T.J. Gassnola is the president and head of the board of trustees of the University of Kansas. He is the face of the school. The front porch of the school.

T.J. runs basketball at KU, and basketball is just about all you’re ever going to read about when it comes to KU.

More specifically, he runs KU’s players. T.J. is in charge of giving them and their families huge wads of cash under the table at Las Vegas hotels to play at KU. T.J. keeps KU all basketball all the time. He is KU’s VIP, MVP, and HRH all rolled into one.

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Everyone knows there’s nothing wrong with outfits like Adidas – for whom T.J. also works – giving money to future basketball greats. This wise investment often starts well before these players launch their adventures in university education… well before they decide to take advantage of the intellectual resources of places like Lawrence.

KU enjoys an extremely lucrative business relationship with Adidas.

Marc Emmert’s multimillion dollar NCAA salary is predicated on his absolute indifference to the transformation of once-respectable American universities into stinky petty hilarious crime gutters, places run by people like T.J. Gassnola.

So. All good. Everyone gets rich: The player, his family, Marc Emmert, the University of Kansas, and ol’ T.J.

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So… FUCK the FBI. What the fuck? It sashays in like it’s king of the world, drags T.J. into court and makes him sing in exchange for reduced prison time for the many many naughty things T.J. has been up to … Worse yet, it makes KU and Emmert scrunch up their features, take a deep breath, and blow out the very best horseshit they can come up with about how shocked and disappointed and eager to be helpful they are…

UD‘s only sorry this woman is no longer KU’s chancellor – she came to KU after running Chapel Hill into the ground cuz of their athletic scandal, remember? She’s just the sort of person you want running a basketball factory, and she’s still getting paid too.

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We had a nice tidy world here, see. Emmert and the whole “university” thing at KU did the work of shedding respectability-light upon the scheme so no one would think anything dark and criminal was going on. The players and the corporate suits and the coaches pocketed the money and kept their mouths shut. But now T.J.’s talking, and it’s… well, it’s Kafka, kiddies.

The most absurd moment of a most absurd day at the federal fraud case featuring one of college basketball’s most absurd characters had to be the following … well, actually, there are many contenders.

Maybe it was when Billy Preston wrecked his Dodge Charger on the campus of the University of Kansas. The fact a top incoming basketball recruit was driving such a car caused concern with the KU compliance office, which investigated who owned the vehicle.

Text messages later revealed Preston’s mother Nicole Player bragging about buying the car for her son, but … the car was … registered with “Nicole Player’s recently deceased grandmother” who lived in Florida.

KU was fine with this explanation. Who wouldn’t be?

[I]n the process of looking into the car, KU discovered a wire transfer to Player that came from a man named T.J. Gassnola. Player lived in Euless, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Gassnola hailed from Ludlow, Massachusetts, a little town a couple hours west of Boston.

There appeared to be no good reason for this exchange – and there wasn’t, at least by NCAA standards. Gassnola, a member of Adidas’ so-called “Black Ops” group and AAU team owner, detailed from the witness stand how he had plied Player with $89,000 over the course of nearly a year, including a $30,000 cash payout in a New York hotel room and another $20,000 brick delivered while in Las Vegas.

But wait, that’s not the best part.

Worried there was no proper explanation for the payments, Player texted Gassnola to inform him she had told KU officials the two had been involved in an “intimate” relationship, believing such activity would somehow make it NCAA legal.

If you can’t get enough of this stuff – and there’s TONS – go here.

Better yet, go here. This narrative, penned by Kafka after he dropped acid, is truly one of the greats.

Sure, laddie.

Listen up.

Until Hillary’s in power, you’ll never rustle up enough guys to do this. President Obama is a major jock, and he sets the tone. Forget it.

And … you know what? Forget it when Hillary takes over too. When that happens, the guys will get even more jockish. In reaction.

… forced out. If this happens, UD‘s putting her money on Trent Lott as his successor.

… as University of Washington president. Like Emmert – now running the NCAA – she’s a jocksniffer. She has also, like Emmert, never seen a corporate board seat she didn’t like.

One of Wise’s first acts as president is to fuck up all sorts of classes on campus because of a football game.

But it’s worth it because a huge national audience will see how important academics are to UW.

Yes. That’s her argument. UW will be able to showcase nationally how it doesn’t give a shit about holding classes, and this will persuade thousands of the most brilliant potential applicants that they should apply to the University of Washington.

The game is expected to snarl traffic through Montlake, disrupt afternoon and evening classes at the university, close clinics at the University of Washington Medical Center and play havoc with the workday schedules of thousands of fans.

… [Wise and other] university officials say the game is an opportunity to showcase the school’s athletics and academics to a national audience.

It’s much more than that. It’s also an opportunity to showcase UW’s commitment to keeping its clinics’ doors open, and its commitment to the quality of life in the larger metropolitan region.

Now that Rick Pitino’s out of commission, America’s filthiest, cheatingest, richest, college coach, John Calipari, struggles with the lamestream media:

Q. What is your reaction to the whole FBI investigation of college basketball? …

JOHN CALIPARI: Well, what’s out there right now is a black eye. But here is the thing for everybody here: I don’t want to come across as uneducated or dumb. None of us know where this thing’s going. So for me to really comment much on it, I mean, I don’t know where all this is going.

Obviously, what’s happened to this point isn’t good. At this point I don’t think me commenting without knowing all the facts is the right thing to do.

Q. How do you react to Mark Emmert’s statements yesterday? Do you think the culture of college basketball is so hopelessly corrupt that something has to change?

JOHN CALIPARI: I read the statement. I kind of liked it because at a point in there he mentioned about the students. At the end of the day, this is about the student-athletes.

I would say, again, this isn’t the format for me to go full boat in this. I would say if we make decisions about these kids, what’s right for these kids, we’re going to be right. If the NBA is worried about the NBA, and if the NCAA is worried about the NCAA, if each individual institution is just worried about themselves, and the last thing we think about are these kids, we’re going to make wrong decisions.

… Q. There’s a decent chance that next week Rick Pitino won’t be the coach at Louisville. Will you miss the rivalry in coaching against him?

JOHN CALIPARI: Look, it’s unfortunate, all the stuff that’s come down. But let’s talk about my team, please. Does anyone here have a question about my team, please?

Q. One more question about the FBI.

JOHN CALIPARI: Anybody have a question?

Q. Wait a minute. This is a Media Day, not Coach Day. I am entitled to ask a question.

JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.

Q. You cannot answer it, fine.

JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.

Q. The FBI reportedly has expanded into looking at Nike. Kentucky is a Nike school. What reassurance would you give your fan base, the Big Blue Nation, if they’re anxious about what this could mean?

JOHN CALIPARI: Again, you’re asking like you know something that I don’t know.

Q. That’s all I know is right there. If a fan would put two and two together…

JOHN CALIPARI: Wait a minute. We don’t know what you’re saying, if it’s true. Do we know if it’s true?

Q. It’s been reported.

JOHN CALIPARI: Oh, that makes it true.

I have no comment to it. I mean, we haven’t been contacted. The NCAA hasn’t contacted us. We’re going about our business of coaching this team.

How about a basketball question since it isn’t my day.

Did you click on that first Calipari link? The one that takes you to years of coverage of this vile, greedy, cynic? I think you should.

As Dave Zirin points out, it’s not the pimping; it’s the hypocrisy. Katina Powell readily admits to being a whore; why won’t Andre McGee and his boss admit to being pimps?

Instead of writing corporate how-to books, Rick Pitino and his ilk should be delivering seminars in Big Pimpin’. Katina Powell isn’t close to being on his level.

As for the NCAA:

[O]ne wonders why NCAA president Mark Emmert doesn’t elicit cries of “stranger danger” when he enters a room.

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No one who has, like UD, followed events at the University of Louisville over the last few years, can be surprised that the first longterm official trade in women at an American university was uncovered at that school. Its board of trustees is cretinous, catatonic. (The only trustee with guts – Steve Wilson – has begged the governor to let him quit, and the governor has obliged.) Its president – who keeps getting immense raises onaccounta he’s doing such a bang-up job – is a fully owned subsidiary of Richard Pitino and Bobby Petrino. Its student body and faculty has responded to the brothelization of their school with silence, or with rage at outsiders kicking over the stalls at the meat market.

Could it be that one of America’s sleaziest coaches, at one of America’s sleaziest schools, will have to leave? Lots of people are saying that the University of Louisville‘s basketball program has tipped over into Too Sordid Even for Division I and will have to sacrifice its coach, Rick Pitino.

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Louisville’s problem is not that it turns its dorms into whorehouses. Big deal. Recruiting 101. Athletics is the university’s front porch. And back room.

“You’re not gonna get players by doing those types of things,” [said Pitino] … what was behind this? What was the reason? An educated person can’t think you’re gonna get a recruit with a stripper coming in. This is University of Louisville, you don’t need any artificial help.” Funny, because you know what the rest of the world assumes? That free, naked, older women in the dorms would be exactly the type of thing that may interest 17 and 18-year-old boys. Why would Pitino staffer Andre McGee set up hooker parties with recruits? To bore them?

No, Louisville’s problem is that the university’s tell-all madam turns out to be a pleasant, articulate, believable person. UL’s last hope was that this woman would be a raving slut rather than a research and publishing genius who could teach UL’s tenure track cohort a trick or two. That strutting pious fraud Pitino will have to go.

The great Sarah Vaughan ushers him out.

Perdido, we look for our coach he’s perdido
We misplaced our coach Rick Pitino
While chancing a dance fiesta.

He’s perdido!

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UD thanks John.

Ah, a walk down memory lane. This is from a 2010 AAUP report expressing dismay at Phyllis Wise (then a high-ranking administrator at the University of Washington) following in the footsteps of UW’s then president Mark Emmert (who as current head of the farcical NCAA makes far far FAR bigger bucks than he did on all of his presidential corporate boards) and displaying her I could give a shit greed to the world.

To Wise’s claim that Nike’s board was interested in her special expertise in their line of work, the AAUP responded:

It is difficult to see what special interest the Nike Corporation could possibly have in Phyllis Wise’s research expertise in obstetrics and gynecology.

Er… How to screw your employees?…

UD is therefore SOOOO not surprised that Wise is insisting on leaving her latest place of employment with every penny coming to her.

One day after the board of trustees rejected her first attempt, the former UI chancellor again tendered her resignation Thursday night, saying she would not accept a position as special assistant to the president and that she is consulting with her lawyers about ways to protect her reputation…

‘[T]he University agreed to provide the compensation and benefits to which I was entitled, including $400,000 in deferred compensation that was part of my 2011 employment contract.’

I want it all! You think by changing your mind and ‘terminating’ instead of retiring me you can avoid yet more ridicule (the University of Illinois has generated tons of that over the last few years) about the four hundred thou reward for the way I handled Salaita and other matters?

YOU CAN’T FIRE ME. I RESIGN. I RESIGN AGAIN. I RESIGN AGAIN. AND AGAIN.

It’s what Kierkegaard called infinite resignation:

Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.

As Wise embarks on her spiritual journey, the rest of us can giggle at the spectacle (see this post, about comedy and repetition) of Wise and her university tossing the terminate/resign ball back and forth. At great expense to Illinois taxpayers, of course.

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UD thanks Wendy.

…is one popular way of characterizing the NCAA/university athletic program/university athlete ménage à trois; for herself, UD has always found the simpler, less sexy, swinish squalor trope serviceable… You’ve got piggy NCAA head Mark Emmert (“In an interview on a PBS Frontline special, ‘Money and March Madness,’ a visibly agitated Emmert refused to reveal his own seven-figure salary on camera…”); piggish coaches making millions even when, as at beyond-belief-awful Syracuse football, almost no one goes to the games and team members are constantly rotated in and out of local jails; and players, sloshing in a stew of agents, boosters, bogus courses…

Whatever pigskin used to be, it’s mostly pigshit now. Universities like North Carolina Chapel Hill, which actually think they don’t stink, are intriguing to track, in a kind of let’s-watch-the-psychotics way…

We’re winners… we have a glorious proud tradition…

These people are kind of like the three Christs of Ypsilanti. Like the three Christs, they are quick to defend their delusions by accusing other schools of being deluded… Yes, we at U Miami give off some stench, but have you smelled Southern Methodist?

Well, so. What is to be done? How to clean up?

This guy thinks we should abolish the NCAA and put caps on coaches’ salaries.

Not gonna happen. Read Animal Farm. The pigs will not be amused.

David, a UD reader, sends UD this opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. It’s strong-minded and well-written, but it’s up against the same problem everyone writing about Penn State is up against.

The entire complicated, powerful, wildly popular, and unimaginably lucrative system of university football is corrupt — morally degenerate, criminally sordid. Forget academic fraud and university-specific stuff like that. Academic fraud is endemic, of course, but that’s a trifle here. When people like the WSJ guy talk about “shining a harsh light, and building the whole thing over, the right way,” they’re talking about revolutionizing a culture – a culture of massive university-sponsored alcohol sales to students, routine post-game riots and campus-trashing after tailgates, Mondo Cane-style coach-deification (after Penn State pulls down Uncle Joe’s statue, you can worship at Saint Saban’s), total subordination to television stations and naming-rights banks…

En effet, mes petites, it can’t be changed. That’s why the harshest critics of it resort to comedy, as in the hilarious yearly Fulmer Awards for the team with the most arrests among its players. A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling, said Nietzsche, and all the smartest critics of college football and basketball are jokesters. They’re way past feeling anything about it. Do you think Italians at this point do anything other than tell each other jokes about the mafia? University football and basketball have settled in, and if you don’t believe me, look at the guy running the biggest joke of them all – the NCAA. Scroll down for the skinny on Mark Emmert, aka “top stooge.”

No, look. J’adore Barack Obama, but he’s a mad jock. Say we get Romney next — Mr Olympics. Ahnold’s trying to repair his marriage to Maria so he can run. (I know – citizenship problems there.) Look at the Senate, for chrissake. We can’t even remove the tax exemptions these educational activities enjoy. Luxury boxes are exempt.

From the little freshman fan in the cheap seats to the President of these United States, everyone’s slobbering and panting for grander Godzillatrons and stronger steroids. Everybody’s hyped up. School spirit. When you feel it, you give money to the sports program so the school can be even more of a jock joke.

The WSJ guy is right – it’s a culture. It has many, many moving parts, and they mesh wonderfully. It’s way past anybody fucking with it in any serious way.

[The people who run the BCS] have allowed their athletic programs to run completely amok. The two people who symbolize what the BCS stands for are, without question, Miami President Donna Shalala, who did everything but rename her school “Shapiro U” while currently jailed booster Nevin Shapiro was lavishing money on her and the one-time “U,” and, of course, Ohio State President Gordon Gee, whose two trademarks are his bow tie and his foot planted firmly inside his mouth.

It was Gee who made himself the Neville Chamberlain of college athletics last spring when he was asked if he would consider firing Jim Tressel as football coach and he replied with a straight face, “Fire him? I just hope he doesn’t fire me.”

The shame of it is that Tressel didn’t stay at Ohio State long enough to get around to firing Gee before Tressel left in disgrace. Of course, the NCAA, led by its top stooge, President Mark Emmert, has been so busy calling meetings and being shocked to learn that cheating is going on that it has yet to take any action against anyone — and will probably come down with a really hard wrist slap when the time finally comes.

John Feinstein, Washington Post

… yet another telling of the scandalous story of university football and basketball. The New Yorker headlines its bland review of current big time campus sports

THE END OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL?

Which has a distinctly New York Daily News ring to it. What happened to the New Yorker?

Fans don’t care as long as the games are played, universities as long as the television contracts are renewed…

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Andrew Zimbalist says that Taylor Branch is wrong about college presidents running the NCAA:

Branch’s assertion to the contrary, college presidents do not run the NCAA. It is run by athletic directors, coaches and conference commissioners, with a smattering of jock-crazed college presidents serving on NCAA committees who have done the bidding of the athletic programs and pass periodic reforms to help preserve a modicum of legitimacy for the system.

But I think Branch is right. The head of the NCAA is customarily a (former) college president; it used to be Myles Brand, and now it’s Mark Emmert. Surely Emmert’s successor will be Gordon Gee.

And there’s a whole lot more than just a smattering of jock-crazed presidents (and other highly ranked university administrators) on those committees.

And the NCAA can’t run without the greed and passivity of university presidents, so it absolutely must keep feeding those two things.

AND the NCAA needs college presidents to maintain the fiction that the organization has a shred of academic significance.

I’d say – along with Taylor Branch – that the power center of the NCAA is the university president and the university administration.

As Ellen Staurowsky says:

As commercial interests in college sport continue to grow, the fictions understandably become more difficult to sustain. The shame rests not with college sports per se but with higher education officials who have served as the architects and promoters of such a system.

Nevin Shapiro, who orchestrated a $930 million Ponzi scheme and is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison, told Yahoo! Sports that he gave [University of Miami] Hurricanes players gifts such as money, jewelry and yacht trips, as well as paid for sex parties, bounties on opposing players and even an abortion for a player’s girlfriend.

And it’s all alleged to have happened under the watch of former Miami athletic director Paul Dee, the former chairman of the NCAA committee on infractions …

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“Former Miami athletic director Paul Dee sat in judgment of USC and others while all of this went on under his nose.”

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“The hypocrisy of the NCAA makes me sick,” [one university president] told the Press-Telegram. “To allow institutions like Miami and Nebraska to chair and oversee its infractions committee is like putting foxes in charge of the henhouse.”

Why do people associated with conferences and schools make up the majority of the 10-person infractions committee?

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UD readers have already met the much-loved University of Miami sports benefactor – the “living scholar” after whom the Nevin Shapiro Student Athlete Lounge is named… Was named… Don’t know who it’s named after now… Allen Stanford?

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The sort of thing the University of Miami did during the Nevin Era will, I think, strike anyone as fully in line with the ethos of any serious American university:

Three sources, including two former Miami football players, confirmed that Shapiro offered bounties.

The booster told Yahoo! Sports he had a number of individual payouts for “hit of the game” and “big plays.” He also put bounties on specific players, including Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and a three-year standing bounty on Seminoles quarterback Chris Rix from 2002 to 2004, offering $5,000 to any player who knocked him out of a game.

“We pounded the (expletive) out of that kid,” Shapiro said of Rix. “Watch the tape of those games. You’ll see so many big hits on him. Guys were all going after that $5,000 in cash. [Jon] Vilma tried to kill him – just crushed him – a couple of times trying to get that $5,000. And he almost got it, too.”

I mean, name any school that doesn’t offer $5,000 extra in scholarship money to an athlete who can kill a competing player.

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Anyway, the writer I quoted up there, the one pointing out that the Miami AD who oversaw the whorehouse during the Nevin years was also NCAA infractions chair… His thing is that the current head of the NCAA is a “detriment to the NCAA” because he’s “not a reformer.”

It’s true that Mark Emmert will do nothing, just as his predecessor did nothing, to rid American universities of the ever-erupting shit-volcano which is big-time football and basketball. But that doesn’t make him a detriment to the NCAA. Uh-uh. Au contraire. How do you think the NCAA chooses its leaders? The point of the NCAA, like any organization, is to sustain itself, not reform itself out of existence. For that, you need a guy as mercenary and cynical as the NCAA itself.

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UD thanks her friend Ralph for linking her to the Yahoo story.

As you recall, we will gather this August in retreat, for one brief moment, far away from the busy bustle of the outer world, to think on our sins and, in sincere repentance, get them hence.

Are there scoffers? Naysayers?

[University sports corruption is] such a point of concern for Mark Emmert that he has convened a retreat for NCAA leaders in August to discuss the problem, play golf, and receive backrubs. The backrubs will be exquisite, and the results of the conference will be hey did we mention backrubs and golf? Seriously, backrubs and golf. That’s really worth the trip alone.

This is the voice of the devil. Do not heed him! The devil wants to banish tax exemptions from luxury boxes and cap what Kentucky can pay John Calipari. Do not heed him!

Gather, instead, with goodly folk like Brother Tressel, and think on how we can make our fellowship yet purer in the sight of God.

With a tip of the hat to Mark Emmert.

From the San Jose Mercury News.

UD thanks Norm for the link.