… best universities.

And who knew what a kettlebell weight was?

******************

The coach in question?

[Sal] Alosi is infamous in his own right. He was a NY Jets coach who was suspended by the NFL in 2010 after tripping a Miami Dolphins player who was covering a punt.

Next stop: UCLA.

[Donald Trump] is nearly a cartoon version of what a comedian such as Stephen Colbert considers a conservative — the kind of conservative Colbert played on Comedy Central until this year.

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it hourly for two days or so.
Maybe at last, a Philip Larkin fan,
I must be satisfied with life sucks, although
Morning and night as this verse began
His other old familiars were on show:
Don’t reproduce. Money and fame are rot.
Death scares my pants off and the Lord knows what.

His masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that his life is gone
He must lie down within Westminster’s heart.
At the pantheon of the poet’s art.

Sen. Ted Cruz’s [father told a crowd]: “Did you know that the Bible tells you exactly who to vote for?”

… [One audience member said that] Sen. Cruz rose to the top of her list of 2016 GOP candidates: “I’m a real follower of Jesus, and when you have someone quoting the Bible, ‘This is what you do,’ you do it.”

UC Riverside is amazing. Its athletes do quite poorly on the Academic Progress Rate. Most of its teams lose most of the time. It’s way heavily subsidized.

89 percent of UCR’s total athletics budget is subsidized through institutional support ($8.95 million in 2013-14), student fees ($4.83 million) or other methods, according to a USA Today database. The only Division I institution in the country more heavily subsidized (90.58 percent) is the New Jersey Institute of Technology…

Plus no one goes to the games.

All three players were suspended indefinitely by [Louisiana State University football coach Les] Miles, who is no longer waiting to suspend players as much as he once did when he used that aggravating coach catchphrase – “We’re going to let the legal system play out.” Of course, Miles has had more than a dozen players arrested on various charges since 2010 alone. So he knows the drill.

Rick Perry said Friday that the massacre at a black church in Charleston was an “accident” as he accused President Barack Obama of succumbing to a “knee jerk” liberal impulse to push a gun-control agenda.

A spokesman for the Republican presidential candidate said it was clear he meant to say “incident” and simply misspoke.

… by Jon Paul Fiorentino.

[Louisiana State University] defensive lineman Trey Lealaimatafao [was] arrested on Tuesday for allegedly pushing and punching a woman in the face outside Reggie’s bar near the LSU campus … He was allegedly taking money from the pants of another person who was on the ground unconscious at the parking lot outside Reggie’s, and that man’s girlfriend began yelling at Lealaimatafao to stop.

“When she approached him, he pushed her away,” the initial Baton Rouge Police report says. “She continued to scream at him to stop, and he hit her in the face with a closed fist, causing her to fall to the ground.”

… Lealaimatafao was issued a misdemeanor summons last July for stealing a bicycle from the LSU library. He later returned the bike and told police that because the bike was not locked, he thought it was part of a ride for free program, which is available in several cities. Lealaimatafao was redshirted last season at LSU after injuring an arm when he punched through a glass in the LSU weight room.

Fucked up the weight room. Stole a bike. Punched a woman while trying to take money from an unconscious person.

It’s real hard to get released from the LSU team.

**********************

UD thanks John.

Allegations of academic fraud, natch; but also this extremely embarrassing Athletic Director at the University of Texas. This guy charges alumni twenty five dollars to step onto the football field.

“Steve Patterson appears to be taking the ‘college’ out of college athletics, and he’s doing so under the guise of supporting the Longhorns,” said Rick Cherwitz, a Texas professor in the Moody College of Communication.

Rick’s a little behind the times. Texas athletics hasn’t had ‘college’ in it since the Pánfilo de Narváez shipwreck. Why blame everything on the latest hustler running the program? True, this AD is free to be slightly more totalitarian than the last one, mainly because UT’s got a brand new, deer in the headlights president (“Fenves said he’s still got learning to do about athletics, the part of the university he is least familiar with.”)… Imagine hiring a president for the University of Texas, which is on its way to being entirely about sports, for whom sports is the part of the university he knows least about! One suspects a conspiracy was behind this, and that the AD and the coaches, who have been running the university for years in a somewhat hidden way, will now openly take it over. Faculty and staff who don’t want to live under Auburn conditions will leave. The rest will scrounge together the latest ticket prices (we’re talking thousands of dollars for most people) and grovel before The Great Leader.

…vote for him…

Ah yes my little kumquat we can dream…

[Let us create] a new minor league at the big-time institutions. These minor-league teams would retain the name of the college at the price of a subsidy to the institution. In this separated state, the free market would dictate… [C]ollegiate men’s and women’s sports would then be limited to true student-athletes, with more emphasis on admissions criteria, graduation rates, and study-friendly scheduling. College presidents would (gasp!) earn more than coaches…

… and all that perniciousness – or most of it – or hey, maybe none of it, given what’s up with professional sports… But somehow it wouldn’t rub off so badly on the university, cuz there’d be this separation, see…

Heard it all before, babe, and you gotta wonder why the idea not only hasn’t gained traction but will go nowhere forever. Let us consider the problem.

Point One: We all agree – most of us agree – most of us willing to be honest about it agree with the following:

I think that a university with a Division I sports program cannot, by definition, be considered “great.” [The writer even wonders, as his headline puts it, whether such schools can be considered “serious.”] In such a place too much time, energy, attention and resources are given to big-time entertainment that is essentially meaningless.

Meaningless? MEANingless? Are you INSANE?

Well now, calm down and think about the activity for a moment, especially in the context of a university. Does it strike you as super meaningful? Whether or not you win a game? How much and in what way you love your team?

Point Two: So there are two high-profile subcultures on many American campuses which generate insane amounts of perniciousness. Athletics is one. And the other?

Ja. Fraternities. As UD has often pointed out on this blog, there’s a beautiful synergy between the frat guys and the football guys. Together, they tend to run Div I schools, with everyone running scared of them and letting them trash everything in sight. Right? Okay, so here’s an idea: Let’s convert fraternities to farm teams. Fraternities are the minor league for the scuzzier reaches of America’s business world, just as Division I football and basketball are the minor leagues for the scuzzy professional leagues. So let’s get rid of fraternity perniciousness by working out a deal with Wall Street that we’ll house the guys while they polish their finance skills but they will be under the control of the business guys. Their universities will pay a subsidy in order to continue to be able to say that they have a fraternity system (this is very popular with applicants); the biz guys will be responsible for the lads.

Under this model, some misconduct … would persist, as would the risk of career-ending injuries for unpaid players. But these problems would continue at a lower level due to adult accountability beyond the cocoon of higher education.

The writer is talking about minor league farm teams at universities, but he could as easily be talking about outsourced frats.

Point Three: Sounds great. You get rid of a lot of campus shits while retaining the ability to say that you still have big-time sports and frats. Why won’t it fly?

Well, it’s a strange thing, but even though big-time sports and frats tend to be, from the point of view of a university, meaningless as well as pernicious (to use the words the guy I’m citing uses), people turn out to be very sentimental about their own traditions of pernicious meaninglessness. These entities are part of – no, for many people, these entities are, college. It’s like those lines from Tom Lehrer about the southland:

Be it ever so decadent
There’s no place like home.

Ah shaddap.

Trump does Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, starting at 5:18.

… I’ll grant you that... But one thing all the highest-ranked schools know is that there’s always another school nipping at your heels, challenging your predominance…

And yes, you’ll say Indiana? What?

But the place has serious fire power, and the Florida syndicate had better take notice:

Indiana University safety Antonio Allen has been suspended from the football team after his arrest Tuesday on multiple drug charges.

A Monroe County jail spokesman said Allen was charged with dealing cocaine and with dealing heroin (over 10 grams) with a firearm.

Sure, the Florida Football Syndicate will point out that the other IU football arrestees over the last few weeks were nuthin. Nuthin! DUI, battery, bupkis! Plus Indiana football doesn’t have the entire legal and legislative apparatus of the state in their pocket, the way FSU and UF do!

Oui oui! C’est entendu! All UD is saying is that Florida’s institutions of higher learning should not rest on their laurels.