Sometimes a little phrase, a little sentence, slips by in the media stream and makes you sort of sit up a bit…

But anyway. Quarterback, sexual battery… Assault is of course a long UF tradition. Back in ’09, UD even wrote a song about it.

Let’s jump to how much the good people of Florida will now spend to get rid of the UF football coach!

Muschamp’s salary is nearly $3 million a year, but if he is fired without cause, his contract will net him $2 million for each year afterward through the 2017 season.

Charlie Weis. The now-fired Kansas football coach didn’t do much winning on the field in Lawrence (6-22) — but has any coach ever benefited more financially from not winning?

Kansas buyout. According to published reports, Kansas will have to pay Weis $5.625 million to fulfill his contractual buyout.

Notre Dame buyout. The Fighting Irish canned Weis in 2009 after he went 35-27 in South Bend over five years. According to a USA Today report, the total price of Notre Dame’s buyout (which is ongoing) of Weis will be $19 million.

Almost $25 million. By my figures, that means Charlie Weis will make $24.625 million over the course of his life for not working/getting fired.

Scales fall from another hedgie’s eyes.

For the first time in my life, I’m having to question whether Michigan truly is different from all those other large, state universities that let their hugely profitable football programs pretty much do what they want.

David Westin, principal, Witherbee Holdings, LLC, burst with pride when his university was run by the team of corporate board slummer Mary Sue Coleman and her hugely expensive/shady businessman/ coach-crush, Rich Rodriguez. This was fine, fine, quite in keeping with the ethos of the greatest of academic institutions… Michigan under Rich – UM had to lose him as fast as they got him, what with all the bad publicity, and losing him cost them millions and millions too – was light years away from, say, Alabama and, you know, all those other sleaze schools …

But now! Westin is shocked – shocked – to find concussing going on in here.

There’s a reason UD could only find one reference on this blog to UL. It’s incapable of making its bad behavior interesting or original or even quirky.

Its corrupt engineering professor was corrupt according to every well-established rule of corruption. He brought absolutely nothing new to the table.

Likewise, one of its linebackers has just been arrested for – get this – domestic abuse battery.

And yes, in answer to your next question, a surveillance camera saw it all.

Beats the shit out of his girlfriend in front of a camera! Wow. Tell me another.

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This, however, is truly new, and UD is loving the way guys all over the place are doing it. This new confessional prose genre – Football Batters Me and Batters Me and I Still Keep Coming Back – is a brilliant thing, it’s a girl thing that boys do, it’s lighting up my life. I am so not yet tired of these essays. Bring ’em on.

Talk about going cosmic. UD, loyal readers know, uses a phrase – going cosmic – to describe the polemical move in which you escape doing anything about a given problem by moving to so vast a level of abstraction about it as to allow pointless, perpetual, dithering.

Of course, pointless perpetual dithering is the Knight Commission’s middle name (UD has attended her share of Knight Commission gatherings, featuring pep talks by such luminaries as Penn State’s Tim Curley), so you’d expect the person who runs the show to say something like University coaches make so much money at a time of dire financial problems at universities that it makes you want to… to… to pose the question Why does college athletics exist?

Meanwhile, UM’s Potemkin president – some random dude with a PhD – does nothing. He’s still trying to absorb the fact that this is the way his academic institution treats the brains of its students:

[Concussed Michigan student] Shane Morris didn’t need a hero coming to his rescue. He needed someone who cared about him as a person, cared enough to pay attention to the damage he was suffering on the field. Shane Morris needed a Michigan Man on the sideline, but all he had was Brady Hoke and the stooges on Hoke’s staff.

… at one of this country’s highest-profile universities:

…[Discontents] consider his inability to formulate coherent thoughts a sign of a lack of intelligence and competence. Interpreting [University of Michigan football coach Brady] Hoke’s intentions … circles back to a Chauncey Gardner–esque mystery that has always surrounded him. Stupidity, which used to be the main charge against Hoke, now turns out to be his best defense…

This is how you measure what big time sports has done to the American university. Once-proud University of Michigan, of all places, is ruled by an idiot.

Fewer and fewer Michigan students attend football games, and when they do, they boo their WAY expensive coach as he puts a concussed player back on the field…

Strange, the business of being a University of Michigan student. For your own good, because you’re so enthusiastic about the experience, the place hits you up for athletic fees galore and pays its coaches three million dollars a year…

Yet you are either withdrawing from the game day experience altogether, or booing the coach when you attend.

Strange.

One thing you can say for American university football. It’s giving writers an opportunity to have their Martin Luther moment and make a huge deal out of having a conscience.

For here is yet another football (well, Michigan football) boycotter, a person eager to share with us her willingness to, in good conscience, put up with scummy Rick Rodriguez as coach of the team, but not Brady Hoke… Brady Hoke who is about to cost the University of Michigan even more millions to get rid of than Rodriguez, and Rodriguez cost it oodles of millions…

Yes, it’s all been a pretty spectacle – The multimillionaire coach keeping a concussed player in the game is just the latest classy move from a school increasingly indistinguishable from Auburn. Scroll through my University of Michigan posts over the last few years (start here) if you have the stomach for it.

(Oh – and the game the latest Here I Stand fan is boycotting? It’s against Rutgers. Rutgers! Talk about a scum cosmic convergence. Rutgers.)

Yeah, shut up and watch the game, kiddies.

Big time. No question. And not just the University of Kentucky administration:

… UK’s basketball and football teams and their boosters … are rich and powerful and prone to trouble. [The programs] bring in a lot of money, and some of it goes to academics. But not nearly enough.

Sports are fun and exciting diversions. But at UK, as at many universities, athletics has become the tail that wags the dog.

[UK’s] rabid fans … think the university exists to support a sports franchise, rather than the other way around.

Basically everyone at UK is way dedicated to football (plus basketball, natch). The school’s academic ranking shows it: 112 in 2007; 129 today. Rah.

Still… with the whole nation lately beginning to absent itself from university football games, UK is no exception.

I don’t get it.

The weather forecast for tomorrow [UK vs Vanderbilt; UK won] is gorgeous; lower level tickets can be purchased for $20; and Kentucky is expected to win its first SEC game since 2011. So what’s the problem?

Last year’s average attendance in Commonwealth Stadium was 59,742, roughly 8,000 more than what we’re currently looking at for tomorrow.

This writer warns darkly of “ramifications down the road,” and we know what that is. Expect that academic ranking number to improve if UK’s not careful…

Add to this the fact that the sport itself is so spectacularly grody that it is “referred to in the news and by late-night comedians as a national shame,” as one professor notes (read this Guardian article from which the quotation is taken only if you get a kick out of witnessing car wrecks) and a university almost exclusively devoted to sport has its work cut out for it.

Sorta says all you need to know about the University of New Mexico, don’t it?

… shuts down its fraternities (relax: they’ll be back in business in no time), you know that public attention to the hazing/football nexus has grown so alarmingly that even pathetic Clemson (famous for having gamed its US News and World Report ranking by rating “all programs other than Clemson below average” on the US News survey) has had to look sharp. Its drunken carnage is definitely trending up a bit, so it’s decided to give everyone a chance to take a deep breath and think about how they can avoid killing more pledges once frat life starts up again. Very creditable of them.

The future of football will be determined not by a mass boycott or a government crackdown but by individual fans who confront the brutal realities of their favorite sport and act as their own consciences recommend.

You want to keep students far away from the capacity to have that confrontation.

Life of the mind, USA.