… all of our school’s other cheating coaches!

This is a very nicely written piece about university football, penned by a brave local English professor in Texas. It shows emotional restraint, and clever concision. John Crisp simply cites three adjacent articles in his local paper:

[O]n a single page in my local paper we find: A suicide by a young man who believed he was suffering from sports-related concussions. A quarterback so vital to the success of his team and its profit-making football program that he’s eager to risk his future mental health. And a university president excoriated for making a sound economic and ethical decision.

The first reference is to the concussion-wracked suicide, Kosta Karageorge, the second to the concussed but still playing Baylor quarterback, and the third to the University of Alabama Birmingham’s decision to shut down its unaffordable football program.

Only in his last line does Crisp come out with it:

One wonders if football has become important beyond all reason.

There was [Florida Atlantic University’s] $70 million football stadium, a facility so palatial that ESPN will showcase it during the inaugural Boca Raton Bowl this month. Then there was the sea of empty blue seats, a stark reminder that precious few fans care about FAU football — and that FAU’s build-it-and-they-will-come strategy hasn’t worked as hoped.

Public university.

Their football players keep getting killed.

In the same apartment complex.

Auburn freshman football player Jakell Mitchell was shot and killed early Sunday morning at an apartment complex near the Auburn University campus.

… The shooting … occurred at the same apartment complex Desmonte Leonard killed three men, including former Auburn players Ed Christian and Ladarious Phillips, at a party in the summer of 2012. He was convicted of capital murder, attempted murder and assault in October and will be sentenced Jan. 7.

In other words: Top-flight recruiting!

A walk down memory lane!

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And sure… the place has deteriorated a bit since those glory days…

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.

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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!

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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.