Yeah. Attendance at football games is tanking at almost all universities. Only FAMU suffers the additional audience-alienation effect that comes from having a marching band that collectively beats its musicians – sometimes to death. This seems to be a real fan turn-off.

But this article makes clear why within five years (UD predicts), at least ten American universities will have coaches as presidents.

Yes, yes, you’re right – as UD readers constantly point out, one day it’s the University of Georgia, another day Penn State, another day Southern Methodist, and yet another day Alabama State… So many of this country’s universities are in various high-profile aspects disgusting that no one university wears the crown for long.

But. But – If UD were asked which university, not only in its sports but in its academic component most consistently struck her as disgusting, I think she’d have to say, on balance, and on reflection, and on reading today’s story about Miami’s deeply loved and curiously successful baseball coach Lazaro Collazo (You can still find Miami heavily breathing upon its beloved here. Why take down the page? Taking down pages of disgraced UM people would threaten the sports budget.), that it’s Charles Nemeroff’s and Nevin Shapiro’s University of Miami.

“When you’re talking about PEDs in the black market, we’re talking about some clown in his basement, with a bucket and a burner, and a very dangerously limited knowledge of chemistry… And these chemicals were going in our children’s bodies.”

Yes, the University of Miami’s finest was for years allegedly peddling and administering performance enhancing drugs to the kiddies. Drugs made, as the DEA agent I just quoted notes, according to the highest standards.

See, that’s why UM gets scuzziest. It’s not just about money. It’s about hiring and sanctifying people like Collazo.

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Ugh. You want the underbelly? You really want the underbelly? Okay. You asked for it. Welcome to the University of Miami.

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Update: Ooh. They took down the page!

Tom Izzo, the $3.4 million a year Michigan State basketball coach, is hurt and angry and confused. Why don’t MSU professors work with him on his players’ academic performance?

— After being in constant contact with professors in his early years at Michigan State as an assistant, Izzo said he now can’t initiate conversations with professors about his players’ academic performance.

“If I see them on the street or at the grocery store, otherwise I’m afraid to,” Izzo said. “That sounds a little ridiculous and a little venom to it, but I’m telling you the truth. I do not like the way we’ve done it, personally.”

The reason for the separation between coaches and professors is that administrators fear coaches will apply pressure to make their players eligible. Izzo said that fear is unfounded.

“I just can’t see myself doing it, strong-arming a prof, number one, or a prof taking my strong-arm number two. I just don’t understand that,” Izzo said.

One of the reasons Izzo is confused is that there’s really no difference between him and any other MSU professor:

“I am an educator, my degree’s in education,” Izzo said. “And so that bothers me that we do not get the opportunity, because I’m a professor in my own right too, I’m a teacher in my own right too.”

Why then when an MSU professor sees Izzo does she skadizzo? Why won’t she, like the Air Force Academy professors we’ve been reading about lately, “hook up” with him?

[T]he Department of Management, which teaches management courses, would “hook-up” athletes – slang for giving athletes advantages in class.

Why won’t professors at MSU play ball?

Well, Tom, let’s consider.

I know it’s petty of her, but Professor I Don’t Brake for Izzo has trouble seeing you as another faculty member. It’s not about snobbery, Tom; it’s about the disparity between your salaries. Talk about income inequality! She can’t help wondering, while you’re bending her ear at the Kroger, why one of the teachers at her school earns fifteen trillion or so more than she does… Than anyone she knows or ever has known or ever will know does… It makes her nervous around him. He must be very important.

And that’s Point Two, Tom. To you, it’s a simple neighborly chat at the grocery; to her, it’s a command performance with the actual president of the university. The actual governor of the state! She knows your salary mops the floor with the titular president’s salary, and with the governor’s salary. She knows that’s because few people on campus – and certainly in the state – give a shit about anything but sports. It’s all there in the numbers. Why should she risk everything in talking to someone of your stature and power? She’d feel compelled to do anything you asked her with a student – pretty much anything at all – because of your state-wide, not just university-wide, influence. (Do you have the highest public salary in the state? She’s sure you’re way up there…)

Okay, and here’s another reason you’re unpopular with faculty, Tom. Every morning professors at your school get up and read about really sickening and endless and humiliating athletics scandals at Penn State and Chapel Hill and the Air Force Academy and all. It’s not so much that your faculty is immediately afraid of the same thing happening at MSU; rather there’s a basic continuous disgust that’s been generated by all of the stories. You are closely associated with the world (university and professional) generating the disgust, and I’m sorry but that makes you kind of gross to be around. It’s not your fault! UD understands. But it’s your world. UD recommends you send a scout out before you enter public spaces – someone to issue trigger warnings so that people liable to experience the disgust/evasion response can exit the area.

… would I guess be the word for what we seem to be dealing with in American culture for the last few years. As in — everybody seems to be plagiarizing to some extent… Including, it appears, Mary Willingham, the University of North Carolina tutor who blew the whistle on that school’s fake courses for athletes. Her online UNC Greensboro master’s thesis seems to include quite a number of lifted sentences…

This is too bad, since Willingham has been one of the strongest, most trustworthy voices protesting the corruption of entire academic departments by sports.

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UPDATE: The best commentary so far:

Whatever Willingham’s graduate work does to her own reputation is no doubt gratifying to UNC fans of a certain type, but the questions about Tar Heel integrity?

… [R]uining Willingham, fun though it may be, is just another side show beside the smoldering wreck of UNC athletics. It’s a small, mean victory, like cutting boots and rings off of the dead at El Alamein.

The battle has moved on. Bigger things are afoot.

Well all UD can say is that if your outfit’s always throwing around words like honor – and hey phrases like sacred honor – you deserve everything you get when you recruit shits to win football games.

UD has often said on this blog that she has no serious problem with honestly scummy schools like Clemson and Auburn which like monks who throughout their day repeat All for Jesus are forthcoming about being All For Sports. She’ll cover them on this blog because they’re good for a laugh, but she won’t give them a hard time. They’re not like Chapel Hill or Penn State. They don’t insist that they are real universities. They’re good ol’ boys. They’re trying to be bad. Their drunken tailgates are charming.

Nor do they, like the Air Force Academy – for which, in pretty much its entirety, you and I pay – natter on about their crispy ironed integrity and insist that we view their rows of bright behatted faces with unmitigated admiration. UD dislikes hypocrisy, and recent reports (UD thanks John, a reader, for alerting her to the story) confirm that the Air Force Academy has been very naughty along those lines.

Let’s start with academic honor, academic integrity, sacred academic honor and integrity, shall we?

[A]thletes cheated on tests, and in one instance, an economics professor created a special course for two basketball players – and taught it around their game and practice schedules.

Athletes cheating en masse is nothing – totally routine – but look at that thing about the special course. Julius Nyang’oro fans are going to want to keep an eye on that as details emerge. Read the article in the Gazette for damning enough details; but wait, because there will be more.

And yeah the rapes and the drugs, the whole shebang, at our most sacred honorable tax funded university…

The new superintendent “pulled coaches aside for a recent meeting and told them continued ethical lapses would send the school down the path to ‘Penn State,'” but she’s just a girl. Her All for Football jock predecessor, Mike Gould

ran the academy for three years before passing command to [Michelle] Johnson in 2013. The former academy football star required his staff to provide weekly updates on efforts to instill what he called “fanatical institutional pride” in cadets.

He ended most emails with “Go Falcons!” Johnson ends her emails with “Respectfully.”

See what I mean? Just a girl. No Falcon fanaticism at all. She needs to watch this.

Gould had everybody on campus cheering for the sports teams, including professors.

Former academy economics professor David Mullin remembered one meeting of the academic staff. “They had half the auditorium shout ‘Knowledge!'” he said. “The other half of the room shouted ‘Power!'”

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The new girl superintendent needs to watch this: POWER.

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UD figures that, professorial self-respect-wise, right behind mandated spot checks of Chapel Hill faculty to make sure they’re meeting their classes (a gift from fake-classes Nyang’oro that keeps on giving) would be academic meetings in which university-provided cheerleaders make you shout out KNOWLEDGE and POWER.

Two football players [just recruited to play for Capital University]… were taken into custody after a SWAT standoff [in Texas] Thursday night that lasted more than three hours. They’re accused of several burglaries, including stealing high-powered rifles.

Both appeared before a judge Friday morning on charges they burglarized a home in the northern part of Harris County.

… [At another home, investigators recovered] five AR-style weapons [and] a handgun…

If these two aren’t ready to join American university football culture, UD doesn’t know who is. They’ve already got it all.

As hard times hit big-time college sports, the brilliant ideas keep coming. Sell naming rights to your stadium to a for-profit prison; dismiss six football players in the space of a two days (five more dismissals may be on the way); raffle off a year’s tuition to students willing to buy season tickets.

Of these three desperation moves, only the purge of players at the University of Texas is proceeding unimpeded, though fans are beginning to grumble that the last coach didn’t mind having a flock of felons…

And you do have to wonder what happens when the new coach removes so much of the team that he doesn’t really have a … team left…

Florida Atlantic University Owls fans (and every late night comic in America) shot down the prison thing; and it turns out state gambling laws might wreak havoc with the University of Iowa’s pioneering approach to tuition payment.

Our universities (using our tax dollars) are paying coaches and ADs millions upon millions of dollars a year, so UD is sure they’ll keep coming up with winning initiatives.

No, because the poljocks telling the NCAA to ditch Penn State’s four-year sports ban and sanctions see what happened as – in their words – “a purely criminal matter.” Had nothing to do with the university itself; a bad man happens to have done his naughty deeds in an on-campus shower stall – c’est tout.

“Your organization, for the moment, is the sole arbiter of conduct in college athletics,” the congressmen wrote. “Surely there is enough to be done in reforming the NCAA’s due process standards without injecting the organization into a purely criminal matter.”

Poljocks are brilliant strategists; they know that the best way to get what you want is to insult the outfit from which you’re trying to get something. I mean, I’m sure they’re right that the NCAA will in five or so years bite the dust; I’m just not sure telling them that is the way to get to yes.

Anyway. Lemme tell you. A story like this, there’s no one to like. Poljocks vs Kiss My Porsche Emmert…

I mean, what I’m trying to say is that it’s not just that there’s no one to like. There’s no one for whom might one even feel dislike. Dislike is a mild emotion.

It was self-defense.

William Dowling, author of the wonderful Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University, has taught at Rutgers University long enough to track its fall from its glory days as one of the public ivies. In an address to the Peithessophian Society, Dowling asks whether Rutgers can save itself as a university rather than a distillery. The current campus is

swarming with party animals who actively despise anything having to do with thinking or learning, who brag about cheating on exams, who spend most of their time playing video games or getting drunk with their friends, and who … should never have been admitted to college at all.

Note the actively despise. UD has noticed this at many of our football factories: Not just polite indifference to the life of the mind, but active hatred. Think Richie Incognito, the soul of the University of Nebraska. Dowling makes the obvious point that “a life devoted to mind or spirit or intelligence [is] what college is all about.” Yet it’s equally obvious that at Rutgers, as at other schools which have always been, or have decided – like Rutgers – to become jock shops, all the money now goes to coaches.

It’s a sad and sickening degeneration. Only students can arrest it.

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UD thanks Brent for sending her the link to Dowling’s talk.

Since turnover at the top is constant, they’ve only been on the job a week or so. The massive ongoing athletic scandals they’ve inherited take up all of their time. If they do get a moment free, it’s taken up with trustees screaming at them that they want a one hundred million dollar new stadium.

Turnover at the top level of the proprietors’ coaches is equally constant. The five million dollar a year coach they hired a few months ago just beat up one of his players and then got drunk and crashed his Porsche. If they let him go, they owe him a three million dollar buyout. Even if they pay it out, he’ll sue the school for defamation or something, and that’s one more layer of litigation on top of deep hardened lava flows of sports-related litigation.

Naturally, his stadium is empty. More precisely, it’s half empty at the start of games, and then, by the second half, it’s almost entirely empty. The team actually wins a lot of its games – the proprietor is totally stumped as to why no one shows up. He’s only just begun running a failing sports factory. He doesn’t understand.

But here he is – new guy on the block – and he’s being interviewed by the local booster press. Which asks him about the empty stadium.

Here is what he says. Here is what the new president of Florida Atlantic University – the school so desperate to get naming rights to its new stadium that it signed a deal with a prison – has to say about that.

“It’s unacceptable for seats to be empty.”

Unacceptable. Do you hear? I, the latest proprietor of this desperately failing endeavor, declare here and now that empty seats are unacceptable. I will do such things,– What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be The terrors of the earth.

… would be out two games, tops.

But it’s a university, see. A university. And what does that mean? What does university mean?

It means that although – just like the NFL – a university like the University of Oklahoma specializes in admitting really wacko football players (so do plenty of other universities, like the University of Nebraska, which adored – still adores – Richie Incognito), a university differs from the NFL in…

Come to think of it, for football factories like OU, there isn’t any difference. When one of your heavily recruited wackos breaks a woman’s face, you suspend him for awhile and then …

Who knows. The freshman whose face the player apparently broke is speaking out big-time, which is a major bummer if – as per tradition – you’re trying to hush the thing up. You might – you’re a university, after all – have to drop the guy from the team.

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UD thanks JND for the link.

The university, where people aren’t supposed to be this dumb.

During the interviews, the two players “began texting each other, trying to get their stories straight,” the affidavit said.

Oh, plus they took photos of themselves doing it.

But of course the front porchers are right. This particular sexual assault is a BIG story, with the national press taking note of every single detail.

Cuz this is the University of Texas! Biggest front porch of ’em all.

There is without question an important discussion to have — an unheated discussion not made for sports radio — about why violence against women and football seem to walk arm-in-arm. We could discuss the inability for football players to compartmentalize violence, taking the hyper-aggression of their sport home with them — something that affects families in the armed forces as well. There is a discussion we need to have about its connection to traumatic brain injury, and the ways that some of the side effects according to the NFL’s own neurologists, are mood swings, fits of temper and the inability to connect emotionally with the people in their lives. There especially is a discussion we need to have about a culture of entitlement that starts in high school and runs even more profoundly in college football, where young men produce billions in revenue and are often “rewarded”, since they can’t be paid, with a warped value system that says women are there to be taken.