And, well, here goes …

Excellent writing about one of America’s most prominent university figures, the University of Kentucky’s John Calipari. A sample:

Anyone who follows college basketball sooner or later develops a kind of ethical dementia. The sport is a perfect example of a functioning underground economy. Players have skills that CBS—to name only the most prominent parasite—values at something over $1 billion a year. Because this is not Soviet Russia, players find ways to get paid for these skills under the table, largely because a preposterous rulebook (and a feast of fat things called the NCAA) works diligently to prevent anyone from getting paid over the table. Since everybody involved in the sport has known this for decades, there’s a lot of the old nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on.

… But even in this culture, which is pretty much what a dockside saloon in Singapore would be if it had shoe contracts and golf outings, John Calipari always has been notable for the baroque happenings that seem to surround his every move. Coaches who have barbered the rulebook like Edward Scissorhands look upon Calipari with a weird mixture of awe and disdain. When he was but a baby brigand in the employ of the University of Pittsburgh, Calipari’s recruiting tactics very nearly incited a general hooley at the Big East’s annual meeting.

During his brief, and clamorously unsuccessful, stint coaching the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, a job he landed because of that UMass Final Four run that doesn’t officially exist any more [it was vacated because of rule-breaking], Calipari enlivened things by calling a reporter a “Mexican idiot.” Then he moved on to Memphis, a university with a proud history of employing coaches whom you would not trust to hang up your coat.

Those southern sports factories… You can’t keep ’em down…

The Senate is not impressed with the deficits the University of Hawaii sports programs have racked up. [Resolution] SCR 38 urges the university not to raise student fees to balance that budget, noting that students already pay $50 apiece for athletics fees each semester and generally aren’t stoked enough about football to actually attend games.

Just a little nudge from hapless Hawaiian lawmakers to hopeless UH. Even though it’s just a nudge, it won’t go anywhere. No one cares.

Whether authorizing the payment of a modest stipend to student-athletes in order to ensure their continued loyalty or penalizing academically noncompliant programs to remind fans that college sports are not simply a farm for professional sports, the NCAA will do whatever it can to preserve its extremely marketable illusions. Absent organizing myths that appeal to casual fans, public interest in a spectator sport will dwindle. A purely cynical atmosphere is bad for business… Revenue-generating college sports will endure as an ungainly appendage to American universities until the precise moment when its costs outweigh its benefits. That day may come sooner rather than later. A chain of unfavorable legal decisions, culminating with a massive judgment award in one or more of the 65 concussion-related lawsuits pending against the NCAA in state and federal courts, could accomplish what a long tradition of media outrage has not been able to: the effacement of a puzzling 100-year marriage between research universities and high-end athletics. Should the plaintiffs prevail in some of these cases, payouts to injured athletes could run into the millions or perhaps even billions of dollars, rendering athletic departments insolvent and unable to continue subsidizing athletic exhibitions of any sort.

While UD agrees with Oliver Bateman that absolutely nothing will change about university revenue sports (beyond these sports plantationizing [Don’t think it’s a word? Look it up. – And I use it because Taylor Branch calls the revenue sports-mad university a plantation.] our universities yet more than they’ve already been plantationized), she disagrees about the cynicism thing. What more purely cynical atmosphere can you think of in current American culture than professional revenue sports? Professional football, professional basketball, professional baseball… I mean, baseball — are you kidding me? UD barely follows baseball, and every year it’s a race to the bottom to see which component – players, owners, agents – can out-cynical the other. Cynicism is part of the American Master of the Universe mystique (watch the game players in this film) and a national hero like Nick Saban or Bob Knight or Johnny Manziel or Cam Newton is a hero because he’s cynical, not despite the fact that he’s cynical.

(Sports like cycling are definitely bringing up the rear in the matter of sports and cynicism in America. What brought down Lance Armstrong would never bring down a baseball player. Not a really good baseball player. Eventually we’ll come to revere cyclists for their cynicism in the same way we revere other sportsmen for their cynicism.)

There’s no reason to think the illusion of student athletes is what makes university revenue sports profitable. The most profitable university programs are the most professionalized, the most nakedly cynical. These programs will fail – if they fail – due to financially crushing personal injury lawsuits.

College fans only care about the same thing professional fans care about: winning. You’ll find a few rows of drunks freezing their asses off in the stadium waving their school colors, but everyone’s laughing at them.

Even the drunks aren’t in it for whatever the old school thing means. They’re in it to get disorderly.

It’s not the sports program which is an ungainly appendage to the university, but the university which is an ungainly appendage to the sports program, and the university is ungainly because by definition it cannot be purely cynical (it’s a non-profit, and people like Charles Grassley are watching). It can be very cynical indeed, as Gordon Gee made clear when he made the mistake of going public with the absolute cynicism he brings to the concept “university president.” (‘When asked in March 2011 whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, a grinning Gee said: “No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.“‘)

Many presidents of our present-day Penn States know they owe their job to the politezza of the coach. They are very very very cynical. But unlike Gee they keep it to themselves.

Of course the American Association of University Professors draws our attention, in a just-issued report, to massive overspending on sports and underspending on academics at American universities. After all:

“This comes from the American Association of University Professors, which has a vested interest in finding that too little money is going to faculty and too much to sports and administration,” [Terry W.] Hartle said.

Let’s not be naive! Get with the program! The AAUP is part of the universities-should-educate-people cartel. Take what they say with a big grain of salt.

Get used to it. Socialism used to be the “historical inevitability.” That didn’t work out too well. Football and basketball coaches as university presidents will happen. Anyone who looks at American universities can see it coming, and you don’t need to be a fancy social theorist.

For the definitive statement of why American university professors don’t wanna know from their local Athletic-Industrial Complex, go here.

For pathetic up to the minute details of the pathology, go here.

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By the way, the Chapel Hill Show Trials (I write about them here) seem not to have gone over well.

[A group of high-profile] retired [UNC] faculty took issue with an event at last week’s Board of Trustees meeting in which several athletes talked about their studies and spoke favorably of the tutoring program that assists them.

“The recent presentation to the Trustees by several accomplished student-athletes whose work as students has not been impugned was one more embarrassing exercise in avoiding the heart of the issue,” the professors wrote.

… the University of Hawaii, which boasts one of the most expensive and most pointless of revenue sports programs (no one comes to the games) in America. Type university hawaii into my search engine for every recent act of the farce, to which we need to add, today, the crazy shit coming from the football coach at the last team practice/press conference. Things were just getting started when the coach saw a local journalist who had written something the coach didn’t like.

The coach screamed at the guy and abruptly cancelled the entire press conference.

Television reporters were interviewing quarterback Taylor Graham when Chow yelled that Reardon was not welcomed at the practice. This morning’s practice, unlike practices during the regular season, was open to the public.

Reardon said he was prepared to leave the grass practice field when Chow began yelling and then ordered a halt to the media’s interviews with players and assistant coaches.

UD loves to follow the careers of these strutting tyrants, these American university football coaches who think they own place because they do. They do own the place.

… and I am just sitting here asking myself WHY. Auburn! Football City!

The largest expense remains compensation for coaches, support staff and administrators, which reached $34.7 million in 2013. When adjusting for inflation, Auburn’s costs for athletics department employees have increased 62 percent since 2006.

Plus, like pretty much everywhere else, fewer and fewer people are coming to the games… Salaries go way up… Ticket sales go down… Quite the business model…

And there’s all those millions in severance for people who aren’t there anymore…

The spectacle has the same combination of massive denial of the obvious, forced enthusiastic comradeship, and a love of show trials where, under extremely pressurized conditions, comrades are made to affirm their love of the – as it were – party.

University revenue athletics even has a Palace of Culture, complete with a cafeteria whose wall is emblazoned with the slogan EAT YOUR ENEMIES, and whose every surface has the hammer and swooshle.

At today’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a recent show for the trustees featured revenue athletes there getting up and pledging their troth to the People’s Committee for the Real Actual and True Education of Football and Basketball Players.

But the athletes’ testimony had an effect opposite to its intent. When [one of them] feels compelled to say of himself and his teammates, “Trust me, we all can read and write,” the heart sinks.

And the discouragement deepens with the realization that UNC can’t get beyond denial. The show for the trustees – called “A Day in the Life of a Student-Athlete” – came the same week that national audiences watching shows on ESPN and HBO heard from former UNC athletes with a different message. They said that not only were they steered to no-show classes, but their entire schedules and majors were set up for them to maximize the time they could devote to sports and still stay academically eligible.

…or call it a philosophy…

As university students abandon football, coaches and presidents have at the very least a rhetorical problem. They will never of course drop football, because they can always make a profit sending their players out to play one massively losing game after another for the money. On the other hand, the fact that, for instance, at Central Michigan University, “[o]nly 102 students attended the last home game against Eastern Michigan,” does sort of need to be dealt with. The stadium’s capacity is 30,199. That was a home game.

So, you know, some new philosophy, some new rhetoric, some new position-taking is going to have to happen in response to – uh – queries about this situation. Here’s the CMU athletic director (salary: close to $300,000 a year):

“Does it matter if you have no one at your game, or 15,000, or 110,000?” Heeke asked. “Does that somehow deem [sic] that you shouldn’t play football at this school because you can’t reach 15,000? [Like a lot of schools, CMU fudges like mad to pretend to the NCAA that it meets the minimal attendance standard.] If the school makes the decision to play football, why should it matter? It’s their decision how they want to manage the game and what they think their expectation is and what makes it a viable program.”

See, to UD, this is where things start to get interesting on the American university campus. This is where there’s suddenly an intellectually generative convergence between things like philosophy and literature – as in those famous lines at the end of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” –

… the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

– and the sports program. These are difficult, paradoxical lines, easily seen, now, as expressing what you see when you look at the nothing that is Kelly/Shorts stadium.

What does it matter, asks the AD, if there is nothing?

If a quarterback falls in Kelly/Shorts, does it make any sound?

Discuss.

The University of North Carolina research paper heard ’round the world has hit England, and some BBC snob has the gall to tell us that we can’t sustain our university football model.

The notion that participants in major college sports are still “scholar-athletes” becomes more and more difficult to defend with each new revelation from schools like UNC.

Add in the mounting scientific evidence that high-contact sports like US football can cause long-term brain damage, and it seems increasingly likely that intercollegiate athletics, as it is now structured, is an unsustainable proposition.

Oh really? Really? You don’t think the United States can sustain an entire nation of universities full of absolutely bogus students and a corrupt faculty to go with them?

Just watch us.

Christine Brennan’s familiar, unconscionable bullshit about university football players getting a college education fares poorly at the hands of Joe Nocera during a radio discussion of unionization of players.

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Brennan: “The academic pursuits [of university football players] are being met in a beautiful way. … [And] union dues? Who’s paying for all this?”

Nocera:  “Hahaha.  I really respect Christine a lot, but I just disagree with almost everything she just said… When you have coaches making five million dollars a year,  it’s silly to say that there’s no money to pay players. [As for education,]  the only thing you major in is eligibility… The courses are baloney… [Many revenue athletes] absolutely positively couldn’t make it in a university setting.”

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UD thanks Dirk.

Johnny Manziel, and now his replacement at Texas A&M: Really not too bad. Not too bad at all!

To persecute [Kenny] Hill for doing something that Texas A&M students, and college students across the nation, engage in routinely is a crime in itself. If you haven’t seen the Arizona and Wisconsin University riots from this weekend, I suggest you Google them immediately.

Riots last night at the University of Arizona in Tucson were totally expected, totally prepared for. Win or lose a game, drunk students hit the bars and then hit the streets.

Scroll down for their selfies of police trying to protect property from them.

UA already has Rick Rodriguez and football players who punch women full in the face. Riots are icing on the cake for this … uh… [trails off, unable to find a word for it]…