They’re bringing Adzillatrons to high school football, not just college. A few stragglers haven’t yet gotten with the program.

[H]ere’s what high school football is not:

A $200,000 Jumbotron scoreboard, one with booming sound and full of advertisements, like the one they are proposing for Manatee High this season.

… [M]aybe people don’t want to be screamed at all the time. Maybe people don’t want to be sold something everywhere they go.

A teeny $200,000 Adzillatron! That’s mere practice for the $13 million Adzillatron you’ll get in college. You think a $200,000 screen is screaming at you? Hahahahaha.

… you can’t be bothered to make any public statements about a very high-ranking faculty member who’s also – according to a number of reports – an outrageous plagiarist.

I mean, it’s a matter of priorities. Do you wanna look at this? Or do you wanna look at some pointless little English professor getting punished for plagiarizing “from at least 160 works over the course of his career”?

Yes, we pay this guy close to $150,000 a year and give him a fancy title AND he has the distinction of having plagiarized an entire article by UD‘s very own dissertation advisor, WJT Mitchell! But hey. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Background here.

They will lose this round. UK’s destiny is way Adzillatron. But the faculty is fighting. If they’re in it for the long haul, they will eventually win.

Who knew they didn’t already have one? Kentucky is one of our nation’s sleaziest sports factories, and UD‘s been assuming it comes equipped with everything sleazy, including the vast non-stop advertising machine that is the Adzillatron.

But no.

The existing video boards, which were installed in July 1999, use Cathode Ray Tube technology which proves difficult to maintain, according to a project summary on the council’s April 28 agenda. The boards “don’t provide the kind of sophisticated viewing experience that fans have come to expect across the country,” Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart said in a written statement.

The two new boards would use Light-Emitting Diode technology, along with “ribbon boards” — aimed at increasing ad revenue — on the upper deck sidelines and suite corners. Barnhart said that the new boards will offer fans more access to statistics, scoring updates from games, video replays and closed captioning.

“As importantly, the boards will generate increased revenue through the sales and marketing of video advertising,” he said.

The factory will spend millions and millions of dollars on fan ad-bombardment and, you know, the UK faculty is upset. No raises for years, what’s left of the educational side of things looking like a 1999 Cathode Ray Tube… Sad.

So now with all this talk of vanishingly few people going to football games (we’ve been talking about it on this blog for a long time), UD is here to tell you the truth about why it’s happening.

Recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dictum – Existence precedes essence. With football, it’s equally existential, though with a twist.

Existence precedes putrescence.

Did you know NASCAR attendance/viewership is also tanking, at an even faster rate than university football? NFL attendance/viewership is down too.

The core problem is one of – incremental, to be sure, but real enough – civilizational progress. We are failing to replicate yahoos.

With each passing year, our young men look at stands rich with drunks either screaming at fields rich with assholes, or enduring fifteen minutes of ads screamed at them from stadiums rich with Adzillatrons, and they ask themselves: Is it just me, or is this disgusting? Am I alone in feeling kind of dirtied up by what I’m being put through here? By the sort of people I’m supposed to be cheering for? By the whole cheesy exploitative atmosphere? Does anyone else notice the hypocrisy of all this clean-cut Americanism as the world’s thinnest overlay for greedy coaches, concussed players, and the total domination of tv revenue?

In short:

I have a life (that’s the “existence” part) and I don’t have to spend one moment of it with this rottenness (putrescence).

The problem is particularly acute on college campuses, where a real-time war is being waged between the pressure from the institution to civilize, and the pressure from the game to barbarize. At least NASCAR isn’t being staged on the fields of Harvard! The great disadvantage under which college football labors is its proximity to sources of human development.

As universities respond by retrofitting stadiums with less and less seating, it’s going to occur to them that things like football and NASCAR are assuming the subcultural status of professional wrestling and motorcycle gangs. Schools will begin the titanic task of dismantling the vast smoky hollow that was their football stadium.

Watch the demolition, and you will be reminded of people all over Europe pulling down statues of Lenin.

… let’s consider a comment from an Arizona State University observer. Why is its stadium empty?

I grew up an ASU fan and will always be, but what has happened is sickening. $305 million dollar upgrade to a tax-funded stadium that has at best 9 games per year, partially empty, ludicrous. I wish we could go back to educating rather than allowing our teachers [to] try to become businessmen. There is a reason they teach and are not in private business. No private business would spend $300 million to upgrade a venue with only 9 games possible a year even if sold out. Bring back sanity!

So the insanity has made him too sick to attend games.

Other perennial excuses include high ticket prices, a losing record, and, well, it’s so much more pleasant to watch in your quiet home, with its absence of threatening drunks and ear-splitting non-stop ads from the Adzillatron.

Plus lately there’s something kinda… squirmy… about watching college football. “The reality,” notes Bob Costas, “is that this game destroys people’s brains.” Now maybe it doesn’t bother you to watch college students get their brains bashed in. I mean, yeah, probably it doesn’t. But Costas says that in a few years, as more posthumous CTE scans come in, even you might start feeling a little uncomfortable shrieking with glee when an opposing player is stretchered off the field, his hands shaking ever so strangely.

They are a special elite among American universities – schools so indifferent to education and so sports-obsessed and so lame that the only news we hear out of them is big talk about – or investigative reports about – their stupid and/or corrupt athletic programs. The University of Louisville is the trend-setter here, but consider that perennial UD favorite, the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Although sports at UNLV is hemorrhaging money (Scold, scold, scold, say the regents, except they’re the group that cheered the school on and made it possible for it to lose all that money), its loser coach is peeing his pants over the prospect of a new immense $1.9 billion football stadium to accommodate all the people who don’t go to his team’s games.

UNLV would share the stadium with the soon-to-be-relocated Oakland Raiders, see, and excellent local characters like Sheldon Adelson will put up most of the money, see?… Are you getting as excited as I am? This vast structure will have the world’s largest Adzillatron spanning its entire length, so none of the twelve thousand people in attendance (and what amazing optics those numbers in that huge space will be for UNLV) will miss one millisecond of constant shrieking gargantuan commercials. The markings on the field will of course say RAIDERS rather than Rebels, and in general UNLV’s status in all of this will be that of a poor overlooked orphan cousin but it will have to put up I dunno around $200 million. BUT what’s $200 million when you already have a five million dollar budget deficit? Just add it to the fucking deficit! Big deal!

Oooh, but speaking of deal – Sheldon’s feelings got hurt in some way and he has pulled all of his money out. BUT Goldman Sachs will pick up the slack!

BUT Goldman Sachs has pulled out of the deal too!

I mean, it looks as though sharing a hot sweaty bed with casino gambling was too much even for the obscene NFL… But poor UNLV! It has no problem with the lower depths, but it might lose that big new stadium anyway…

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Yeah and now that the deal’s falling through you got all these local naysayers…

It is high time lawmakers, now meeting in regular session, reconsider the state’s commitment of room tax money to this harebrained, half-baked scheme to enrich billionaires.

Instead of sticking tourists with a 0.88 percent hike in the room tax, lawmakers should let them keep that money to spend on food, drink and gambling, which net nearly 10 times as much in tax revenue.

… Lawmakers should note that there is no stadium price tag in the bill they passed, and the stadium backers flatly refused to consider capping public funding at 39 percent of the cost of construction. It was $750 million or no deal. The cost of the stadium when first proposed was a mere $1 billion. It ratcheted up from there. What is to stop the Raiders from building a $1 billion stadium, tapping the taxpayers for three-quarters of the tab and getting the state to make the estimated $900 million in road improvements needed to access the stadium?

Besides, does UNLV really need a new football stadium, when it can’t fill the one it has? One that has adequate traffic access off a major freeway and abundant parking. Why is there a need for a stadium on or near the campus, when 93 percent of students live off campus?

Oh shaddap.

I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me, as Lady Bracknell says… Is attendance at games, as this University of Virginia student editorialist argues, really a reflection of any kind, poor or rich, on a university? You could argue that the school in question here, UVa, should be proud of its low football turn-out, suggestive as it is of things like independent mindedness and studiousness. Perhaps some UVa students don’t like thinking of themselves as subjects in a long-running experiment on how to stimulate your rats into finding boring bone-crushing sports events interesting.

[UVa needs to be] building new stadium video boards … enhancing sound systems….

Buy a state of the art Adzillatron to shriek car dealership ads at them! Trap them in a stadium for hours, unable to turn off, or even turn down, incessant messages!

But UD says: Nothing will work without liquor. Only schools willing to soak students in booze are going to get anywhere with the national nightmare of tanking game attendance. Once your students are really shitfaced, they’ll do anything.

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Now with university players, it’s different. If you want to motivate them, try Coach Kermit Blount’s approach: starvation.

How to approach the delicate topic of football culture and the gifts it has given the American university? It’s not merely the obvious stuff – the pointless stupid scary violence that scads of sports heroes like Richie Incognito bring to campus (idle Google Newsing turns up the latest helmet-bashing-in-the-campus-locker-room, this one at the University of Delaware, where last February another player “was charged with assaulting three other students at a party.”).

This violence has turned professors into police:

Days after the incident, [an Oregon State student who got beaten by team members] said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

The violence is hard-wired, of course, into the coaching of both university football and basketball, so that on a routine basis latter-day Bobby Knights are filmed and parodied (start at 1:15). The coaches are quickly replaced, sometimes by women, who are symbolically part of the clean-up routine cuz you know women just want to mother the team and would never be violent…

In fact, let’s pause there and think about the incredibly important role of women in big-time university sports. I don’t mean merely as tools of recruitment (several schools attract players via, er, dates with carefully selected female students), and objects of rape, assault, and harassment (see, most recently, the Norwood Teague unpleasantness at the University of Minnesota). And I don’t mean merely the importance of trotting out mom, post-assault, on Good Morning America. (Or, as Matt Hayes puts it, “GMA’s utterly repulsive decision to allow De’Andre Johnson on television to apologize for punching a woman in the face.”)

I mean, think about Donna Shalala’s tenure as president of Miami University. Her main role was as cover for a team that got in big on-field brawls and whose best buddy was Nevin Shapiro. She was like the Good Morning America mom times a hundred. They kept wheeling Shalala out to apply the back of her hand to her naughty charges, and this routine actually worked for a while.

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A local commentator asks incredulously where the University of Minnesota found the likes of Teague (the answer is that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a search firm). “Were the other finalists Bill Cosby and Donald Sterling?”

Donald Sterling, Zygi (“bad faith and evil motive”) Wilf, these are the guys who give professional basketball and football such a great name… And, as the commentator suggests, there’s not a lot of discernible difference between professional and big-time university football. Even in the matter of violence, there’s the NFL…

In the N.F.L., … fits of violence hardly blacklist players chasing roster spots. The day after punching [Geno] Smith, [Ikemefuna] Enemkpali latched on with the Buffalo Bills, whose new coach, Rex Ryan, has created a haven for wayward players…

(What a sweet, Victorian, girly way of putting it! A haven for wayward players! Like Ikemefuna’s teammate, the aforementioned Richie Incognito! The way Jane Addams created a haven for wayward girls! SWEET.)

… and there’s college ball, where getting kicked out for violence means the same thing it meant for Ikemefuna – you just find another team.

All of which is why, as UD has often recommended, universities with big-time football need football coaches, not academics, as presidents. (See Jim Tressel.) In a pinch, a politician will do. You could also go with a figurehead, a Queen Elizabeth to Nick Saban’s prime minister. But you’ll keep getting stories like the one coming out of the University of Minnesota as long as you take some guy – some random polite reflective well-meaning university denizen – and hand him the management of what is essentially a professional football team.

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The petri dish for university football culture is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their new field design is all about Vegas. A sample headline:

UNLV REBELS WILL BE PLAYING FOOTBALL ON ONE BIG CRAPS TABLE IN 2015

“The team’s field and uniforms now reek of the Strip — it’s glitz, gold, gambling and most importantly, its promise of future fortunes.”

This is a team with one of the worst records in university football. An appalling record. Very few people show up to their games. Season tickets sold last year: 3,890. In response, the university decided to build a $900 million, 55,000 seat stadium with an Adzillatron spanning the length of the field. Although they’ve cut back on that original plan, they’ll surely come up with something like it. And they’ve got yet another miracle coach who’s going to shock everybody with the greatest comeback story this side of Elvis.

UD loves to chronicle the intellectual life of her beloved country, as it plays out in our universities.

U President Vows to Push for Stadium Liquor Sales, for instance, is a headline that says so much about the preoccupations of our highest-ranked academic officers; and then there’s the University of Houston’s leader – Coach Herman – whose threatening language to UH students about their unwillingness to attend football games makes us all wonder what he plans to do if they continue to act like students rather than fans.

UD totally understands the coach’s desperate rhetoric: UH just spent $128 million on a new 40,000-seat stadium, and at best it’s half-filled on game day. Of that half, I’m figuring not many are students, and, well, the conceit here is that university football has something to do with university students. Like, the university is giving students this incredible experience – Adzillatrons shrieking ads at them, drunks with guns, I dunno, but IT’S TEXAS for god’s sake where up north a tad from Houston they spent sixty mill on a high school football stadium that has never been used because of structural flaws and no one seems to mind about that! Build another one!

So what’ll coach do? Bring in the Attorney General! But no – the AG’s a Baylor man, and anyways he’s gonna be (cough) a little too busy to deliver a spanking to the many thousands of Oppositional Defiant Disorder sufferers on the UH campus…

UD thinks the best idea is to perform pre-frontal lobotomies on the noncompliant students. Of course they would have to be sedated first because no one is going to want one. They’ve all read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the lobes are coach’s main enemy here, and the medical school is just sitting there.

UD proposes this tag: A half-empty stadium: Unacceptable. A half-empty brain: Acceptable.

The reality is that UH would only have to perform one, maybe two, for students to get the message.

This is a question worth pondering. When not only Florida State, but several other university and of course professional football teams generate so much abuse of women, it’s worth asking whether they are in fact in some sense requiring it.

Of course the question as posed is meant to be amusing, provocative, whatever. But let’s take it seriously for a moment.

The article from which I got the question is titled

What is the Deal With FSU and Their Recruitment of Psycho Quarterbacks?

with the plural meant to refer to FSU’s Jameis Winston… So there’s this “psycho” theme (think also, for instance, of Nebraska’s big hero, Richie Incognito) and this abuse of women theme, that runs through the sport, sometimes with video accompaniment, sometimes not.

UD suggests that the arms race in professional university sports (as UD calls it) involves a dramatic escalation not only of coaching salaries and Adzillatrons, but increasing pressure to locate bigger, scarier, and more volatile players.

The appeal of massive crazy easily set-off dudes on the field is obvious – they intimidate opponents, excite fans, etc., etc. But as Incognito’s sad college career attests, it’s increasingly dangerous to put hopped-up essentially professional football player-sized students on a campus with plain old students. This kind of classroom incident will, I think, become more common:

Around midnight on April 12, 2014, Oregon State student Michael Davis said he and a friend had been arguing with some football players about cutting in line at a bar and he had fallen to the ground with one of them while fending off a punch. As Davis stood up, tight end Tyler Perry ran up and punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground, the police report states.

According to the report, Davis said a friend who played football told him that he “shouldn’t call the cops. We won’t have a starting lineup next year.” Another person involved in the incident said he “knew the males to be OSU football players so did not really want them in any trouble.”

Days after the incident, Davis said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

Yes. Professors protecting students from the team.

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Writing about professional football, one observer notes:

We idolize players of a game that champions aggression and violence. Their lifestyles of opulence and celebrity are dependent on their ability to run fast, throw far and hit very hard. They are so dependent on this lifestyle that they no longer have the ability to control the aggression for which they are revered.

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To make the university situation even more perilous, football players tend, as at Oregon State, to move in packs (the police in Florida are currently interviewing five or six players who entered the bar with De’Andre Johnson). Like the bikers at Twin Peaks, they’re a band of brothers, and they’ll all beat you up.

Keep in mind, finally, that the trend in America is not only toward guns on campus, but, in some places, open carry.

Talk about an arms race on campus.

Feast your mind on the academic future.

Now that the entirely random (all are called to cheat; few are chosen) Adzillatron of Fortune has swiveled its gigantic screen in the direction of Syracuse University, and now that the nation’s media is riveted to that school (you can’t buy this kind of publicity), it’s time for UD not only to remind you of her way-beyond-legendary column on the subject of professors and big-time sports; it’s also time to put in a word for the ladies.

The guys?  Sure, sure, the guys.  King Coach, the Coach God, with his massive salary and pep talks about character;  the “Vice Chancellor and Athletics Director” (think I’m kidding?  when you’re the absolute bottom of the barrel, you better believe you make your AD a chancellor);  the president of the university, docile, kittenish BFF of his coachly master… We’ve seen this adorable bumbling crowd so many times…

But without the receptionist in the background of all this high-profile bonding, athletes would never be able to stay eligible.  People forget that at schools like Chapel Hill and Syracuse, the entire elaborate system gets sacked and broken like Joe Theismann without those sweethearts over in the corner stamping AAAAAAA all day.

Auburn University. As always, the standard-bearer.

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Ranked Best University for Adzillatrons.

A local letter writer in Fort Collins Colorado rails against Colorado State University’s decision to build a new football stadium. Yet UD wonders whether moral revulsion will really be what brings the college game down.

People seem to like watching hulks hurt each other. The younger the better.

I think it’s more likely that a simple, irreversible shift in techno-preferences will do the trick. The whole “being there” thing just isn’t working for people anymore. Showing up isn’t in the cards; watching at home while fiddling with social media is the new deal. With social media you create your own big viewing party, down your own liquor, avoid driving in heavy traffic and negotiating foul drunks and sitting on hard bleachers (while gazing up at the assholes in the luxury boxes) and enduring long vast shrieking ads on Adzillatrons, etc., etc. Nothing can compete with the capacity to control your own environment.

… Two universities’ football programs…

There’s Florida International University, bleeding its students dry for a team no one watches. Here’s a recent lead from a local article about the team’s last game:

A near-empty FIU Stadium for Senior Day. The Panthers sloughing about as Middle Tennessee State built a second-quarter deficit almost as large as FIU’s average points per game…

After which the reporter goes on to … describe the game. Why not. It’s what he’s paid to do.

FIU students, however, pay a fortune not to attend football games.

And then there’s the University of Wisconsin, whose students also seem a bit miffed about the football program. The editors of the UW Madison newspaper complain about a thank you to our supporters video of athletes that ran on the Adzillatron during the last game and which “left the audience with an uncomfortable and annoyed feeling.” Apparently it featured the lads larking about, while a voiceover kept repeating that the university’s facilities were “world-class.”

A simpler, “Thank you for all the support,” without explicitly mentioning more than once the world-class, bordering exorbitant facilities would not cross fans in the same fashion.

Another cause for the discomfort stems from the funding in general.

While student-athletes have access to their world-class facilities, many students would be right to ask “What about me?” Between the crumbling infrastructure of the Natatorium, the SERF and the Shell, our options pale in comparison.

… [S]tudents will be footing 57 percent of the bill for the [most recent] facilities [upgrade] while the Athletic Department will contribute 3 percent. After seeing what the athletes have and seeing videos boasting their new, nearly $125 million facilities coupled with their newly approved $133 million budget, as students, it’s difficult to accept the lack of participation by the Athletic Department.

Chancellor Rebecca Blank, in an open email to Madison students, likened the Athletic Department increasing their financial contribution to “asking the physics department to pay for improvements in chemistry, just because they both study science.”

This oversimplification does a disservice to the students. What if the physics department uses the chemistry facilities on a regular basis and does not allow chemistry students to use them at that time?

Or, what if the chemistry students bailed the physics department out of a projected $1.5 million deficit like in 1989, when the Athletic Department was under financial duress and student segregated fees covered the deficits?

Oh pish-posh. A little bitter, aren’t we? If y’all weren’t losers who can’t throw a football, you’d be singing a different tune.