games, and the growing need to ply them with drink to get them to attend) to do anything but ramp up the Italianization.

It is terribly important to get an accurate account of the now-notorious reported rape at the University of Virginia; but we are well past needing to establish the fact that our Italianizing campuses are dangerous.

I thought university football was already “truly professionalized,” but according to this, there’s much more to come.

UD has predicted that most physical campus life will disappear as everyone goes online; but she has also – naively – said that the only place on campus where students will continue to congregate in real time will be the football stadium. Wrong.

Even though college football is as steeped in its history and culture as any sport in the country, with the amount of money flying around the sport, it’s just more efficient to play games in these huge stadiums, sold to the highest bidder. The strange thing is that—national title games aside—these stadiums are often empty, particularly for conference championship games. (None of the major conference championships—the Pac-12, Big Ten, or SEC—is expected to sell out their games at neutral sites this weekend.) That doesn’t really matter for the people selling these games: Television stations, particularly ESPN, who just need the programming. (The fans in attendance are essentially just atmosphere—extras.) This is the ongoing trend, too: Fewer and fewer students are even showing up to campus games anymore. In the future college football world, you won’t even need them: These games might as well be played on sound stages.

I mean, yes, UD has been blogging for some time about disappearing students; she just thought that … you know… while they’d be totally gone from physical classrooms, there’d still be “the few, the proud” in the stadiums. (Thanks, Andre, for that link.) Apparently not.

(Silver lining: They’ll still show up for the tailgate and the riot.)

That being the case, UD will make another prediction.

It’s very embarrassing to the schools, these empty televised stadiums. (“[On] average, only 8 percent of U.A.B.’s 18,600 students attended home games this year.”) Soon many universities will revamp their entire admissions systems. They will seek above all in a student the willingness and ability to sit – not too drunk; reasonably excited – in a stadium for the entire duration of a football game. Extras Scholarships will go out to students who can document (via admissions portfolio videos of their high school game attendance) their capacity to simulate being a fan of the university’s football team.

Required reading for the credit-bearing freshman-fan training course will be DeLillo’s White Noise, and in particular the simulacral German nuns scene:

“Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life.”

Real fans are gone; no one cares about a fake tv spectacle. But a large group of people must sit in the stands looking like students who give a shit. Someone must appear to care.

[C]ollege football has been accused of being an unpaid farm system for the NFL. This winnowing of the ranks [of universities with football teams], and the increased ability of Power Five schools to compensate players, could make it that much closer to a formality. If we accept—as the Northwestern [University] union lawsuit claims—that these players are more “athletes” than “students” (and thus more employees than subjects) then they’re essentially professional leagues already. You can see this eventually—maybe not as early 2025, but someday—becoming standard operating procedure, and having the Dallas Cowboys go ahead and make Baylor or Texas A&M their “farm” team.

The effect on academics? Well, first of all there will be a synergy with the movement of the university’s teaching business to online. There won’t be any angst about academic integrity, because everything will be invisible. Nothing to see here! And the new honesty about the tv-run, paid-player, farm-team, nature of the university, coupled with the obsolescence of the NCAA itself (“one of the last connections any of these athletic departments have to ‘academics’ at all”) will truly clear the way for more and more American universities to drop the whole “university” pretense and get down to business.

He cut his teeth at death-penaltied Southern Methodist U, so Pete Mangurian knows what you have to do to inspire a team… But the snobs at Columbia have hated him since he was recruited, and I guess it doesn’t help that the team loses all of its games…

… Plus, according to some, the coach is a mite rough with the lads… Ignores concussions… is physically abusive… after a recent loss told the team You are terrible [expletive] people… The world would be a better place without you.

Which, okay, given the suicide rate among undergraduates, might not be the most politic thing to say if your university cares about the welfare of its students…

But by prevailing standards the man is a pussycat.

Wheeeehoooooo!

A local columnist points out that scandalous, money-hemorrhaging University of Hawaii athletics is only part of the story at comprehensively unbelievable UH.

All for Football!

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

UD thanks a reader for this update on the legendary legal journey of the highest-paid person at Washington State University, Mike Leach.

WSU: Good on ya!

The American University Hymn

All for Football, all for Football!
All our students’ ransomed dollars:
All our thoughts and words and doings,
All our days and all our hours.

Oh, what wonder! How amazing!
Football, glorious King of kings,
Deigns to call me His beloved,
Lets me rest beneath His wings.

Sing it to this tune: Ay Romania, Romania…

Ay! Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska —
Once there was a land, sweet and lovely.
Ay! Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska —
Once there was a school, sweet and fine.
To go there is a pleasure;
What your heart desires you can get:

Pelini’s $7.7 million buyout, aha … !

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

UPDATE: Good stewards of public money in so many ways.

“Some of these cats came from 3,000 miles away to play here, to be a part of this, to be a part of all of this!” UAB tight end Tristan Henderson hollered at [UAB president Ray] Watts during his meeting with the team. “But you say numbers? That’s what you come here to say, numbers?”

University of Alabama Birmingham men don’t understand that the school can’t afford football. In order for them to understand why the school shut down the program, they would have to understand numbers.

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

Professor Mondo found another good quotation (UD didn’t find it because she couldn’t bear to read the whole article):

“Now you’re telling me I’ve got two more years left to play and I’ve got to give up on football and settle for an education?”

Read this Wikipedia page.

Although Derek Boogaard wasn’t connected to any universities (he was a high school dropout), UD has to say that his story haunts her more than any of the university player biographies she’s read.

No doubt we’re in for more hideous details surrounding the suicide of Ohio State football player Kosta Karageorge, but for sheer fulsome horror, for the capacity to touch on virtually all killing aspects of a violent, out-of-control sports culture, the blighted life of this hockey enforcer is hard to top.

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

There’s something about the brief dry chronology of the Wiki page that makes Boogaard’s rapid collapse and death that much more stark… You feel the inevitability of it, I suppose, his brisk unstoppable march to ruin, with so much against the guy: He was naive and mildly learning disabled; he was a hulking kid who’d been bullied and emerged from that himself a bully (see also Richie Incognito, and probably many others punching away on the front lines of university and professional sports); his big break came when a professional agent happened to be at the rink when Boogaard had his first violent breakdown on the ice, practically killing some of the players around him… whereupon the agent, recognizing a monster when he saw one, recruited him; bloodthirsty fans made him a god of gore; he treated his pain from injuries and surgeries, as well as from the anxiety he (and apparently all enforcers) felt as he anticipated one game after another in which he knew his worshippers would demand blood, with the oxycodone that team support staff reportedly dispensed like candy; he became an addict; he drank and partied hard (he came from a rough Saskatchewan background in which he would have hit the bottle and partied hard anyway — so add that to his hockey stuff); and of course his concussed and pummeled brain was beginning to give way, so he didn’t really have much fight left in him on the rink. In fact, friends say he began to act rather like a blank-faced zombie toward the end.

The rest involves a couple of failed rehab efforts, and then, at age 28, death from a mix of alcohol and oxycodone after a long night at the bars with friends.

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

UD senses the same pathos of the big sweet dim baby, transformed by agents and fans and drugs and money into a weird amalgam of a hulk and a husk, in the emerging story of Kosta Karageorge.

We don’t yet know for sure that concussions produced the physical and emotional problems that contributed to wrestler/football player Kosta Karageorge’s suicide at Ohio State University. But while we’re all thinking about the question, recall this 2012 New York Times story about an already accomplished young wrestler who decided he’d had one too many hits.

A charismatic athlete from Minnesota who was pegged by some wrestling experts as a future Olympic medalist, [Jake] Deitchler retired in January [at age 22] because of the cumulative effects of about a dozen concussions.

Deitchler sat out a year and a half before wrestling briefly last fall for the University of Minnesota, when symptoms like fogginess returned…

… Deitchler still has short-term memory lapses. But his symptoms are not as severe as two years ago, he said, when he drove his moped on the wrong side of a street near the University of Minnesota, and fell asleep at a youth meet where he was supposed to be coaching.

“His concussion problems were really bad, and I didn’t know what was going on,” said Brandon Paulson, Deitchler’s former coach and the co-director of PINnacle. “He was forgetting everything. He was forgetting to show up to practice. He was really messed up.”

… Deitchler deferred acceptance to Minnesota to train in Greco-Roman full time at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Though bothered by headaches, nausea and blurred vision, Deitchler kept wrestling. “I didn’t have necessarily short-term memory problems,” he said. “It wasn’t really affecting me too bad.”

Things worsened in 2009 after he enrolled at Minnesota. In the first month of practice, a senior trying to escape a hold drove his head into Deitchler’s chin. “I was just in a daze, and it didn’t go away,” he said. “It lasted months.”

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

From an article this morning in the Washington Post:

One study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in January of this year, found that repeatedly-concussed teens are three times more likely to develop depression. A separate paper, published in PLoS One last spring, suggested that teens with a history of head injury are at “significantly greater odds” of attempting suicide and “engaging in numerous violent behaviors.”

… One study, published in Clinics in Sports Medicine in 2005, analyzed 71 athletes who had either contemplated or committed suicide over the last several decades. Nearly half were found to be football players. More than 60 of the athletes were men. And the median age was 22. One such player was a Duke lineman named Ted McNairy, who committed suicide years after playing. [The paper went on to say:] “Of the 1.5 million high school players in the United States, 250,000 have a concussion in a given season. … Concussions on the field are probably underreported, both because they can be subtle, and because of football’s ‘rub-dirt-on-it ethos.”

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

From an article in The Daily Beast:

Should CTE be found, Karageorge will join Andre Waters, Ray Easterling, Dave Duerson, Terry Long, Junior Seau, Paul Oliver, Shane Dronett, and Jovan Belcher in an ever-growing list of athletes with CTE who took their own lives and were wracked by memory loss, disorientation, cognitive issues, mood and personality changes, and crushing depression.

And yes, this is the point where we mention that even the NFL admits that nearly three in 10 former players will develop some form of debilitating brain injury in their lifetimes as a result of playing football. Concussion-related illnesses are usually presumed to be an issue for older, retired players, but Karageorge’s death at age 22 would set that myth aflame.

Then again, you would hope that notion would have gone the way of the dodo bird after a 29-year-old soccer player was found to have CTE after his autopsy, and an Olympic wrestler retired at 22.

… The treatment of concussed players in college football made headlines earlier this season when the University of Michigan’s athletic director, David Brandon, resigned in large part over Head Coach Brady Hoke’s mind-boggling decision to send a clearly concussed quarterback back out onto the field.

Ohio State’s football coach, Urban Meyer, or Athletic Director Gene Smith must be made to pay a similar price should it be found that Karageorge was already suffering from some form of traumatic brain injury when he committed suicide, or if the school’s policy was in any way negligent.

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

From a comment thread in the OSU newspaper:

How many of these sad stories must we have before universities [acknowledge] the contradiction between educating a brain while traumatizing it?

… The sort of stories that rise above all other stories and become master narratives…

The University of Virginia gang rape story, which riveted national attention onto issues of alcohol, fraternities, and sexual violence on campus, broke only a few days ago; and now an Ohio State football player who had been complaining about the psychological effects of his sports-related concussions has been found dead in a dumpster behind his apartment building. He had shot himself.

The news coverage of this suicide has been gigantic. News coverage of the UVa rape has also been gigantic. Why?

UD has argued that the particular gang rape described in Rolling Stone magazine took off in the media because of that publication’s high profile, and because the article was extremely well-written, putting the reader at the scene with great immediacy, and in this way heightening everyone’s sense of the intimately vile and lurid nature of that form of assault. It also took off because of the great distance between the public perception of venerable honorable well-bred UVa and the reality of rapist-alcoholic UVa. The UVa gang rape has become the paradigmatic university rape story; its details are so grotesque, the damage done to its victim so grievous, that huge numbers of people know about it, make reference to it, understand the crime of rape through it.

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

Similarly, the pitiable tale of Kosta Karageorge is, even in its first few hours (it just broke), becoming iconic of college football. As with the Rolling Stone piece, this is for a number of reasons.

Like the UVa story, it exhibits striking irony. This football hero’s nightmare end, his act of unimaginable despair and self-hatred, happened in the midst of football season – a time of perpetually-renewed optimism and communal excitement. Literally at the same time as Ohio State fans were rocking in their seats, a missing player from the team was dressing all in black, walking to a dumpster, climbing into it, and shooting himself to death.

So we have not only this irony, this sardonic and sickening counterpoint to the happy game-day narrative, but we have it in real time. That drama is one of the reasons why this story will carry farther than the several other CTE-related suicides we’ve been reading about.

Karageorge’s story is also about a very young man, and most of the CTE stories so far have been about older, retired players.

Defenders of football’s safety will point out that most of Karageorge’s college athletic career was about wrestling, not football. That’s true. But he has obviously been playing – practicing – football for some time in order to qualify for the team. Could the combined effects of wrestling and football smackdowns have damaged his brain?

Only the results of his autopsy will reveal whether Karageorge had chronic traumatic encephalopathy. If he did, his story will assume even more archetypal significance.

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

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, with its battered denizens of the ashbin, has covered some of this territory.

Readers tend to think the play is ridiculous. Outrageous. Impossible.

… is that it flushes out comrades in arms — people like the eminent sociologist John Shelton Reed, a man who was there (extremely well-positioned, in fact, at the now-notorious University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) long before UD stumbled onto the corrupt university athletics scene. Long before UD began wondering what to do about coach salaries, perks, and buyouts bankrupting schools, for instance, Reed was on the case, as in a 1997 Wall Street Journal piece, where he wonders why professors don’t run amateur student/athlete sports:

It shouldn’t be hard to find professors — or to recruit “professors” — willing to work with the varsity teams. This would be in addition to their regular teaching loads, of course, and there’d be no extra pay — no more than for faculty members who work with other student organizations.

And there’d have to be restrictions on outside income. Just as we hold athletes to higher standards than other students, so we’d have to expect more of their coaches than of other faculty members. If we’re really going to keep college athletics amateur, student-athletes should be served by “teacher-coaches.” Better yet, let’s not call them coaches at all. Let’s call them “faculty advisers.”

Only trouble is, how do you get rid of a losing coach if he has tenure?

Reed sent me another “golden oldie,” as he called it, this one from way back in 1987. It’s an essay in which he evokes the special something in the air down south during football season.

Like the other piece, it’s mainly about farcical levels of corruption down those parts when it comes to keeping hopeless students academically eligible, dealing with team criminality, etc., etc.

But it’s also got some great local details:

People used to alter the road signs around here to read things like “Interstate 85/Wake Forest 0.”

And it ends with words of wisdom:

For a college or university, assimilating semi-professional athletics is like building a perpetual-motion machine: some do better than others; but the undertaking is impossible in the first place.