The world of professionalized university sports is super-seamy. It’s like a Fellini film with the surreality edited out and the depravity left in.

As UD often notes on this blog, none of us minds the even greater depravity of truly professional sports, where bloodshed doping and cheating are part of the spectacle. In the professional game, these are perennial, structural, cultural elements, like soccer riots in Brazil.

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But a lot of people retain a misty flimsy sense that a university… as opposed to a thirteen billion dollar professional league… that a university president… as opposed to an NFL commissioner…

So you get this… discomfort, when people are again and again made to realize that the NCAA is the NFL with less revenue (one billion v thirteen), and that major university athletic programs are … well, remove the word university.

Since everyone knows what a joke any academic component of most big-time university sports programs is likely to be, all it takes is for the tiniest shoe to drop for a ton of shit to hit the fan.

Take what’s been going on for a year now at the University of Missouri, where one – count ’em! one! – measly athletic academic tutor suddenly alleged that the whole tutoring of athletes thing was, you know …

Now Ms Kumar, like many of the people willing to profit off of the dungheap that is major university athletics, is not, on careful consideration, as pure as the driven snow. Her rap sheet’s up there in my headline. Yet her little peep about the program has a vast expensive arsenal of UM attorneys, investigators, and all the rest training its guns over the program with as much dispatch and authority as the Chapel Hill arsenal.

Yet while that fighting force roots out corruption, there’s still Ms Kumar, waiting with waning patience on the sidelines for her reward. One way or another she intends to make a lot of money – maybe a whistleblower settlement, maybe an exclusive magazine interview, whatever, but the point here is to pay off her debts.

Yolanda Kumar, the tutor at the epicenter of the Missouri athletic department’s joint investigation with the NCAA into alleged academic fraud, touched off a social-media firestorm Friday afternoon by offering to sell [names of campus wrongdoers] in exchange for about $3,000.

So add blackmail to the sordid landscape of higher education in the American heartland.

But this is nothing new for the University of Missouri.