There’s a beautiful honesty here. It’s not easy to write this stuff.

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The business of honoring – not a cheater, but an inept man with a vaguely reformist tendency who got taken over by the organization he was supposed to lead – is also rhetorically dicey.

UD wonders why, in this effort on behalf of Brand, his salary as head of the NCAA is not mentioned. Don’t you think a million dollar plus salary should at least be figured in a little bit in trying to explain why Brand capitulated rather rapidly to business as usual at the NCAA?

It’s like this, see.

Meaningful reform will happen in big-time college sports only when everyone involved – coaches, athletic directors, conferences, BCS, networks, advertisers (but not the athletes themselves, because they have no standing in the argument) – agree to take considerably less money than they do now.

Greed’s the big winner. It’s the Great Immovable. And now that the potential money – for coaches, schools, everybody except the players – has increased, as Art Thiel writes, “exponentially,” the cheating is rising accordingly. To police it, the NCAA would have to “increase [its] enforcement division to something on the order of the North Korean army.”

Solution? Go with the greed, baby. Live in the truth.

The likeliest solution, which is already on the drawing board in some form, is for the top 64 schools to break away from the NCAA and form their own professional association of four super-conferences, with limited connections to the universities and the old rulebook.

To take it a step beyond, the conferences should rent facilities from universities for the same amount they now provide to subsidize the non-revenue sports.

Limited connections to universities… There’s an enigmatic, pathetic psychology in a lot of people out there having to do with rooting until you’re bleeding from every pore for what you think of as your school. The people who write about big time university sports have been telling you for awhile that the players, coaches, tv execs, etc., on and around the field have little to nothing to do with your school…

But we can’t pursue that direction of thought in anything approaching a rational way, so shut up, UD… I’m just saying… Just thinking out loud here… That as long as many fans need the fantasy that they’re rooting for their school, Thiel’s purely capitalist solution – an excellent, excellent solution – will have trouble prevailing.

My blog became my voice, my outlet, my “social media” in a way I couldn’t have dreamed of. Into it I poured my regrets, desires, and memories. Some days I became possessed. The comments were a form of feedback I’d never had before, and I gained a better and deeper understanding of my readers. I made “online friends,” a concept I’d scoffed at. Most people choose to write a blog. I needed to. I didn’t intend for it to drift into autobiography, but in blogging there is a tidal drift that pushes you that way. Getting such quick feedback may be one reason; the Internet encourages first- person writing, and I’ve always written that way.

… The blog let loose the flood of memories. Told sometimes that I should write my memoirs, I failed to see how I possibly could. I had memories, I had lived a good life in an interesting time, but I was at a loss to see how I could organize the accumulation of a lifetime. It was the blog that taught me how. It pushed me into first- person confession, it insisted on the personal, it seemed to organize itself in manageable fragments. Some of these words, since rewritten and expanded, first appeared in blog forms. Most are here for the first time. They came pouring forth in a flood of relief.

From the beginning of his forthcoming memoir.

Ethan Rothstein in SB Nation has a nicely written update of the University of Texas / ESPN tv network – a network showcasing UT’s football team for fun, profit, and recruitment. Rothstein seems to think there’s something wrong with the arrangement. This “walking conflict of interest,” he writes, “marches on, trying to only grow bigger and conflict-of-interest-ier.” He worries about what will happen “if Texas has its own Nevin Shapiro hiding in the wings.”

I must say. Nevin may have to rot in jail for awhile, but his j’accuse has given him an extremely impressive cultural currency. A one-act play has already been written.

I’m just reading through this now.

Details in a few moments.

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The story hasn’t hit the English language yet, so the following quotations are my translation from various French sources. Joseph Macé-Scaron, an important member of the French literary community, recently published a novel, a satire about the world of contemporary journalism in Paris, Ticket d’entrée (Ticket). It has just received a high-profile award.

A few days ago, a woman named Evelyne Larousserie happened to read the French novel just after having read the Bryson, and the copying “immediately jumped out at me.”

The author prefers the term intertexuality. Who wouldn’t?

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An attempt at a defense.

If you listen to UM officials, the nation gloats while the U twists in the wind.

“…[I]t pains me tremendously to see such sensational stories and headlines,” former athletic director Paul Dee is quoted in the Miami Herald. “UM is getting creamed again, and everyone around the country loves it.”

But the reason UM is getting creamed again and others gloat is that its football program is in scandal again, as it has been over and over. A fine academic center has developed as its national face not medical giants or scientific powerhouses but a football bad boy on steroids.

The athletic program over the years has been sanctioned three times. That’s ample reason for bad repute…

Under Shalala’s leadership, UM is changing the face not only of American university sports. It’s also contributing to important changes in the way scientific research is conducted in the United States.

It was to Shalala’s UM that Charles Nemeroff repaired after his problems at Emory. As the Chronicle puts it:

… Thomas R. Insel, who was helping to lead the [government’s conflict of interest] review, was also helping a tainted researcher, Charles B. Nemeroff, land a new job at the University of Miami.

Dr. Nemeroff, while chairman of the psychiatry department at Emory University, was one of several high-profile doctors found to have given speeches or written articles in medical journals extolling drugs or products made by companies that had paid them money or stock benefits that they did not report to their universities. Emory agreed to make Dr. Nemeroff ineligible for NIH grant money for two years. But after moving to Miami with the assistance of Dr. Insel, the director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Nemeroff was receiving NIH money before the two-year ban expired.

Addressing the NIH’s advisory board after Dr. Insel’s assistance to Dr. Nemeroff was revealed, Dr. Collins said he would delay the process of putting the rules in place to consider additional changes. In particular, he said the rules may need to be changed to ensure that any penalties or sanctions against a researcher remain in effect if the researcher moves to another institution.

Smart move on Nemeroff’s part, by the way, to jump to the University of Miami. They’ll never give him any trouble. You can’t go any lower than UM.

Mr UD was at the computer, following developments in Libya.

UD was putting on sneakers, getting ready to take a short, post-operative stroll through her azaleas.

Suddenly their house loudly began to shake. LOUDLY. As if it were about to collapse on them.

Les UDs raced out of the house; they heard shouts up and down the street.

I checked my roof for a massive tree that might have fallen on it, but I knew I wouldn’t see that. No tree could make our house do what it just did, vibrate violently in every corner for over a minute.

Earthquake. 6.0 magnitude, epicenter Mineral Virginia.

Very scary. I’ve never been in an earthquake before.

Out on the street, on a beautiful late summer day, I stopped some kids who’d been in the park nearby.

“Yeah! Everything started to move! We saw a window in a house across the street and it was moving!”

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La Kid was alone in an elevator at the Congressional Quarterly offices in downtown Washington.

“It shook from side to side. I thought It must be broken in some way. Then I got to my floor and the door opened and the earthquake was over and I was greeted by a scene of all my co-workers freaking out totally… They evacuated the building and told us we could take the rest of the day off.”

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Photos from the DC quake.

William Black investigated the savings and loan scandals in the ‘eighties. You remember those. They cost American taxpayers around $500 billion and made the Milken brothers – responsible, according to many insider accounts, for much of the fraud – incredibly rich.

Decades later, noting UCLA law school’s recent enthusiastic acceptance of millions of dollars from Lowell Milken as long as UCLA names a school after him, Black reminds us what Bernie Madoff (benefactor and high-ranking Yeshiva University trustee) and so many other criminals and accomplices know: Prestige universities are reputation colonics. They are there to clean your tushy. They are Quackser Fortunes making their fortunes in the Quackser way.

This is why Black goes on to say

“The UCLA thing … is a great demonstration of one of my family sayings: ‘It’s impossible to compete with unintentional parody.'”

Well, at least the ads remain. Whew!

UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS VOW TO STOP
IMPROPRIETIES IN COLLEGE SPORTS

Yes my little brothers and sisters in sports, this our summer retreat has now come to an end.

All please raise your right hand and repeat after me.

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country to obey the Scout Law to help other people at all times to keep myself physically strong mentally awake and morally straight I vow if I see any improprieties and I mean any I vow to stop them pronto amen.

Nice, completely straight-faced account of the University of Northern Virginia.

The school offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees, though it’s not clear how that works since it is unaccredited…

[Just-resigned] Chancellor David V. Lee felt like there was just too much chatter about his profile on the world’s largest bondage and sado-masochism website, collarme.com.

Background here.

Gray said that either Rupp Arena or a new downtown arena had to meet the needs of UK’s basketball program.

When asked how Rupp Arena was not currently meeting the needs of the program, Barnhart said, “In today’s world, we’ve got to make sure the fan amenities are what we think our fans deserve.” Those amenities include “electronics” and updated concession stands, he said.

Well, UK. University of Kentucky. What would this blog do without the University of Kentucky. Gotta spend their money on a brand new – or overhauled – stadium… It’s those needs… meeting the needs of the program…

For amenities (needed so that UK can charge more for tickets), and for mysterious ‘electronics,’ which probably means – yes! – the biggest, baddest Adzillatron money can buy! Our fans need loud, huge advertisements exploding in their faces every moment of every game, and, dammit, we’re going to find the money for it!

There have to be enough university professors and administrators who recognize that a soiled reputation is not worth it.

… If you have any doubts about how and when the athletics department lost its way, watch ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary about Miami football, “It’s All About The U.” The backdrop is Miami’s national championship football teams of 1983, ’87, ’89 and ’91.

The show details how Miami developed a “bad boy” image through the taunting of opponents, player arrests and athletes accepting illegal benefits. The worst part is interviews with former players who come across as proud of their actions and the reputation they left at the school.

… Miami never has had a great fan base. Its average attendance for home football games the past three seasons has been 46,299, 47,551 and 51,509. That represents about 60 percent capacity of Sun Life Stadium…

[T]he athletics department likely operates at a deficit.

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Well, but as is usually the case, not a peep out of the professors. Maybe they’re the 45,000 people who come to the games.

Quelle question!

Are vous insane, Wall Street Journal? Look at my last post! T-a-a-ax Ex-emp-tion! And why tax exemption? Because athletics at U Miami are an intrinsic, inherent, ineluctable, innate, inspirational, and – fuck it – intellectual part — part and parcel! – of that institution! Students can’t think straight without a football team! Plus these grand spectacles of sportsmanship and amateurism deepen our students’ moral sense. It’s all about integrity – on the field and off.

There’s a chance that losing football could, in fact, have a positive effect the school’s academic reputation — not to mention donations to support academics. Jonathan Willner, an economics professor at Oklahoma City University, said that in recent years, athletic donations have been eating into some schools’ academic endowments: Some donors who would have given money to a university’s general fund have started giving gifts directly to athletic departments instead. So while the end of football would “certainly see gifts to athletic department drop precipitously, it could increase gifts to university’s other activities,” he said.

While [Southern Methodist University’s] football team returned to the field two years after its suspension, it hasn’t returned to its previous heights. The school has made other strides, though: it said its average SAT scores for incoming students are up compared to 10 years ago. The school said its endowment has grown to $1.07 billion, more than double the pre-penalty total.

Academic improvements help attract donations and out-of-state tuition. SMU’s recent fundraising campaign almost doubled its original goal by raising $542 million from 1997-2002, the school said, providing 80 endowments for academic programs.

Oh shut up.

Forbes:

[B]ecause of the tax-exempt designation for college athletics, nearly all of the revenue, including that generated by ticket sales, television deals, bowl games and corporate sponsorships flows tax-free.

It looks like a business. It smells like a business. But we won’t call it a business. We won’t because we’re still buying into the fiction that these programs are somehow an integral part of the academics at these schools. So we call it a charity.

… It’s a game – a game that makes a whole lot of money for a whole lot of people. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I just happen to believe it’s not a tax exempt purpose.