Too much of nothing, or too much of less than nothing: However you slice it, intellectual life at your basic jockshop is, er, a bit off.

Courtesy of Charlie, a reader, there’s this local yokel update on Oklahoma University, long ruled by Gotta Love Em! David Boren, and absolutely drowning in sports revenue..

But now they’ve got a new president, and he seems to have decided that the next step is to move toward creating an actual university on the campus, where “OU is bleeding money while Sooner athletics swims in it.”

Bleeding how much, you ask? After all, the more successful the front porch of the American university, the more successful the university, and it doesn’t come more successful than OU’s athletic programs, so OU must be…

One billion dollars in debt.

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The yokel struggles with this. How can it be? His final line says it all:

We will wait and see what [this spectacular disparity] means, but it would seem to mean something.

I think we can do better than that. I think we can specify quite precisely what it means. It means OU is a football team with some sort of shabby deadbeat school attached to it somewhere. It means that, as a witty long-ago OU president once said of his school, “We want to build a university our football team can be proud of.”

But we don’t really want to, or at least David Boren didn’t want to. He wanted to soak his students for higher and higher tuition, and deny raises to his faculty, while paying top dollar – over the top – to coaches and their minions. Even as OU’s new president began making noises about how this wasn’t a great way to run a university, OU announced they’d just given the football coach a $1.7 million raise.

The only word for it is surrealistic: “[A]s the academic side of the institution finds itself in dire straits, Sooner sports sits pretty.” Academically, although OU designates itself a university, there’s no there there. The whole place is football. And if you think you can reverse that winning, nothing-but-football record, you’re nuts. The new president is about to discover what the word “culture” — make that cult – means.

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And then there’s also massively indebted Rutgers – though here the debt in question is athletics itself. Rutgers economics professor Mark Killingsworth, after immense efforts to uncover the actual numbers from a most unforthcoming university, concludes that

the real deficit for 2016-17 … comes to a total of $35.4 million plus $11.9 million, or $47.3 million — the largest deficit in the history of Rutgers athletics. Despite [President Robert] Barchi’s oft-expressed pious hopes for athletics self-sufficiency, the program has now blown through a grand total of $193.1 million in deficit spending since he arrived in New Brunswick.

Killingsworth concludes by stating the obvious – obvious to everyone but the president and trustees of Rutgers:

[A]thletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.

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Rich jockshop; poor jockshop. Don’t make no never mind.

Minnesota: Not just rape: Gang rape!

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Well, UM used to be a respectable school, and now that it’s going down the tubes the wise men are gathering (see this article and its various theories) to explain what happened.

The short version is of course reputational death by football. Like this:

ICK FACTOR ——-> INSTITUTIONAL FINANCIAL COLLAPSE

That is, your scummy team and its scummy coaches generate such massive alienation/disgust that the school hemorrhages money and reputation in every direction – ticket sales, coach buyouts, athletic facility debt repayment, lawsuits, SNL skits, declining enrollment, declining alumni support (see the comment in this post’s headline), blahblah.

Problem is, you can get this outcome in two wildly different ways: Through a president who’s nothing but a football coach, and through a president who is simply appalled to discover that a person of his or her cerebral delicacy is at a jock school, and who refuses to sully him or herself with the brainless assholes at Athletes’ Village. You can be Ken Starr of blessed memory (Ken’s still playing the last down); or you can be UM’s Eric Kaler. You can be President Booster (Oklahoma’s David Boren has held on the longest with this unremittingly nauseating approach) or President I’m Better Than This, Dammit! and you will still run an extremely high risk of implosion. Forces that transcend your provincial world (see this Bloomberg series) are in play, and only a genius tactician (like coach, president, chancellor, head trustee, and reincarnation of Jesus Christ Nick Saban) is going to be able to thread his way through the blockers.

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UD thanks Keith.

The man who – until his recent firing – presided over endless sports, academic fraud, and sports-related misuse of funds cases at the University of North Carolina was a saint. A saint. He did his best. He was powerless.

Big-time college athletics have long been a minefield for university administrators. They often find themselves at the mercy of highly paid coaches under intense pressure to recruit top players – who may struggle academically – and wealthy boosters who want successful teams.

… A 2009 Knight Commission survey of university presidents and chancellors found many of them feel powerless to stop or slow the financial arms race in athletic departments that has often brought scandal.

“(P)residents would like serious change but do not see themselves as the force for the changes needed,” the report said.

As poor little David Boren of Oklahoma University says of the coaches’ salaries there, “We can’t control the marketplace.”

These guys can’t do anything! They’re only the president.

John, John, John.

Do you know how often UD has been lectured on the subject of the athletic marketplace? “We can’t control the marketplace,” says David Boren, president of the University of Oklahoma. We just can’t! We can’t control the market! Whatever we have to pay, we have to pay!

Absolutely everyone thinks that way.

So now you say – under pressure of Penn State – you just say, you just state it like oh obviously – they shouldn’t give coaches multimillion-dollar contracts.

Tell me in what way that’s not a cheap throwaway line.

Oklahoma is a very backward state.

The OU Board of Regents approved raises for all nine assistant football coaches Oct. 28. …Kevin Wilson and Brent Venables received a $45,000 raise, increasing their salaries to $440,000 and $430,000 respectively.

Less than two weeks later, during his State of the University address to the Faculty Senate on Monday, OU President David Boren warned … department heads to prepare for a 5-percent budget cut…

[T]his situation highlights the strange reality that football coaches making six figures a year can get a pay raise during a time when the already-weak state budget is experiencing a $400 million shortfall …

Strange brew, OU. Killing what’s inside of you.

“Do I think that salaries are too high nationwide? Yes, I certainly do, but we can’t control the marketplace,” Boren said.

Boren is David Boren, current president of the University of Oklahoma. And what he’s doing is called passing the buck.

Actually Boren can, to a remarkable extent, control the marketplace. Rich brainless schools like his (see also the University of Alabama), who care only about sports and therefore offer millions of dollars to coaches are the leading edge of the salaries problem. They’re setting the pace, see.

Boren should check to see whether he still has balls. If he does, he should take a stand on the issue.

The problem is not that abstraction, the marketplace. It is that very real entity, the greedy coach and the greedy coach’s agent.

Now y’all sit down with those people, see. You tell them you’re a university, not a football field, and you tell them what you think a reasonable salary for a coach – as opposed to your university’s president, or, say, the president of the United States – would be.

‘Course, here comes another non-abstraction: Your paralyzing fear of your student body and your alumni. You’ve let their moronic passions overrule your sense of what the university should represent. You say to them I’m gonna stop the madness right here right now.

They say to you You’re out on your ass.

So what? So what, Boren? So you take yourself out of the president’s office and you write a book about how you were sent packing from an institution of higher learning because you wouldn’t pay a football coach five million dollars. You give interviews. You make a little documentary. Whatever. You piss off a lot of stupid people who, because they’re both stupid and pissed off, unwittingly reveal all sorts of other scandals at the university, sports related and non sports related. A big ol’ mess, like the one going on at the University of Illinois right now.

See now, that’s a good thing. That’s changing the world for the better, Boren, and I seem to recall you used to be a politician with a modicum of self-respect and a desire to make the world better.

Whether it’s national disgrace University of Oklahoma or national disgrace Florida State, the crucial step in creating a totally shitty university is appointing as president a used-up political hack. Once you’ve given David “We can’t control the marketplace” Boren and John “I want FSU to have a chiropractic school” Thrasher their pointless sinecures, the sky’s the limit. Coaches and boosters and – er – fraternities – are free to run the school right into the ground.

FSU faculty begged the trustees not to appoint Thrasher; one professor called him, with remarkably accurate foresight, the “scary” rather than the “safe” choice. It’s scary to appoint passive stupid people to run things; active, clever, bad people step in and run them instead. It’s scary to attend a school where everyone has to hide from the football team. It’s scary to realize how quickly a campus can become a criminal syndicate.

Graham Spanier, Holden Thorp, Gordon Gee, Donna Shalala, David Boren – As Chief Inspiration Officers of football factories, these leaders have taken whatever dignity the office of university president once had and run all the way downfield with it.

Rick Perry’s football factory – Texas A&M – has got itself a way-depraved chancellor who’s been out there boohooing over little Johnny Manziel and his drunken greedy ways. So the boy’s a lout — so what? Physical aggression, financial self-serving, and booze up the wazoo happen to be the values we cherish at this school, and Manziel’s three for three.