[Duet, O’Bannon/Emmert.]

O’Bannon:

“Was I really happy there
With the basketball I played?
Pretending to attend UCLA.

Searching but not finding
Understanding anywhere
I’m lost in a masquerade.”

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

Emmert:

“I’m afraid to say we’re just too far away.
You don’t seem to understand the NCAA.

We tried to talk it over but my Porsche got in the way.
We’re lost inside this legal game we play.

Thoughts of losing $1.67 million
Appear each time I see your eyes.

No matter how hard I try
To understand your reasons why
You know I can’t let
You take my private jet.”

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

O’Bannon, Emmert:

Yeah, we’re lost in a masquerade…
… a masquerade… (fade out)

94% sports subsidy at a school with just about the lowest graduation rate in the country. Only in America.

And, if you can stand it, more posts on Chicago State University (scroll down).

… is a time-honored effect of big-time sports recruiting on the university level, of course… You’re after the most aggressive person you can find, and you don’t much care whether he’s aggressive off the field as well as on…

I mean, University of Oregon, naturally… And naturally an occasional victim will write to the campus newspaper…

I am angry with the culture that appears to exist in our athletic department that prioritizes winning over safety of our students. I cannot fathom how our basketball coach recruited someone who was in the middle of a suspension for another sexual assault to come to Eugene.

But this woman – who was allegedly raped by Oregon basketball players – needs to understand that the occasionally raped or killed university student is pretty much the cost of doing business if you want to win games. With time, she can perhaps be made to see that she has, in her own way, made a huge contribution to her school’s winning efforts…

But it takes a football-crazed state like Texas to bring the recruiting of perilously violent people to high school.

The Dallas Independent School District is run by people who illegally (of course – the local rags mention this part as scandalous, but really…) recruit violent people to their secondary schools… And one of these illegally recruited guys killed another illegally recruited guy.

What’s especially impressive about this story is that it took the murder of a teenager by another teenager to spark the investigation that led to the oh so shocking revelation about not just the illegal recruiting but all sorts of other violations among top ISD people.

UD would call the whole thing depraved beyond belief if it weren’t Texas, where what you call it is business as usual. If a few kids have to lay down their lives for football, big deal.

[Jonathan] Turner led the Madison Trojans to the 2013 and 2014 Class 3A state championships and was selected to the all-tournament team this year. But while his classmates were celebrating the last day of the school year on Friday, he was in the Dallas County jail, where he’s being held in lieu of $250,000 bond. He’s accused of killing [Troy] Causey during a fight over a video game.

After the killing, Causey’s mother, Tammy Simpson, said that Burley improperly recruited her son while he was at a residential facility for young offenders on an assault charge. [An IDS administrator] arranged for Causey to attend [a local school] even though he lived in Richardson ISD, she said.

The investigation found that Causey and Turner were not eligible to play for those teams, sources said.

… (its real name is Personal Wellness, but the clever students call it Hellness), is the sort of school that just… you know… does things, and chumps – i.e. students – can take it or leave it. Students will learn personal hygiene in their personal hell class whether they like it or not; and students will keep getting hit with increased athletics fees whether they vote for them or not. YOU VILL PRACTICE PERSONAL WELLNESS. YOU VILL HAVE FUN. VEE HAFF WAYS OF MAKING YOU GO TO GAMES.

If you expect anyone in a position of authority at the university to answer your calls about this, let alone talk to you, forget it.

This last year, UNI President William Ruud approved an additional $25 to the Student Services Fee for athletics without the recommendation of the Student Service Fee Committee. The student body also recommended against the additional fee, according to a survey that University Relations has not released despite multiple requests… Why did Ruud approve the $25 even though students didn’t want it?

… What is the point of having a survey and a committee if the opinions of them are not acted upon and the final decision is not explained?

YOU VILL NOW SHUT UP PLEASE.

… of a sham.

In the wake of the latest details about the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Scathing Online Schoolmarm can’t hold back her excitement. Rampant pointless pretentious bloviating – her favorite kind of writing!

The charges against [Coach Roy] Williams will be difficult to prove conclusively. Despite that, it’s now time for the NCAA to send an investigative team to UNC and find out what happened. Otherwise it’s willful ignorance, a sham of an enforcement process for a sham of a student-athlete dynamic. The entire system may be ridiculous. Some rules may be laughable. But it’s much more difficult to be dismissive or cynical about academic fraud — universities do exist to educate — and this is the sort of corruption that poisons the whole idea. If the NCAA won’t act on that, why bother acting on anything?

WAY big shocker. Maybe I’m reading this wrong. You’re telling me basketball players – not just football players – at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill took bullshit classes? I mean, football, okay. But basketball? What’s next? Badminton?

Who knows why Rashad McCants suddenly felt the need to confess. Maybe he’s spent the last nine years trying to figure out how you can make Dean’s List at Chapel Hill by not attending any classes.

But see this is the thing – in the annals of crime – this is the thing that often trips people up. If his professors had simply passed McCants through with the B grade that’s considered … plausible… for athletes taking bogus courses, all would probably have been fine. But they made a mistake. They got a little cocky. They got pleasantly shitfaced together one night – his professors, his tutors, his coaches – and began giggling about how I mean you know long as it’s all made up why don’t we make him a goddamn Dean’s List student? And ever since then it’s been rankling McCants… he feels a little put-upon… because it’s one thing to pass a guy through, and another to, uh, sport with him like that…

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

You can just hear the conversation in the president’s office this morning at UNC:

Where’s that guy who ruined Mary Willingham’s life? Get him on the phone!

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

UD thanks Ralph for sending her this article, which includes a soon-to-be-famous statement from McCants:

“I thought it was a part of the college experience, just like watching it on a movie from ‘He Got Game’ or ‘Blue Chips… [W]hen you get to college, you don’t go to class, you don’t do nothing, you just show up and play. That’s exactly how it was, you know, and I think that was the tradition of college basketball, or college, period, any sport. You’re not there to get an education, though they tell you that… You’re there to make revenue for the college. You’re there to put fans in the seats. You’re there to bring prestige to the university by winning games.”

You’re about to get a pious jock for your president. Your school is so horribly in debt that it’s laying off tons of people. Your job, as student, is to pay

$810 per student (roughly 10 percent of overall tuition), [which] goes from our tuition through the general fund to athletics.

This is from a 2012 article titled AS YSU CUTS ITS BUDGET, ATHLETICS GETS MORE.

The general fund of the university transferred nearly $8.8 million in 2012 to the athletics department, 5.5% more than in 2011, and in 2013 the general fund will transfer $9.06 million, an increase of 5.8% above 2012.

So YSU is set up nicely. A coach for a president. Students whose main function is to feed the sports program. Good set up for an athletics facility.

If on the other hand you’re talking university, nothing could be shabbier.

… A&M!

[Texas] A&M’s offseason transgressions are many. Starting senior defensive lineman Gavin Stansbury was arrested this spring on charges of assault on the Rice [University] campus. He’s fighting the charges. Two of Stansbury’s teammates, safety Howard Matthews and receiver Edward Pope, were in a vehicle with him when they were pulled over by College Station police, and Matthews and Pope each were arrested at the same time as Stansbury for prior failure to appear in court.

Receiver Ricky Seals-Jones was arrested this offseason on charges of disorderly conduct, but he’s also fighting the charges. Quarterback Kenny Hill, who’s vying for the starting job, was arrested on charges of public intoxication. Touted safety Kameron Miles was dismissed from the program in early March for what has been reported as theft.

Last year, about half of [Coach] Sumlin’s starting defense was suspended for the Aggies’ season-opening victory over Rice after various misdeeds in the previous offseason.

And hell we’re just getting started!

[Darian] Claiborne and [Isaiah] Golden [were] arrested Tuesday on three charges each of aggravated robbery stemming from a drug-related incident on May 23.

“An Investigation at the scene found that the three victims had entered into an agreement to purchase a quantity of marijuana from the suspects (identified as Claiborne and Golden),” according to a release from the police. “When the suspects arrived at the apartment to complete the transaction, one of the suspects produced a handgun, pointed it at one of the victims while the other suspect took the money that was present to purchase the marijuana.

“While this was occurring, one of the victims stood up from the couch and was struck in the face by the suspect with the handgun. The suspects then fled the area on foot and the victims notified police.”

SING IT WITH ME!

We are the Aggies – the Aggies are we
True to each other as Aggies can be
We’ve got to FIGHT boys
We’ve got to fight!
We’ve got to fight for Maroon and White!

After we’ve strapped on our bulletproof vests
We’ll strut around campus to show we’re the best!
For we are the Aggies – the Aggies are we
We’re from Texas AMC!

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

UD thanks a reader.

Does it make sense for your university to have a president who doesn’t know anything? Who thinks that academics and athletics rise together? Who’s putting your school into deeper and deeper deficit because of this belief?

Fresno State’s president keeps the athletics program in deficit and continues borrowing – taking? – at higher and higher rates from the university. Sounds like a formula for academic advancement, doesn’t it?

An entire university as a temple of unreason.

… has been a particular problem at risible University of South Florida, where anyone trying to follow the huge initial salaries, huge buyouts, and hugely expensive new hires is liable to get whiplash. Between enraged trustees yelling off with their heads when coaches don’t deliver enough wins, and shit-faced coaches piling into their black SUV’s (“Car & Driver magazine’s official vehicle for the inebriated“) and weaving all over town, USF just can’t catch a break. Don’t even mention the coach dumped immediately before the drunk driver coach – the one that sent that naughty tweet.

USF is a sandbox full of hyper boys. Strange, for a university.

Veteran University Diaries readers know about what Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls coacha inconsolata – that form of local booster journalism that involves portraying football coaches who knowingly recruit dangerous criminals to our universities as suffering saintlike beings whose only motivation in these recruitments is a deep belief in The Ultimate Goodness of Man. When the dangerous recruits start doing what dangerous recruits tend to do – break the law and put everyone in danger – the local booster press doesn’t say the obvious, which is Why do we pay the highest-paid person on campus to cynically, with arrant disregard for the safety of our community, go to a lot of trouble to bring a very dangerous man into our midst? No, no. It always goes something like this:

Coaches like to believe … that they can rescue troubled kids, even save them. It’s a noble premise.

Far from being assholes who don’t care that they are exposing young and vulnerable people to hardened criminals (not to mention admitting people unlikely to take even one course with any academic legitimacy – but that’s a trifle here), these coaches are noblemen, pure of heart, so sure of the glorious transformative power of university football that they are willing to take risks other people won’t – they are willing to say Under the rap sheet of this running back beats the heart of a true gentleman, and though it won’t be easy I’m going to dedicate myself to finding that heart. Because that’s what Oklahoma State’s football team is all about – turning young men around.

And when the entire divinely-kissed scheme fails to work out, what then?

Why, coacha inconsolata, of course. His heart is absolutely broken. He is suffering.

“I think every campus has faculty members who are cheap dates when it comes to academic matters related to athletes.”

He said it; I didn’t.

Note that the author of this piece goes from calling professors who’ll do anything for campus athletes “friendly faculty” to “cheap dates.”

UD proposes that we take the matter one step further, from the euphemistic friendly faculty to the almost-there cheap date to the fully honest sports whore. (Functional equivalent of the much better known pharma whore.)

Plenty of sports factories have a well-established corps of comfort women among their undergraduates, students whose job it is to … entertain hotly sought-after football and basketball prospects. Not only should it not be difficult for us to acknowledge that there are faculty members similarly willing to do almost anything for the team; UD thinks that schools like Auburn and Chapel Hill should sponsor self-studies (these could be carried out by sociology professors, for instance, or psychology professors) aimed at illuminating the background and character type of faculty liable to corrupt the school by the irresistible force of their attraction to athletes. Once we know more about this segment of the faculty, we can institute some reforms. Like barring them from being faculty liaisons to the sports program. And keeping an eye on that curious course (Sociology of Communications Studies of General Studies of Sports Marketing) they keep offering.

Nah! The latest arrest was only for armed robbery and attempted murder! Wait til he actually kills someone!

Oklahoma State, which so avidly recruited the running back to its freshman class, has this to say:

An OSU athletic department spokesperson said a press release concerning the arrest would be posted as a general statement but is not expecting one to be issued at this time.

A general statement regarding the arrest… Hm… We see that one of our freshmen has been arrested for attempted murder… Hm…

But not at this time! No, not yet! Let’s wait until all the facts are in. Otherwise, we’re rushing to judgment, like those guys on our recruiting staff who said Whoa, maybe not this guy… Only eighteen and look at his priors…

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

Sportsprose-wise, there’s some great shit here:

The accusations levied against Thomas are significant, and one can only assume that Oklahoma State might have second thoughts about him if he is ultimately charged.

Thomas has a ton of talent, but OSU can’t afford much bad publicity in the wake of an extensive expose released by SI.com regarding the football program last year. [Oy, don’t make me read all five parts again! Short version: OSU football stinks to high heaven.]

There is no question that Thomas deserves his day in court, however, he is faced with an uphill battle. This looks bad for him regardless, but perhaps he will be able to learn from it and become a better person moving forward.

What’s not to like in this prose, Scathing Online Schoolmarm would like to know? The last paragraph puts four cliches in two sentences and leaves us feeling warm and runny at the thought of how much OSU’s man is going to learn from having tried to murder someone.

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

Only for those who think they can handle it: UD‘s chronicle of the last few years of sports life at one of America’s largest toxic dumps, Oklahoma State University.

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“For more on your favorite athletes and their troubles with the law, visit us at thefumble.com.”

It’s how you get the job done.

“The large, well-funded universities have hired large compliance staffs who literally escort athletes to class each day to meet the increased requirements,” complains the latest president (before him there was Patricia Slade) of Texas Southern University, one of America’s most notorious dropout factories. TSU’s president fails to see why schools which happen not to be able to afford escorts should be punished by the NCAA for low grades among their athletes. This outraged columnist agrees that just because some schools can’t afford to service their athletes fully, that doesn’t make them lesser schools.