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.

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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.

With incredulity? Or because he was so drunk everything made him laugh?

Anyway. Apparently you can do things like this in FSU’s Tallahassee, but it’s harder in Orlando.

Galvin must have known it’d be harder, because he offered not merely a ticket to see amazing Central Florida University play football. He offered season tickets.

UD likes her way of putting it.

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

San Diego State University also scored a great headline in England’s Independent newspaper:

WORLD’S WORST HUMANS
WAVE DILDOS AT
ANTI-RAPE PROTESTERS

Way to go, SDSU! This is generating even more publicity than your six-fraternity drug cartel.

It hasn’t been a great few weeks for [University of Tennessee] athletics. Between NCAA investigations, resignations, suspensions and rape allegations, the news cycle has been overwhelmingly negative. Such an environment has made it easy to forget the many positives surrounding Tennessee athletics. So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, here are five reasons Vol fans should be thankful.

Unlike George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, all American university campuses know the truth about big-time athletics. They know precisely the difference between truth and illusion.

They have no illusions that big-time athletes are students. Watch the parade of prevaricators at the University of North Carolina who are shocked – shocked! – to find that academic fraud is going on there. We know they’re lying; they know they’re lying. It’s all very strange.

Yet on it goes. As his school goes the way of virtually all big-time sports schools, a University of Michigan regent offers an if/then:

If [academics and big-time athletics] can’t coexist, then intercollegiate athletics is truly an illusion.”

Yes, if and only if… Because… uh… We haven’t settled the question! Not enough data. Votes aren’t yet all counted.

But while you’re counting them, don’t forget that where academic fraud is concerned, Michigan’s tally is below Chapel Hill:

[In 2008,] Prof. John Hagen … was accused of assisting student-athletes in maintaining eligibility by teaching independent study courses that were well below University standards of academic rigor. In Hagen’s courses, the student-athletes had an average GPA of 3.62, whereas their average in other classes was a 2.57. Some students were found to have spent only 15 minutes with Hagen every two weeks, but earned up to four credits for the class. Hagen taught 294 independent studies courses from Fall 2004 to Fall 2007, 251 of which were to student-athletes. After months of investigation, the allegations were dropped…

Dropped! Dropped! Even Chapel Hill couldn’t find a way to drop them.

Truth or illusion. These people feel compelled to carry on as though we’re too stupid to see the difference. They of course see the difference all too clearly. They just don’t give a shit.

In college, he will learn he is still different and be treated as such. He may live in an athlete only dorm and receive special food, tutoring services, and attention. Many colleges will give him credits for classes he never took and go to great lengths to find him instructors who are athlete friendly. In fact, if you are the rare breed of athlete who is academically smart, you will anger your coach when your academics interfere with training, practice, or games.

… tell a high-level Washington DC gathering of university administrators (they were there to talk about the, er, problem of college athletics) that the solution was easy: “Make athletic directors and coaches professors.”

UD, from her seat at the back of the room, silently applauded the man on his genius. “Yes,” she thought. “He has understood that if you wave a wand and declare the athletic staff professors, you destroy any ability the university has to defend itself as anything other than a sports team. There’s no longer an athletic side and an academic side; there’s no longer any protest from professors that too much of the budget goes to athletics; there’s no longer any concept of academic integrity that might be corrupted by athletics. It’s the final triumph of athletics over academics.”

This was years ago – before the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill went this man’s idea one better and somehow allowed an administrator who essentially worked for the athletics department to be a professor (she didn’t teach, but Deborah Crowder acted as a professor in almost every other way), and before Youngstown State University made a tarnished football coach its president. These were positive trends from the genius’s point of view, but then Penn State came along, and a lot of people seem to have decided that a university run in significant ways by its football team was not a good idea. So that was a setback.

You see these power tensions (does athletics run the school? should it?) at a school so academically bad that there shouldn’t be any sports program there at all: Florida A&M. Yet FAMU has so powerful a sports program (and sports ethos – for decades the university looked the other way while its untouchably powerful marching band hazed members to within an inch of their lives — and then last year the university kept looking the other way while the band did succeed in actually killing a member) that the trustees are in the humiliating position of begging the president to fire an athletics director they can’t fire. The AD is brand new; the president is brand new — FAMU has had to turn over a lot of new leaves in the wake of the bad publicity its manslaughtering marching band brought. Continues to bring, as multiple manslaughter trials (one person has already been found guilty) proceed.

And now, while that beleaguered school’s trustees ought to be talking about how to teach the few students who continue to apply to FAMU, they’re spending all their time talking about the sports program. No one goes to the games; the new AD is fucking up left and right; the athletics budget is so huge it’s killing what’s left of the school… and not only that, but…

[Trustee Rufus] Montgomery also was critical of correspondence coming out of the athletics department to the trustees, saying the emails contained numerous spelling and grammar errors.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing,” Montgomery said. “Please don’t let this happen again with athletics.”

But how are you going to keep it from happening? The only solution will cost the school more money in its athletics budget. They’re going to have to hire someone to rewrite the correspondence.

FAMU is a really interesting case right now. Like a lot of universities, it has for decades acted on the belief that a big noisy sports program is the front porch of the university. What do you do when the sports program at your school turns out to be the university’s front funeral parlor?

There’s no question that a program that beats people to death puts a damper on things. Fewer students apply. Very few students go to games. You’re losing so much sports revenue that you increase tuition big time, which turns off yet more applicants.

FAMU, UD thinks, could go either way. It could go the way of the genius and athleticize the whole school. Make the new AD the provost; keep pouring money into the football program, etc. Or it could suspend all or part of its athletics program and concentrate on academics.

You and I know which one it’ll be.

Orin Starn, the sports-anthropology professor, is less sanguine. Duke, he says, has become “this place that’s sort of divided against itself. On the one hand, you have this university that wants to be this first-class liberal-arts university, with a cutting-edge university press, these great programs in literature and history and African-American studies, that’s really done some amazing things over the last twenty years, building itself from a kind of regional school mostly for the Southern élite into a really global university with first-class scholarship. But then you have another university. That’s a university of partying and getting drunk, hiring strippers, frats, big-time college athletics.

… If you were starting from scratch at Duke, no one would have imagined an athletics program where the budget is almost fifty million dollars. This huge outlay of expenses and energy and visibility of sports is just clearly out of proportion with what it should be. Yes, athletics has a place in college education, but not this sort of massive space that it’s taking.”

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

Even before the lacrosse scandal, alarms had been sounded over the coarsening of undergraduate life. Toward the end of Nan Keohane’s tenure as president, the school undertook an extensive study examining the lives of women at Duke. The project’s summation reads like a scholarly anticipation of Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” the 2004 novel (published after Wolfe’s daughter graduated from Duke) portraying college life as a soul-deadening, booze-fueled marathon of sexual predation:

Students rarely go on formal dates but instead attend parties in large groups, followed by “hook-ups”—unplanned sexual encounters typically fueled by alcohol. Men and women agreed the double standard persists: men gain status through sexual activity while women lose status. Fraternities control the mainstream social scene to such an extent that women feel like they play by the men’s rules. Social life is further complicated by a number of embedded hierarchies, from the widely understood ranking of Greek organizations to the opposite trajectories women and men take over four years, with women losing status in the campus environment while men gain status.

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

[T]he University of Virginia has allowed its top seeded men’s team to continue playing into the [lacrosse murder] post-season. … George Huguely V, the indicted midfielder from the men’s Cavalier squad, has, for nearly all intents and purposes, already admitted to the crime, and, in my mind at least, also implicated — albeit on a very different level — the culture and friends that provoked reckless excess and failed to take notice of a young man spiraling out of control.

… [T]he fact that Huguely was at times reckless and violent, particularly when drunk, and was alarmingly obsessive about Love, would have been recognized by fellow players, and perhaps coaches, too, and certainly should have been addressed. The fact that this was not his first violent interaction with Love is the strongest charge against the friends and teammates that failed to recognize the severity of the situation.

In truth, there are many places in the game’s culture where nights like the one Huguely had at Washington and Lee University in November 2008–when he was Tasered after resisting arrest and shouting slurs at a black, female officer who had found him stumbling into oncoming traffic–garner acceptance and credibility. As with other sports teams and fraternities, stories like these are traded like war stories among lacrosse players; they’re the battle ribbons of a culture that enjoys hard-drinking and recklessness. They’re a kind of proof of one’s weekend warrior bona fides.

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

Huguely’s team is … one on which eight players have been charged with alcohol-related offenses. Is anyone paying attention?… If things go terribly wrong, the culture of protection — including parents, coaches and alumni boosters — hire high-priced lawyers who manage to get records expunged and witnesses to forget what they saw.

A Penn State person shares her scandal-wisdom with UVa.

I’m fine with this except for the writer’s suggestion that coaches, of all people, are unequipped to handle criminal investigations.

If university football coaches aren’t equipped to handle criminal investigations, who is?

Doesn’t experience count for anything?

… Two universities’ football programs…

There’s Florida International University, bleeding its students dry for a team no one watches. Here’s a recent lead from a local article about the team’s last game:

A near-empty FIU Stadium for Senior Day. The Panthers sloughing about as Middle Tennessee State built a second-quarter deficit almost as large as FIU’s average points per game…

After which the reporter goes on to … describe the game. Why not. It’s what he’s paid to do.

FIU students, however, pay a fortune not to attend football games.

And then there’s the University of Wisconsin, whose students also seem a bit miffed about the football program. The editors of the UW Madison newspaper complain about a thank you to our supporters video of athletes that ran on the Adzillatron during the last game and which “left the audience with an uncomfortable and annoyed feeling.” Apparently it featured the lads larking about, while a voiceover kept repeating that the university’s facilities were “world-class.”

A simpler, “Thank you for all the support,” without explicitly mentioning more than once the world-class, bordering exorbitant facilities would not cross fans in the same fashion.

Another cause for the discomfort stems from the funding in general.

While student-athletes have access to their world-class facilities, many students would be right to ask “What about me?” Between the crumbling infrastructure of the Natatorium, the SERF and the Shell, our options pale in comparison.

… [S]tudents will be footing 57 percent of the bill for the [most recent] facilities [upgrade] while the Athletic Department will contribute 3 percent. After seeing what the athletes have and seeing videos boasting their new, nearly $125 million facilities coupled with their newly approved $133 million budget, as students, it’s difficult to accept the lack of participation by the Athletic Department.

Chancellor Rebecca Blank, in an open email to Madison students, likened the Athletic Department increasing their financial contribution to “asking the physics department to pay for improvements in chemistry, just because they both study science.”

This oversimplification does a disservice to the students. What if the physics department uses the chemistry facilities on a regular basis and does not allow chemistry students to use them at that time?

Or, what if the chemistry students bailed the physics department out of a projected $1.5 million deficit like in 1989, when the Athletic Department was under financial duress and student segregated fees covered the deficits?

Oh pish-posh. A little bitter, aren’t we? If y’all weren’t losers who can’t throw a football, you’d be singing a different tune.