Life of the mind, United States of America, 2014.

[Incognito’s drunken] assault [on a woman] at an annual team event happened in view of sponsors. [Head coach Joe] Philbin knew it happened yet continued to preach about the quality of the men in his locker room. He got rid of Chad Johnson after a domestic violence incident but kept Incognito after a sexual abuse incident.

The National Football Post on Friday reported Incognito called offensive line meetings at a strip club and fined players if they didn’t show up…

But the Dolphins allowed Incognito to be a member of the leadership council, which empowered him as a leader.

A coach, aware of the sexual assault and Incognito’s penchant for drinking and past drug use, overrides the player vote for leadership council. Philbin this week instead hid behind that vote, saying it was players, not him who made Incognito a team leader.

Look, the people within the Dolphins’ organization claiming complete ignorance of the apparent tension in Martin’s mind over Incognito and others are either lying – which makes them complicit – or out of touch, which makes them incompetent.

Either way, it is grounds for dismissal.

Some fans see what’s going on. And they’ve had enough. Fans have been writing to me and telling me they’re through with the franchise. Others say they’ll never buy a ticket again until major changes in leadership are enacted.

Consider that the Dolphins had 70,660 people at Sun Life Stadium for the season home opener. Then 68,342 for the second home game. Then 60,592 for the third home game. And 52,388 for the fourth home game.

Notice the trend?

Fans were abandoning this team in droves before the current scandal. You think any part of the last week is going to convince them to return?

The Dolphins failed to get public funding for upgrades to their stadium before this happened. Who’s going to vote to give them public money now, and what brilliant politician is going to champion the cause?

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Though college and professional football detests – to the point of seeking and destroying it – any form of thinking, it might be time for the sport to do some reading in the extensive literature on disgust. (The New York Times provides a reading list of some recent works here.) If American football fails to understand the nature and effects of the stupendous revulsion it generates even in its fan base, it might not be able to save itself.

American university football: The most perverted product of Western culture since The Story of O.

The most criminalized university in America.

And we haven’t even started talking about the medical school.

Moral indignation, university football style.

The problem with vehement, outraged post-Freeh Report opinion pieces like this one, which breathlessly recounts the excruciating filth of university football in this country, is that these pieces — we’ll see tons of them in the next forty-eight hours — are simply little system flushes, little emetics, little confessionals, for the very sports guys who’ve happily been covering the game for years. I hope they feel better now. But tomorrow they’ll be back at it, back playing the game that they love as much as Paterno’s happy little North Koreans did. All for football! All for the Beloved Leader!

… bask in it.

Look. If you can’t make that campus attractive to people (UD has seen its palm-lined splendor), you’re not much of a president. Shalala did accomplish this.

Her problem is that she did it indiscriminately. She just looked at anything that might tart up the place and went there: football, Nemeroff:

The former secretary of health and human services raised some eyebrows when Miami hired Charles Nemeroff, a star researcher who left a previous job at Emory during a conflict-of-interest scandal, to lead the medical school’s psychiatry program.

Shalala swung wild and wide. And struck out.

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.

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.

How did things come to this, Donna Shalala? What have you done to deserve this? Maybe it’s that $1.2 million salary.

This Dead Spin blogger is only the first of many writers who in the next few days will turn their attention to the woman who has presided over all of the amazing events at the University of Miami – hiring Charles Nemeroff, fielding the most violent university football team ever, enabling Nevin Shapiro for years… Miami, in UD‘s opinion, is just a scummy school, and Shalala has let it get that way. She should go.

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.

Classy.