Graham Spanier, Holden Thorp, Gordon Gee, Donna Shalala, David Boren – As Chief Inspiration Officers of football factories, these leaders have taken whatever dignity the office of university president once had and run all the way downfield with it.
Rick Perry’s football factory – Texas A&M – has got itself a way-depraved chancellor who’s been out there boohooing over little Johnny Manziel and his drunken greedy ways. So the boy’s a lout — so what? Physical aggression, financial self-serving, and booze up the wazoo happen to be the values we cherish at this school, and Manziel’s three for three.
August 16th, 2013 at 8:22PM
Texas schools are back in the football news, and all is right with the world!
I really hate it when pikers from West Virginia or some other piss ant state push us out of the football news.
August 16th, 2013 at 10:17PM
JND: You’re right – Texas is the big kid on the block.
August 17th, 2013 at 11:39AM
Met a young Dallas woman the other night. Right after she tried to convince me that JFK was mobbed up and his murder was all the fault of Chicago Syndicate, we got around to Texas A&M’s 1/2 billion $$$ renovation of their football stadium. Despite the fact that she was a UT Austin grad, she was proud of her Aggie brethren for designing a football field that had its yard marker grow as the grass length increased. Somehow, the fact that the numbers painted on a field were constantly in need of renovation was a major problem for Texans.
I asked her if she didn’t think that $500 million for nothing more than a football field improvement, despite the yard marker improvement, wasn’t excessive, she said, “Not for Texas!” With the number facility that only an accounting wonk could appreciate, she rattled off how much several high schools paid for their football digs, the amount of money that CFB brings to the state, the pride that Texans have that one of their teams plays in the SEC. But when it came to k-12 academic achievement, and how poorly it ranked nationally, she then told me that wasn’t the issue, that had nothing to do with college sports. Well, yes it does, because most of that 1/2 billion buildout was funded by public debt, which means that more money is going to have to come from the state budget to pay back that idiocy, and of course, tuition goes up, money for prospective college students education goes down, and some people will get rich at the expense of everyone else. What she said next was the killer, that the West Coast thinks that way, but not in TX. I left and didn’t pay for her drink….
August 19th, 2013 at 10:23PM
When I was a young lout at Rice we used to cheer at Southwest Conference football games (all of which we were losing) . . . “That’s all right / That’s OK / You’re going to work / For us some day.”
July 11th, 2015 at 8:41AM
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