Mike Bianchi, Orlando Sentinel.

[University of Central Florida] basketball coach Donnie Jones is being accused of using a convicted felon with ties to a sports agent as a conduit to funnel big-name recruits into his program.

Sadly, my first response when I read this story in The New York Times Saturday was this: Doesn’t everybody?

… At this point, it’s impossible to know if Jones is breaking the rules or simply pushing the envelope. And, frankly, when you look at the sad state of the NCAA, does it really matter?

Auburn, the national football champion, had a star player who somehow kept his eligibility and won the Heisman Trophy despite the fact that his father tried to sell his services for $180,000.

UConn, the national basketball champion, has a coach in Jim Calhoun who will be suspended for a grand total of three games next year despite the fact that the NCAA says he runs a cheating program that “fails to promote an atmosphere of compliance.”

John Calipari has been in charge of two different programs that had to vacate their Final Four appearances because of NCAA violations. He now holds the premier job in college basketball at Kentucky…

A local paper reviews the accomplishments of the departing president of the University of Kentucky.

UD comments in parenthesis.

Take Todd. Since his hiring, UK has had one of its longest stretches without an NCAA investigation. [What an achievement! What’s it been – more than a year?] But with UK sports, calm is a relative term. In just the past four years, Todd has had to manage uproars over basketball coach Tubby Smith’s departure, the hiring, firing and $3 million settlement for the next basketball coach, Billy Gillispie, and the hiring of John Calipari, which was shortly followed by news that his most recent Final Four appearance had to be vacated. Calipari was not sanctioned in the Memphis matter. [So we’re between NCAA investigations PLUS Calipari wasn’t sanctioned! Was Todd a great president, or what?]

Then there was the controversy over coal magnate Joe Craft’s organized donation of $7 million for the new Wildcat “Coal” Lodge, which led one of Kentucky’s most famous authors, Wendell Berry, to withdraw his papers from UK. [Ah hell who gives a shit about that.]

Most recently, Todd gave [the UK athletics director] a $125,000 raise on his annual base pay and extended his contract until 2019, which put Todd at odds with his own Board of Trustees in the last few months of his tenure.

More legacy at the link.

… Is [UK basketball coach John] Calipari shady? No question. Everybody knows that the two college programs he coached prior to Kentucky — Massachusetts (1996) and Memphis (2008) — both had their Final Four appearances vacated by the NCAA. And, yes, there are already TMZ reports that NCAA investigators are snooping around Kentucky.

Who knows what the NCAA might find.

Agents paying players?

Players with bogus SAT scores?

A university administration that admits athletes who don’t have the academic credentials or desire to be in college?

Sounds about like every other big-time program to me.

The only difference is John Calipari understands that his program is nothing more than an NBA developmental league.

He is at least honest about the dishonesty that contaminates college athletics.

Albert Hunt, New York Times:

…[T]he leaders of college athletics [will soon introduce in place of] the 64-team tournament, which balances quality and inclusiveness, … 96 teams next year.

This would encourage mediocrity and make more money. The latter is the dominant concern of too many leaders of higher education; it trumps the academic interests of the players and institutions and the desires of fans, whether it’s the basketball tournament’s expansion or the insistence on keeping the antiquated football bowl game schedule.

One of the top teams in college basketball this season was the University of Kentucky. Recent figures show that just 31 percent of its players graduate; a year ago the university brought in a hot-shot coach, John Calipari, who took two other schools to the tournament finals only to have those achievements wiped from the record books for rules violations (though Mr. Calipari himself was not directly implicated).

His Kentucky team was led by four fabulous freshmen, all of whom indicated last week that they would leave without graduating and play professionally next year. So much for the student-athlete concept.

Many of the basketball-crazed fans in Lexington, Kentucky, probably couldn’t care less about student athletes or graduation rates, or their coach’s possible ethical transgressions; he wins games…

Lost amidst the news that NCAA rejected Memphis’ appeal regarding 38 vacated wins from the 2007-08 season is that the university is now looking into the possibility of suing John Calipari.

The school was punished for having used an ineligible player — Derrick Rose — after it was determined that his SAT was invalidated.

… During the 2007-08 season, Calipari was awarded $200,000 for reaching the Final Four and another $160,000 for winning 81% of his games. With 38 wins being taken off the books, including off of Calipari’s overall record with the school, those bonus levels would no longer be met…

Calipari is allowed to keep coaching for the same reason Knight was allowed to stamp, scream and bully his way through Bloomington from 1971 to 2000. They both win.

He’s wrong.

Winning’s a lot of it.

But audiences like to see the same aggression in coaches that they like to see in players.

Coaches who are sons of bitches are exciting to watch.

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

There’s a whole charismatic world of violence and destruction off the university or professional football field that people find exciting to follow. Players and coaches with their drunken assaults, crashed sports cars, and gun play — these aren’t things universities tolerate because they only care about winning. They’re things the fan base adores. Football wouldn’t be football without them.

“… College athletes, many of them African-American, are brought to college as hired guns, under the guise of getting an education. The entire charade is sustained for the sake of helping the NCAA maintain its multi-billion dollar professional sports league.

Yes, I said professional, not amateur. Any league that earns money on par with the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB is a professional sports league. NCAA coaches, commentators and administrators – mostly white – earn six and seven figure salaries while simultaneously robbing athletes of their educations, their futures, and the money that they and their families have earned. In order to avoid paying taxes on their revenue, the NCAA spends millions on marketing to convince us that their multi-million dollar corporate extravaganzas are polite little weekend activities that students barely remember to keep on their schedules. All the while, Tyrone Smith attends four years of college and doesn’t even learn how to read.

… The NCAA needs independent oversight. The federal government should take the lead and give meaningful disciplinary power to individuals who care more about education than winning percentages. When schools like The University of Kentucky choose to pay millions to coaches like John Calipari – who has consistently violated NCAA rules and carries a horrific graduation record – they are making their intentions… clear …”

Boyce Watkins:

http://www.thegrio.com/2009/12/educational-mission-of-ncaa-is-great-scam-of-21st-century.php

Boyce Watkins on the latest Michigan scandal.

… One can hardly blame Michigan Coach Rodriguez for pushing the players too hard, since universities make it clear that winning percentages matter far more than graduation rates. The University of Kentucky’s decision to pay nearly $30 million dollars to John Calipari, a coach known for both corruption and a lack of academic integrity, sends a message about the importance of winning games over educating athletes.

We know that corruption rolls down hills and at the bottom of this pile are the players, their families and the entire African-American community. NCAA athletes in revenue- generating sports are typically kept in special dormitories, forced to live on rigorous athletic schedules, and pushed to place football ahead of everything else. All the while, the administrators on central campus, as educated as they are, turn themselves into unenlightened blind mice when confronted with the reality of athletic exploitation.

… Massive reform is needed not only within the Michigan football program, but also within all of college sports. Congress must step in and challenge the NCAA for anti-trust violations, as well as its tax-exempt status. NCAA revenues during March madness rival that of the NFL and NBA, so it’s time to note the NCAA for what it truly is: a professional sports league that artificially restricts the wages of its employees…

Scathing Online Schoolmarm will leave to a psychiatrist the close analysis of this language.

Preliminarily, however, what strikes one is the linkage between the moribund verbal formulations throughout, and the inability / unwillingness to grasp reality. Note the final sentence. Note the recommendation of John Calipari as a role model.

SOS attaches to this post a warning: Reading this opinion piece from start to finish is not for everyone. There will be people who cannot continue with it all the way to the end. We recall what Freud told us:

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has wrestled with these demons for years.

She’s not denying that this piece of writing, and writing like it, scathes the scather. But she’s compelled to struggle with it.

What SOS is saying is that if you have no pressing need to go there, you shouldn’t feel bad if you decide to stay away.

Point Two: Nobody can hold a candle to the state of Kentucky.

Who’s gorgeouser — University of Louisville, or University of Kentucky?

Well, Louisville’s got Pitino. University of Kentucky’s got Calipari.

But UK also has Gillispie.

Don’t tell me he’s not there anymore. Every time he gets in that big ol’ Mercedes and starts weaving toward Lexington, the University of Kentucky gets a plug. Plus there’s his big ol’ lawsuit to remind us of his ol’ Kentucky home.

Gillispie [has] sued the university in federal court in Texas, alleging that the school’s athletics department owes him $6 million for firing him two years into a seven-year agreement. The university says he never signed a formal contract and the school doesn’t owe the money.

So – winner hands down – University of Kentucky!

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

The New York Times elaborates:

It is an otherwise lovely state, known for the mint juleps and jaunty hats of its Derby, the bluegrass and the rolling hills, but Kentucky has an alter ego when it comes to college sports, and let’s just say that alter ego should be checking into therapy any day now.

In one padded cell, you could put Kentucky’s basketball coach, John Calipari, blithely humming away despite the complete shambles he left at his last college, Memphis, and the one before that, Massachusetts, two Final Fours that supposedly didn’t happen…

Meanwhile, Calipari’s predecessor, Billy Gillispie, was arrested early Thursday and charged with driving while intoxicated.

And all of that looked positively sane compared with Louisville Coach Rick Pitino’s calling an impromptu news conference Wednesday about his simmering sex-and-blackmail scandal to lambaste the news media for covering his simmering sex-and-blackmail scandal…

The single big ick is John Calipari, but UD ain’t gonna sully her pages with his latest thing.

What interests her is that a sports columnist writing about Calipari commits two little icks in a row.

Let’s take a look.

Now that Calipari has raised his hind leg and defacated all over the basketball program by causing Memphis to now have the unique distinction of having its Final Four appearance tossed in the trash — all before scampering off to Kentucky — what do Memphis fans and university backers think of him now?

Hm. Now that I look at it again, there are any number of icks in this sentence. But … When’s the last time your dog raised his hind leg to shit? Plus … If you can’t spell defecate, you should write shit, because that’s easier to spell.

Even UD wouldn’t go this far in describing big time university sports. I mean, there’s … Why can’t I think of anything? Maybe Murray Sperber’s right!

A Memphis paper interviews him about the recent unpleasantness there involving a basketball player at the University of Memphis who seems not to have taken his SAT. I mean, he didn’t forget to take it. Someone else took it for him.

He was a one-and-done student. This is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of thing where an athlete, because of irrational rules, spends a year at a university before entering professional life. The university’s thrilled, of course — unlike the professional world, it doesn’t have to pay the player four hundred million dollars a year. It has to pay the player nothing. And the player gives it its most amazingest winningest season ever!!! Until the NCAA takes all the wins away because someone else took the student’s SAT so he could be admitted to the university.

“The NCAA really insists on this ‘student-athlete’ thing,” said Sperber, the author of “Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education.” “And I assume the NCAA put pressure on (NBA commissioner) David Stern to institute the one-year policy. The NCAA ought to rethink the whole thing, but there’s so much pressure within the NCAA and from big-time coaches to keep it in place. A one-and-done player did get Calipari to a Final Four. But you have to wonder: Did it really help the University of Memphis at the end of the day?”

The negative impact of the past week on the school’s reputation cannot be measured, Sperber said. In recent days, the phrases “University of Memphis” and “major violations” got constant play throughout the media. Sperber said he feels certain there are Memphis fans who insist the ordeal is a small price to pay for a trip to the national title game, but the effect can be corrosive and lasting.

“I’m sure the Chronicle of Higher Education will report on this, and people in academic circles will say, ‘Oh, there’s Memphis again,'” Sperber said. “It just seems like a travesty forcing these players to go to college. And poor Memphis, it’s like a roller coaster. They got to the very top of the thing with the Final Four, and now that coaster is heading down and they may not even get to keep the banners. I guess the whole thing could have been avoided.”

… and of course its money, nobody does it like the University of Kentucky.

Having just given John Calipari over thirty million dollars to coach one of its teams for a few years, Kentucky must now deal with his predecessor’s lawsuit against it for six million.

Kentucky’s adminstration smokes too much bluegrass. UD has nothing against a toke or three, but when you’re running a university, you need to be able to think clearly. UK is into that thing where you don’t care about anything anymore.

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

Update on Kentucky’s thirty million dollar man here.

UD fears this news will only drive UK’s administrators into deeper drug dependency.

Meanwhile, she wrote a little ditty!

Calipari
isn’t vari
wari.

When there’s quarri
he ain’t sorri.
Chase them in his
Maserari.

From Newsday:

… I’m not … sure the word obscene is a gross enough word to describe what the University of Kentucky, a taxpayer-funded institution, is offering John Calipari to become its basketball coach. According to several reports, Calipari is mulling over an 8-year, $35 million offer. That contract would make him the highest paid coach in the history of the game, surpassing Florida’s Billy Donovan, who makes $3.5 million a year.

…The state of Kentucky is in so much fiscal trouble that Gov. Steve Beshear declared in December that he planned to take a 10 percent salary cut, dropping his annual pay down to $111,945.

Calipari will make more than that much per game with an annual salary of $4.3 million. What’s more, the University’s board of trustees just approved a five percent tuition hike for undergraduates. I guess they’re going to have to get the money from somewhere, and it’s clear that this is a school and a state with priorities.

Now, I know I am going to get inundated with comments and e-mail talking about just how much money the basketball program brings into the school. My question is this: Just how much of that money goes to the English department, or engineering department or education department? …