This should sell a lot of tickets! Every eye in the country is on the California University of Pennsylvania football gang, which has scraped together enough members out on bond to field a game tomorrow against little Mercyhurst University, and is currently preparing by reviewing video (“Mr. DiLucente said he believes there is a video of the incident but has not seen it.”) of its most recent play.

Go and watch U Cal make them squeal! Football Strong!

This obscure institution has now scored an in-depth article in Newsweek. And all because of its football team! Sports truly is the university’s front cell.

To understand big-time university sports, you have to go beyond the headlines. UD spends a lot of time reading the local booster press at pitiably sports-obsessed places like Indiana University so that she can understand the deep structure of a significant part of this country’s grotesque (the recent failures of Penn State and the University of North Carolina to, uh, control their narratives has contributed immeasurably to our recognition of just how grotesque) university system. So take this latest piece out of Bloomington, which announces its grasp of reality in its headline. Let us see how that reality is evoked.

The background here is that everyone in Bloomington has decided to be upset because some mysterious critical mass of team criminality has flicked some switch in their collective mind. Should they fire the coach? Would that be with cause or without cause? What’s the deal with recruiting anyhow? Have we tarnished our grand reputation? Und so weiter.

Start with coacha inconsolata (background on that term here).

[The] mess in Bloomington [has occurred under Coach Tom Crean’s] watch … [He’s a] grown man unable to keep his teenage players from chasing the night — no matter how hard he tries.

This great and good man has tried and tried and tried. Let’s not talk about how the same man avidly recruited these players.

Next: Lugubrious nostalgia for The Earlier Better Coach, The True Great and Good Man. Unfortunately for this writer, that role at Indiana is played by notorious Bobby Knight, the most frighteningly demento university basketball coach ever. So let’s see how we handle that prose-wise, in our reality-based account of things.

Bob Knight may be long gone, and though he didn’t live a life of sainthood in Bloomington, he drafted … [the] “It’s Indiana” blueprint. It’s a privilege to wear the candy stripes. And with it comes responsibility, higher standards, round-the-clock commitments. It’s not easy. It’s not always fun. But it’s what’s expected.

I mean, which of us is a saint? Which of us hasn’t experienced a rage so intense we’ve thrown a chair at referees during a basketball game and then because of our general aspect of insane obscene violence been thrown out of the game? A game we’re coaching? And this is the man who drafted the blueprint that for some reason players aren’t following. What’s wrong with them? Can’t they follow an example?

Now to the defense of the players themselves.

Troy Williams and Stanford Robinson… when they weren’t failing drug tests, were putting in the work and getting better.

So it’s another mixed bag, like Bobby Knight: Putting in the work, chair-tossing, drugging… Throw it all in together and you get a storied team!

There are two final elements of all booster journalism:

1. Biblical quotations.

“He talked about how we are our brothers’ keeper.” The athletic director describes the coach’s recent pep talk.

2. Always calling the players “kids” and invoking an inspiring future with them.

The kids … will forge onward this season.

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To review: These are the basic elements of university sports booster journalism:

* Coacha inconsolata

* Players are children; the coach is their hapless adorable bumbling dad

* Great times lie ahead

* Nostalgic reminder of our grand tradition

* Biblical quotation reminds us God is on our side

* Gotta take the good with the bad, balance the failed drug tests with the work ethic

The only thing missing here is the otherwise very popular Comparative Approach. We’re pretty scummy, but Florida State is so much scummier. Scathing Online Schoolmarm recommends the writer revise and extend his remarks to include the Comparative Approach. Then he will have written a comprehensive account of Reality in Bloomington.

Uh, no. Enrollment at California University of Pennsylvania has fallen off. It’s led by a clueless interim president and seems to have no plans to find a permanent one, clueless or not. It has allowed its football coach to assemble a team one third of which is in trouble with the law.

Last week, six players ganged up on a man, beat him close to death, and shouted “Football Strong!” while doing it.

So the eyes of the world are upon Cal U of PA. Even in the context of naughty football teams all over the United States, the crowded jail cell that is Cal U football stands out.

The interim president has spent forty years at Cal U of PA. Her entire career. She’s been in various academic and administrative positions there. How can she not have noticed the rather curious recruiting philosophy on the team? The let’s-go-all-out-and-not-even-give-a-shadow-of-a-shit-about-rap-sheets recruiting philosophy? Each one of the twenty-seven current naughty players has a public record, and many of their deeds have been chronicled in the press. Cal U is only a big story now because of the lusty teamwork behind this latest assault, and because, in the wake of the assault, a local news outlet had a reporter actually sit down and do the math on Cal U’s Big Men on Campus.

UD looks forward to details on the classes these guys have been taking. She’s going to guess they’re all clustered in Criminal Justice. If she’s right, we’re in for some fun.

“When universities and school boards have to start paying out substantial settlements, the debate will change,” says Daniel Okrent, who has written histories of both baseball and Prohibition.

But no, that can’t be true. Maybe school boards. Universities all over this country are happily bankrupting themselves to offer their students a game they don’t want to see, with players toward whom they feel contempt and fear. Many universities consider multimillion dollar payouts to abusive coaches, public relations firms, lawyers, and student victims of sexual and physical assault nothing more than the price of doing business. They regularly pay huge sums to clean up epic tailgating trash on campus, and their equally regular post-student-riot costs – riots of course stretch deep into the local community – are astronomical.

Universities have worked into the football and basketball equation totally ruined academic reputations, as well as the pesky business of constantly being at the receiving end of national ridicule on late-night comedy shows. It’s nothing to them to buy up huge swathes of tickets to their own games, since students aren’t going to the games and you need to keep your tickets-bought statistics up or you’ll get in trouble with the NCAA and other groups.

Universities are places where the president makes $500,000 and the coach makes five million. Coach earns his salary by carving out scholarship admission for concussed violence-prone 300-pound steroidal applicants.

(26 CAL U FOOTBALL PLAYERS HAVE BEEN IN TROUBLE WITH THE LAW

That’s a third of the roster.

We’re only counting the last three years.

More than half of the team currently has active charges.

“Out on bail but still on the field.” Corey Ford, one of the U Cal players arrested for assault last week, has in a separate case pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. He was in Washington DC, New Year’s day, drunk and driving on the wrong side of the road. He hit a bicyclist and left him in a coma.

Oh, it was also a hit and run.

Who is the coach at Cal U? Why is this person the coach at Cal U?

Here he is, and he’s got quite the pedigree. A protege of one of the sleaziest coaches out there, the notorious Rich Rodriguez. Oh, and his academic specialty seems prophetic: master’s degree from one of America’s sleaziest football factories – West Virginia University – in — wait for it — safety management.)

Substantial settlements for brain damaged players? So what. A drop in the bucket.

And after all, what is college but a place to send your kid to get and give brain damage?

… is where we’ve gotten at a lot of our institutions of higher learning in this country, and it’s a way-strange situation.

Of course we pay much more attention to cheaters staging games in full stadiums. Everyone’s gassing on about the University of North Carolina what a shocker a fine institution bites the dust blahblah… But you could argue that it’s the critical mass of shitkickers like the University of Hawaii and Ball State, with their own scandals, their massive sports budgets, and their microscopic bleacher sections that should draw a bit of attention.

But then Ball State doesn’t even pay attention to itself. It’s in the business of hiding how much it makes students pay to subsidize the empty stadiums.

Even with income from concession sales; NCAA allocations; $1,050,000 in guarantees paid out by Army and Iowa for road football games; private gifts; paid parking; school general funds and other sources, there remains an $11.6 million budget shortfall.

Hidden fees collected from students will make up that deficit, funding 65 percent of the budget adopted this summer by the board of trustees.

UD loves the wizened philosophical approach the Ball State spokesperson takes:

“Human fascination with organized sports reaches back centuries to the days of the Coliseum and the first Olympics,” Ball State spokeswoman Joan Todd said. “It is not a situation we created…”

UD loves that – the profound informed approach, so characteristic of a university setting… It’s like… I don’t know, put pornography in that sentence and it’ll work too – Our university didn’t create the age-old human fascination with pornography, but robbing our students blind in its pursuit is an obvious academic imperative…

As always, though, you have to go to Hawaii for the shittiest shitkicking out there. Truly no one attends their games; every week brings a new coach (hell, a new university president), a new buyout, a new scandal, a bigger deficit. Why aren’t people noticing Hawaii? It’s a far ickier story than UNC, even by university athletics standards.

The late great University of North Carolina. It’s all over but the witnessing, and there’s gonna be a lot of that. Now that we know pretty much everything, it’s time for I Was There.

Hey I was in one of those classes… I did wonder why the campus big shot who taught philosophy – ethics – let everyone in the class over six feet tall skip the course except for exam day and I wondered why they all knew exactly what to write right away on the exam… What kind of ethics is that, to single out just the tall people and tell them what’s on the exam and give them As even though they don’t even attend once?

Didn’t Jan Boxill explain that to you? The end justifies the means.

Higher education news, West Virginia.

It was seven. Now it’s eight. Eight football players under arrest, and that’s just the tally for the month of October. Let’s review:

Two charged with intent to riot and a raft of other stuff.

Six charged with assault.

Most big football universities play by what UD calls the Richie Incognito Rule:

It’s always worth exposing your student body to danger if you can recruit a good player.

Florida State. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Penn State. Certain schools stand out from the crowd.

… Where’s the team when it’s Nine Ten Eleven?
How do we get on the comeback trail?
Who plays ball when they’re all in jail?

Ya gotta envy their coach, though. He’s the functional equivalent of the laptop lecturer (see post just below). Both are getting paid to work with groups that aren’t there.

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UD thanks Veblen.

… is at it again.

Must be really weird being a cheerleader there.

Keep that third one in mind: most athletic. Read this article about sororities and add to an undergraduate woman’s non-academic time commitments participation in one or more university teams. Get the picture?

These dedicated men and women worked tirelessly in the courtroom and together formed an ironclad defense that will be remembered for generations to come. Just as importantly, throughout their time here, they remained equally committed to the ideals and core values of Penn State.

Honoring Penn State’s finest.

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

UD thanks Wendy.

So here’s where the ethos of the serious university hits up against a perfectly reasonable question from a person outside the university.

The greatest damage UNC’s corruption has done is not to its students’ degrees (despite all the coverage and hoo-hah, no one cares about what happened at UNC, and they won’t look at its graduates’ degrees any differently than they did before), but to the American university as such.

Why? Go back to those empty classrooms nobody noticed. Of course many people did notice; but they were in on the game. What about everyone else?

Serious American universities, like the American economy, ultimately run on trust. They are special places in part because there isn’t anyone racing around checking to see if you’re meeting your class. The assumption at serious universities is that faculty obviously meet their classes. It is that kind of community. It is a serious place full of serious people, both students and faculty.

UNC isn’t a serious university anymore (it can become one again); at UNC, in the wake of the scandal, all professors are subject to spot checks. At UNC

administrators are making surprise inspections in class to make sure courses are actually taking place.

You’re in the army now, fella! Sheets on tight? Maybe I’ll just burst in on you some afternoon…

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That is why no one noticed the empty classrooms. No one was looking. Everyone was trusting that a tenured professor, the chair of a department, a researcher in a recognized field, would – duh! – meet his classes. Are you kidding me?

UNC has fucked it up for all of us, especially those sentenced to life at a sports factory. Because now that the lid has fallen off UNC, it’s going to fall off a lot of other schools. Don’t forget that a critical mass of these absurdity-based institutions has been growing: Exactly the same academic hoax has been reported on at Auburn, SUNY Binghamton, etc. Everyone knows that a variant of the UNC scheme operates at virtually all of the big-time sports schools, and now that we’re paying attention, we can expect dozens of other unshocking revelations from other campuses.

The UNC thing goes straight to the heart of what distinguishes universities from all other institutions, all other workplaces. The university is an odd creature, a rare thing. Bartlett Giamatti called it “a free and ordered space.” Get it? Free and ordered?

It’s also a delicate thing. Our friends from the southland have really done a number on it.