Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Wow.

… Camera!

A retired professor from way down south testifies.

… the University of Tennessee staggers piteously along like O in her tiny mules and painfully cinched waist, America’s campus epicenter of sadomasochism.

Paralyzed by debt and despair –

Tennessee’s situation makes frighteningly clear the high cost of bad coaching hires, as the athletic department owes $7 million to recently fired coach Derek Dooley and his staff on top of $11.4 million paid out in buyouts to other football, baseball and basketball coaches. Declining attendance has also taken a toll on Tennessee’s financial situation as it has proven difficult for the school to fill the stadium when losses outnumber wins. Ironically, improvements to the stadium that sits partly empty helped drive the expansion of the debt.

– UT lashes out at others and itself in a perennial bacchanalia of desperate perversion. [Trigger warning goes here.] Its students inject themselves anally with alcohol. They lie still while fellow students pour hot sauce over their penises. They’re asking for it! If you won’t pour the Tabasco on the front, they’ll inject the Zinfandel in the back. One way or another, the University of Tennessee is going to punish itself for…

For what? O’s motives are notoriously obscure… Imagine trying to understand a drunk and masochistic institution that’s fucked itself over financially forever.

Maybe one good way to think about Tennessee’s current life of the mind is to recall another literary work – Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. Imagine that, instead of the reckless racing of cars, the Australians, as they await apocalypse, decide to fuck and suck themselves to oblivion.

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A reader sends in a limerick:

Does my penis go well with Tabasco?
Does this Zinfandel into my ass go?
Front porch or back door,
What college is for
Is much more than you learn in a class, bro.

We want our rights! And we don’t care how! We want our revolution… NOW.

Income inequality hits the American university! Sports slaves at Syracuse and Boise State are moving their slow thighs, and what rough beast slouches toward Alabam’ to be born?

Why do they have the friends at the top? Why do they have the jobs at the top?

Boise State’s president rages against the NCAA big boys muscling out mid-major programs like Boise State by making it more and more expensive for schools to compete. In a spectacular instance of the pot calling the kettle black, President Bob Kustra attacks “programs that look less and less like they bear any relationship to the university’s mission and role.”

Ah, mon Kustra! Here’s your school! Here’s your school! Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! “It seems they are never satisfied with their bloated athletic budgets,” hisses Kustra, whose own budget bulges like an Idaho spud on steroids. Then he gets real high and mighty.

It is sometimes hard to believe that our finest universities and their presidents are behind this effort to fuel what the former NCAA President Myles Brand termed the “arms race” in Division 1 athletic budgets. You would think that the primacy of the academic mission and the long-held principles of amateur athletics would trump the drive toward commercialism and professionalism in the athletic department. You would think that university presidents would be up in arms at the way the NFL and the NBA use the universities’ athletic departments as training camps and minor league clubs for professional sports.

It is beyond me why university presidents are so quick to fall in line with powerful conference commissioners who seem to be calling the shots with these NCAA reforms. But I have no doubt why the power conferences are working to separate themselves from some Division 1 universities who still see the value of equity and fairness in athletic funding. Lately, those pesky mid-major programs such as Boise State and many others have showed up the big boys for what they are – wasteful models of athletic spending that cannot be justified.

Little late now to be moving them slow thighs, ain’t it, Kustra? You didn’t give a shit about evil commercialism until the big boys began making your school pay through the nose to stay in the big leagues. Now you sound like ol’ UD herself with all that excellent rhetoric about universities having something to do with academics.

Face it. You’re poor. And the poor stay poor. Accept your caste.

It’s a little late for Syracuse, too. Faculty there has finally decided to squawk about that school’s wasteful degrading ridiculous sports program. A local reporter talks to an economist who specializes in sports.

“Pay is up for coaches, pay is up for administrators,” [Andy] Schwarz said. “Athletic departments are hiring people, building new facilities. It doesn’t look like any losing business that I know of. But if you can say you’re losing money, there are a lot fewer questions. You don’t have people asking what you can do for them. The only people annoyed at you if you’re losing money is a few faculty members, and you can sort of manage that.”

At Syracuse four of the five highest-paid university employees are members of the athletic department, including athletic director Daryl Gross and women’s lacrosse coach Gary Gait. Gross, basketball coach Jim Boeheim and former football coach Doug Marrone all made at least $150,000 more in 2013 than they did in 2012, according to tax documents released by the school last week.

But the program’s losing money, see, so lay off, Little People of the Faculty.

Faculty of Syracuse University! You’re poor. And the poor stay poor. Accept your caste.

I know you don’t think so. I know you’re content to think of that state rarely … as a vague jewel set off to the left of the left coast…

But if you type Hawaii Athletics into this blog’s search engine, you’ll be shaken out of your vagueness.

Hawaii is after all a startlingly corrupt state, so you’d expect its university system to be a mess. And it is; it is a mess. But within that mess, athletics is a doubleplusgood mess. The people of Hawaii just bailed it out of its thirteen million dollar debt so as to clear the way for more astounding debt accumulation…

How do they do it? Well, no one goes to their games. So that would mean no ticket sales. And then there’s constant expensive mischief. Not just stuff that hits the national news, like the Stevie Wonder concert scam; we’re also talking NCAA rules violations and having to pay for internal investigations, etc., etc.

Hawaii’s athletic director, by the way, sure knows how to make a public statement. He “acknowledges” the latest NCAA investigation (this one’s of the basketball team) and ends this way:

Thank you for your understanding, respect and your continued support of University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Athletics. GO BOWS!

GO BOWS! We love ya guys, and this is just the time to say it! In deep shit with the NCAA again: Huzzah!

Tragedy in Texas as a brand new taxpayer funded sixty million dollar high school football stadium which “rivals college facilities in grandeur” is shut down because of structural flaws.

It’s impossible to know when the local lads will be able to concuss themselves grandeurly, since we’re talking years of complex litigation plus massive repair payments, some of which will almost certainly have to come from taxpayers.

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Not that UD is really worried about whether local taxpayers will pay millions more to fix the stadium. Of course they will. Either you’re willing to pay through the nose to watch your kid get the shit kicked out of him or you’re not. In Texas they’re willing.

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UD thanks JND.

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More in the God Hates Football thread.

… on all counts of fraud. He’s a former football coach at the University of Georgia.

… that a particular sport makes you more likely to murder? Who said football makes you likelier to murder? UD chronicles the notable violence of the game and the off-field violence of some of the players… And since her blog is about universities, she regularly registers her incredulity that many American universities all but define themselves in terms of a game that notoriously damages the brain; but she has never suggested a link between football and murder.

Why then, in the context of Aaron Hernandez (who graced the University of Florida), does the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins feel compelled to write the following:

Initially, Hernandez’s arrest provoked a number of commentators to associate his violence with NFL. But it doesn’t follow; if there was a real association between football and murder, there would be more Hernandezes. There is a huge difference between men who are talented at a violent game, and a man who is simply, viciously, senselessly violent. If Hernandez is guilty of these additional murders, all it proves is that NFL executives were as fooled as the rest of us by the blankness of his face.

I think this paragraph is worthy of a Scathing Online Schoolmarm scathe. Let’s see how Jenkins does what she does.

Initially, Hernandez’s arrest provoked a number of commentators to associate his violence with NFL. But it doesn’t follow; if there was a real association between football and murder, [Uh, hold on. Note how Jenkins subtly shifts from violence in her first sentence to murder in her second. I’m not aware of people saying football makes you a murderer. I’m aware of plenty of people pointing out the obvious, whether it’s boxing or hockey or football: Sports that put an amazing premium on brutality are likelier to attract and cultivate violent people.] there would be more Hernandezes. There is a huge difference between men who are talented at a violent game, and a man who is simply, viciously, senselessly violent. If Hernandez is guilty of these additional murders, all it proves is that NFL executives were as fooled as the rest of us by the blankness of his face. [This is a version of what SOS calls coacha inconsolata. Poor naive NFL executives! Can’t read faces! Because what you’re looking for in an NFL player is a warm vulnerable approachable sort of face.]

In a subsequent couple of paragraph, Jenkins attempts to refine her argument. Let’s scathe that one too.

Given football’s savage nature it’s tempting to draw a correlation between the NFL and violent crime. Throw in the fact that a lot of high-profile athletes have an undeniable romance with guns. Reuben Fischer Baum, a data cruncher who posts on Deadspin.com, found that NFLers are twice as likely as their male peers to be arrested on weapons charges.

But football by itself is not the culprit. In fact all of the rules of the game are oriented around preventing harm, and penalizing willful injuries. It’s a game of controlled violence, not uncontrolled. As Grossman has written, “the purpose of play is to learn not to hurt members of your society and members of your own species. In a basketball game, or a football game, when one of the players is hurt, the play stops.” A far more likely culprit is the sustained desensitization of video games and other forms of glorified media violence. Grossman argues these are “murder simulators” that actually award points for killing.

SOS loves this. Jenkins cannot avoid stating the empirical obvious truth at some point. Yeah, NFL’ers (and college football players) tend toward really incredible rates of violence. (It’s been a constant argument on this blog that the professional leagues are free to deal with the gun shit, etc., as they would like; but it’s obscene for universities to recruit it, valorize it, and expose their students to it.) But it ain’t the game! It ain’t that these players have been systematically rewarded – with incredible money and acclaim – for their bulk, their menace, their violence, as football becomes more and more violent. No. It’s… video games!

After all, football is fine; football has way non-violent rules.

This point reminds me of something Mr UD routinely does at the beginning of his Comparative Constitutional Law course. He reads to the students a truly inspiring Constitution. Beautifully written, guaranteeing all of the country’s citizens all sorts of excellent rights. Mr UD then asks his students to guess which country’s Constitution this is. They guess various advanced European democracies.

“Sorry, no. North Korea.”

Growing? As the Rugrats would put it, Nike University is all growed up. Take a look around at the place. The New York Times says that the University of Oregon’s palais des sports (whose walls do not – yet – say RAPE YOUR ENEMIES, but do say EAT YOUR ENEMIES) is “enough to make an NFL team jealous.” To me, that doesn’t sound like a growing sports culture. It sounds like an accomplished sports culture.

The University of Oregon is, in the particular case, a basketball culture which seems to be fostering a troubling rape culture. Aggression above all.

When your football team boasts Richie Incognito and… so many others…

Incognito was suspended (twice) at Nebraska, and you know it’s not easy to get suspended at Nebraska, where character-building coach Tom Osborne let a cornerback play while awaiting trial for second-degree murder. Osborne also retained a defensive lineman who was arrested eight times, convicted four times, and left the heartland accused of multiple sexual assaults, before his induction into Nebraska’s Hall of Fame in 2006. Not to mention Nebraska’s current leader of young men, Bo Pelini, who is still apologizing for an epic carpet-bombing of F-words, an attempt to say exactly what he thought of Nebraska’s fans.

… The Incognito rap sheet includes a note that his peers voted him the NFL’s second-dirtiest player. No. 1 in a Sporting News poll last year was another Nebraska worthy, Ndamukong Suh.

… it’s maybe hard to get worked up about the team currently – allegedly – harboring a linebacker who’s a very professional bicycle thief… I mean, a linebacker who’s part of a very professional bicycle theft ring, made up of himself and fellow hometown-boy-made-good (they met in high school) Lucas Keifer. Both are two of the university’s finest – Keifer is a long-distance runner. So both of these heartlanders are excellent runners… Maybe they should have fled the scene of their theft on one of the bikes – that’d be faster than running, even given their terrific running ability…

I’m not sure why the nation never focuses its attention on teams like Nebraska’s. People seem more comfortable thinking about thugs in Florida or New Jersey schools. Americans are very sentimental about the heartland. But actually Nebraska is one of the most disgusting teams out there. And that’s saying a lot.

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UD thanks Dirk.

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Here’s the local press, featuring the writing style Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls coacha inconsolata:

Here is a problem Husker football Coach Bo Pelini certainly doesn’t need or didn’t count on this off season…

Poor Bo! Poor put-upon Bo! Only months removed from the revelation of his own shitheadery/paranoia, Bo must now suffer the slings and arrows of his highly recruited bicycle thief. Dear God! What can we say at this point of this great and good man?

How about… BO‘DIED BUT UNBO‘D…

… which people will be rereading when Penn State’s latest Dear Leader, James Franklin, implodes, taking already-imploded Penn State with him.

Already trailing moronic sexism and the Vanderbilt scandal, James Franklin

feels very much like a modern football coach. He is a walking TED talk. His is the language of a pitchman rather than a professor. He readily admits to being a perfectionist, and he says things like this about coaches, according to Blue-White Illustrated’s Nate Bauer: “They’re control freaks, they’re maniacs, and I’m one of them.”

And that’s the issue: I have no idea if, given the contours of this system, it is possible to be all these things and still maintain one’s ethical framework. I have no idea if a college football coach can be both a control freak and a model citizen, and I don’t think anyone else knows, either. This is, after all, the subtext of the debate Penn State people been waging amongst themselves for the past three years: Was the Paterno mythos inherently flawed? (Hell, you might say that this is the central question inherent to the existence of college football itself.) And this is the same question that lingers now, as the James Franklin era takes hold.

Is the Kim Jong-un mythos inherently flawed? Not if you revel in total control by maniacs. Weinreb cites a recent interview with a Franklin fanatic:

A few weeks ago, Penn State played its spring football game, and Harrisburg Patriot-News columnist David Jones conducted some interviews with fans, and during one of them, he expressed to a young man his thoughts that Penn State would have been better off hiring someone else. The young man was incredulous; the young man said, Have you seen the way this guy recruits? And Jones said yes, and Jones said he worried that Franklin, for all his seeming good will, might cause Penn State trouble at some point down the line. And the response he got weighed heavily on me for days after I read it.

“Yeah, I know,” the young man said. “But I don’t care.”

Here at University Diaries, we never tire of quoting that thing beloved of university football boosters: Give the sport more money because it’s the university’s front porch.

Too true. Every outlet from the New York Times on down today features astoundingly violent (coaches and players) Rutgers University, and you obviously can’t put a price on publicity like this. It’s one thing to become a national laughingstock because of your mad sadistic basketball coach (who can forget the SNL sketch?). You’re moving to a whole other level when you recruit a quarterback who a few nights ago allegedly inflicted permanent brain damage on someone. Someone he seems to have left to die on the streets. Someone currently fighting for his life.

The quarterback, who’s from Minnesota, was named “Minnesota’s Mr Football in 2011.” Too right.

… campus in the country to start doing some marketing. If you read through these posts about Rutgers, you’ll discover that the school subsidizes its athletics program to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, so the place should be receptive to revenue-generating ideas.

Now that their quarterback-to-be has been arrested for beating a guy possibly to death (the guy is still alive, but in critical condition, having apparently been kicked twice in the head while down, etc.), Rutgers, with its notoriously violent coaches and players, would be a fool not to take advantage of the cachet its name now carries.

What UD is getting at is that the school should market a muscle car, or boxing gloves, or some sort of weapon (not a gun, because the Ruger is a gun, and that sounds too much like Rutger), and call it The Rutger. The name Rutgers is at the moment synonymous in the public mind with brutality; if Rutgers wants to make money, it’s going to have to strike while the iron is hot. There’s always another school (feast your eyes) vying for most sports-related assaults, rapes… And though Rutgers has a little breathing room here, given the sheer volume of violent incidents it has maintained over the last couple of years, you can’t let your guard down.

Get behind the wheel of a Rutger and own the road, baby.

… win-hungry pigs.”

The University of Oregon gang rape case rocks on.