Ed Keller, baseball player for Oklahoma State University back in the day, chairs the board of trustees there… The Board of Trustees! Where have they been during OSU’s long years of academic fraud, pimping of coeds to football recruits, money gifts to players, etc. etc.? What is a board of trustees? What does it do?

Okay, so the best answer to those questions is (see Penn State) nothing and nothing. We know this. Does it bother Yeshiva University that a man just found guilty of massive racketeering is on its board of trustees? Does Brown give a shit that Steve Cohen is on its board of trustees?

The best answer to these questions is no and no. Au contraire, if you’re a sports slut like OSU, you positively want a board of trustees made up of mindless jocks and boosters. In order to get to Number One, your coaches are going to be breaking a lot of rules, and the last thing they need is even one trustee with a conscience.

How do you keep all the trustees in line? If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you know how the thing is done. All BOTs have one really well-connected bully (see Auburn’s Bobby Lowder) who controls everyone else on the board by withholding information, threatening to drop them from the board, whatever. This person takes advantage of the fact that for most university trustees the position is little more than something to boast about rather than a series of meetings one really means to attend, etc. Note that some universities have boards made up of thirty, forty, fifty people. You don’t have to be an expert in organizations to know that these groups are pointless, bootless, bogus.

Sports Illustrated is going after low-hanging fruit like this Okie joke first; expect more such multi-part investigations. And expect, in each case, that at some point someone’s going to say Hey doesn’t this school have a board of trustees? What does the board do?

Answers: Yes. Nothing.

…whether your favorite college football program is dirty.

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UD thanks Andrew.

But it’s here now, and it’s great. Enjoy.

Classy. The Oklahoma State University librarian who according to tons of former football players wrote all of their papers for them has counterattacked. They’re all demented, see. One too many blows to the helmet.

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OSU pushed “players into easier majors, notably sociology.”

It’ll be interesting to hear what professors in the OSU sociology department – handmaiden of the football flunkies – have to say in their defense.

… “You don’t have to do anything. If you go to class, they’ll give you a C because they care about Oklahoma State football.”

Former wide receiver Artrell Woods told the magazine he didn’t write “a single paper” while at OSU, but rather had completed work dictated to him by a tutor.

Said former defensive tackle Brad Girtman, “Are you kidding me? I didn’t go there to go to school. I went there to play football.”

One of the former players named among those who received improper academic assistance is all-Big 12 wide receiver Dez Bryant, currently with the Dallas Cowboys. Sports Illustrated quotes a former assistant coach, who said of Bryant, “He just wasn’t supposed to be there. There’s no way he could do the college work. Once he got there, he was connected with the people that would help him.”

Maybe they’ll say the same thing the librarian did. The many players making these accusations are hopelessly gaga after years of tackles.

But it would be more seemly for people at this prostituted school to be honest about it. There’s a Jacobean comedy called The Honest Whore, and it would be truly wonderful, a wonderful thing for the American university, if the current madam of OSU – the university’s president, I assume – would honestly admit that OSU has been a sports bordello. Professors and advisors there should emulate Sonia, the redeemed prostitute of Crime and Punishment, and pray for divine release.

Headline of the day, from Bloomberg.

… the nation’s number one party school last year (this year it’s number two), the school that has over the decades hired more drunks and debauchees as coaches and athletics directors than any other, the school… oh, read UD’s many posts about WVU if you have a taste for the sordid – put West Virginia University in my search engine… Anyway, it should come as no surprise that the coach at the center of the Oklahoma State allegations has moved on to… West Virginia University! Joe DeForest will be soberly scrutinized by head coach Dana Holgorsen, himself a man of unimpeachable self-control.

UD’s enjoyed, over the years, following good ol’ T. Boone’s beloved Oklahoma State University (and – if you read that last link – T. Boone is so right that it’s a changed school!), and she’s certainly settling in to enjoy Parts One through All Our Coaches Are Pimps.

Hoo-wheeeee!

Tis the song, the sigh of the weary, as Stephen Foster put it. The guy in this post’s title wants to know why he can’t just love his Vikings and not have to think about being one of millions of Minnesota taxpayers who’ve given hundreds of millions of dollars to the team’s racketeering owner, Zygi Wilf.

Zygi is one of Yeshiva University’s most honored trustees. He is part of the Yeshiva University tradition of having its trustees called “evil” by judges. First Bernard Madoff and now Zygi have inspired some of America’s finest jurists to rise to this rhetorical occasion…

(Update: Yeshiva’s main campus is named after the Wilf family. Yikes.)

But back to our headline. Like it or not, your sports news – university sports, professional sports – will always be saturated with – imbricated with (to use an English major word) – criminal news. This being the case, UD proposes that MFA programs at sports factories offer not just instruction in Minimalism, but also instruction in Criminalism, a prose style in which you entertainingly interweave afternoons at the arena with evenings in jail.

There is a good deal to study here. UD has been a student of criminalist prose for years and has accumulated a syllabus-full of methods, approaches, points of view. She’s particularly intrigued by the style she calls Coacha Inconsolata, a mournful account of the sufferings of coaches who through no fault of their own recruited drunks and flunkies to the team and of course to the school. Here’s a very recent example. The trick is to focus not on the totally foreseeable stupidity and criminality of the recruit, but rather on the shocked and hurt coach.

Here are some excerpts, with commentary from Scathing Online Schoolmarm.

U Conn [basketball] center Tyler Olander has put Kevin Ollie in a difficult position … [This is the beginning of the first sentence of the article. Start right off not with the player, but with the coach. It’s unseemly to dwell on jailed players — too many of them, doesn’t look good, challenges alumni to keep loving the team — so dwell rather on the sacrificial agonies of the coaches.] Legendary coach Jim Calhoun had already left Ollie with a underwhelming and thinning front line. Now, calling that front line “thinning” is like a bald man using the comb over. It’s approaching nonexistent. [Next move: Recall the impossibly big shoes into which the coach must step. Legendary Jim! You only have to watch this famous clip to understand how beloved, how amazing, Calhoun was… Poor Ollie! Left only with thinning hair.] Olander was UConn’s only big man left on the roster with any sort of real experience. The Huskies had already lost veteran Enosch Wolf, who had his scholarship taken away for his own legal issues… [If you’re not blubbering by this point, you’ve got a heart of stone. What is this good and great man, this Job of the jocks, supposed to do?]

Just continue like that if you want to write Coacha Inconsolata criminalism: The writer here goes on to talk about the coach’s “major headache,” the way he’s “scrambling” to do a good job, and how “This is not what he had to have in mind when he laid out his plan” for greatness. Do not touch on the question of how it is that anyone entering a major university sports coaching position lays out non-criminogenic plans for greatness. Do not ask how anyone could possibly be that stupid. Just go with the Job thing.

Not Matthew Rouch’s best week.

Between 2003 and 2008, Rutgers’ overall athletic budget increased at double the rate of the university budget. This was made possible in part by the university, which, through student fees and its general fund, heavily subsidized the athletic department, sometimes to the tune of 40 percent of its budget. Worse, some of the athletic department’s budget wasn’t even accounted for, since it was kept hidden in off-the-books spending deals and secret contracts that were discovered by the Star-Ledger in 2008.

The New York magazine article from which I’ve quoted ends with this way-ringing endorsement:

Rutgers’ [ongoing] pursuit of athletic glory won’t be any more ignominious than anyone else’s.

A commenter adds:

Omitted by the author is the exceedingly discouraging fact that Rutgers Athletics amassed a deficit of $28 million last year, the second largest deficit in all of college athletics. All at time when state support to the academic enterprises of this once highly regarded public institution have been reduced significantly.

And a major portion of the athletics budget comes from a mandatory “student activity fee” supposedly instituted to fund things like student organizations, concerts, etc. Instead most of the fee is directed towards 84 athletes, 15 highly paid coaches, and massive athletics facilities.

This once highly regarded etc. says it all.

… performs at Maryland’s
Renaissance Festival last weekend.

Her husband is behind her, waving.

Click on the image for more detail.

Many Oklahoma State University fans are shocked by allegations that OSU football players were paid, their grades were changed and that recruits received sexual favors.

According to the university, a series of articles in Sports Illustrated will allege that misconduct in the OSU football program occurred between 2001 and 2007.

OSU Vice President of Athletics Mike Holder said, ” We are shocked by the allegations raised about our football program…”

… USA!!

Yeah, passing out in piles of beer cans – that’s college students everywhere, not just at tailgates down south.

… Peter Berkowitz messes everything up by writing this:

[G]reater participation of the ultra-Orthodox in the economic life and defense of the country can contribute to the emancipation of enlightened Israelis from their reflexive contempt for a community whose passionate religious observance provides a counterweight to those dangerous tendencies — aimless drift, restless materialism, and indiscriminate leveling — to which free and democratic societies are prone.

Fraid not. Fanaticism is not a counterweight; it is a deadweight. Hatred of the state, hatred of free thought, hatred of empiricism, hatred of anyone on your neighborhood streets who doesn’t dress like a member of your sect, ridicule of the Holocaust, and of course thoroughgoing disgusting denigration of women – these are not sacred commitments saving Israel from becoming profane. They are direct threats to equality, communal life, enlightenment, tolerance and – ask the schoolgirl spat on and called a whore by a group of haredim because she wore modern orthodox dress – to simple humanity. There is nothing reflexive about contempt for people who are truly cruel, and whose commitment to the most toxic anti-democratic values is damaging Israel terribly.