When wee UD studied at the Medill School of Journalism, we often discussed the qualities of a good lead sentence; in particular, you want to pack a lot of information in without creating a run-on feel to the thing.

The AP writer who had to pack all of the repulsive behavior at New Mexico State into her lead had quite a task, but she acquitted herself well, finding a place in one sentence for the guns thing AND the cock-grabbing thing. Actual shooters (of guns) among team members appear a little farther down in the article. When there’s this much material, you have to be selective.

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For the venerable history of this institution, go here.

Zat all you got? 2.5 kids a month plus at least one adult gun death a day by homicide or suicide? Give me a call when citizens’ brigades are mopping up twenty buckets of blood every morning in Civic Plaza and getting shot at while doing it! Okay?

Meanwhile, Guv, if you think a few pulverized brats justifies seizing our AKs, you are looking at a world of pain.

Only twenty years old, she was found unresponsive in an off-campus house.

Police have ruled out anything suspicious, which leaves

1. suicide
2. overdose
3. underlying, previously unknown, health issue.

Background on NMSU.

The gunny, sexually perverted basketball team is of course only the most obvious sign of thorough institutional squalor.

Current and former employees the AP interviewed described scenarios in which top-level administrators refused to hold themselves or others accountable, both inside and outside the athletic department. One said the “guardrails” designed to protect students and faculty — from everything from retaliation for whistleblowing to sexual improprieties — had all but disappeared.

“Because there’s so much churn in our upper administration, we never get to the point of hammering out who is actually accountable for upholding policies,” [one insider] said.

In one instance, a lawsuit last year filed by a Jane Doe alleges a longtime professor with ties to the athletic department “harassed and groomed female students for years, coercing them into sexual relations and bragging about the same” while school officials looked the other way. The plaintiff alleges she was sexually assaulted by the professor.

Another case alleges that two professors who blew the whistle about hiring practices they claimed flouted human-resource policies had their complaints intercepted by an administrator involved in the hiring, who then pushed for disciplinary cases to be opened against those professors. One has been demoted from his deanship.

[The] Office of Institutional Equity, which handles Title IX and other discrimination complaints and should have been on the front lines of the hazing allegations, [was] marginalized, with administrators ignoring some recommendations produced by the office and putting others off.

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Uh lets see what else.

1. misappropriation of funds
2. unethical hiring
3. humongous lawsuits filed by the latest set of massively overpaid now-fired shitskis
4. the decision to end a policy that “student-athletes would be dismissed if found guilty of (or pleaded no contest to) a felony. That allowed one player to remain on the team at the time the rules were changed. It also furthered New Mexico State’s reputation as a place where athletes and coaches get second chances — perhaps without accountability.” Nice way to put it. Perhaps without.

Look. Tons of universities in this country have forged winning basketball/football teams by scouring the junior colleges for naughty numbskulls who play really well. It’s a beyond-belief sordid thing for a university to do, but tons of them do it. Many come to grief as the bad boys launch crime sprees, start fights on the field/court, get involved in academic cheating scandals, rape people, blah blah. Small price to pay, says a school like Nebraska, which has an AMAZING record of recruiting crazyass assholes. It’s one way to field winning teams and who cares if players beat the shit out of students ahead of them in line for pizza just cuz they’re getting impatient.

UD will admit that, in a strong field, NMSU has distinguished itself. But the indecent tale of school-destruction is one it shares with many cohorts.

UD likes to drift among the current articles on the web ISO … kibbles you might enjoy.

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In a follow-up filing, Guttenberg argued that misspellings do not constitute proof of drunkenness.

True, true. But Scathing Online Schoolmarm thinks they may constitute … a suggestion … that something (“You have defamed, slandered and attempted to ruin my lively hood” … “The words that came out of her mouth were very offensive like calling the President a Nazi and refuring to constration camps and Nazi Germany.”) is very wrong.

In this interview, he blames the shutdown of the basketball program, plus a purge of its coach and others, on a total lack of leadership at the school. No one’s home. Because no one’s home, someone recently hired a shitty clueless coach who probably doesn’t even see what’s wrong with hazing; because no one’s home, the lame duck chancellor let a university sports team full of gunnies and hazers form itself.

Eventually the gunplay and sexual assaults on fellow teammates (with the team watching) just got to be too much sleaze, even for bigtime university sports.

Plus they can expect a LOT of lawsuits, from players and coaches. Expensive.

The guy also pointed out that what with the loss from the roster of

*the guy who recently shot and killed a UNM student he’s been fighting with,

*the two guys who are leaving cuz they can’t take the sleaze anymore,

*and the three hazers who are leaving cuz they’re expected in court (court; not basketball court),

the team doesn’t have enough players to play the game anyway.

[T]he new allegations involved potential violations of university policy and were separate from the November 19 shooting of a student from the University of New Mexico. 

[T]he allegations involved multiple players hazing a teammate more than once with a police report filed.

What can we say on this blog about nauseating New Mexico State that we haven’t already said a hundred times? (All the up-to-date details you can stomach here.) In an academic landscape of booze, guns, hazing, and cheating, schools like NMSU, where reporters must distinguish among ongoing acts of vileness, stand out boldly.

You figure the highest paid person on campus must be the recruiting coach, cuz he’s the one bringing the hazers and the killers — people whose intrinsic violence does wonders on the court. And recruits can rest safe in the knowledge that the rest of the staff will hide the guns that do the killing from the cops. Definitely a team effort at this school.

I mean, some of these players make the shooter at Richneck Elementary look like a kid.

… makes sure its universities share fully in this bounty. Its two highest-profile campuses – U New Mexico, and New Mexico State – are POP POP POP POPPIN away with healthy rivalry, on the basketball court and off! (For the long glorious sports history – there isn’t any other history – of both schools, go here.) Now that both schools’ teams are literally engaged in an ongoing shooting war, the basketball coaches have, uh, started to issue statements and shit.

Cuz I mean.

Read it all.

When your schools are dumpsters instead of colleges, and when your basketball teams are gangs (with the coaching staff apparently part of the gangs), instead of basketball teams, you should…

Oh I dunno. You’re down there with your guns and your gangs, leading your best life now, living out loud, standing in your truth, letting a smile be your umbrella, and ain’t no place of mine to look at the carnage and say one damn word.

Now that its quarterback has been filmed calling a woman over to his car and telling her to help him finish masturbating, UNM – one of this blog’s venerable favorites – is in the news again. UD has long argued that a state as corrupt and fiercely anti-intellectual as New Mexico should give up on the whole public university thing, with its Dave Schmidlys and Mike Locksleys and a host of others running this hopelessly shabby show. But on it goes; the curtain … or whatever … keeps going up…

They wallow. They simmer in their own juices. They don’t get nowhere.

To be sure, they’re corrupt. I don’t want you to think they aren’t corrupt, or that there isn’t a connection between their being corrupt and their wallowing. There’s a direct connection. People can certainly make money off of wallowing.

On this blog, we make a point of following the nothingness of these schools, with a particular eye on their sports programs, since here the futility, absurdity, and nihilism is at its most obvious.

Take New Mexico. Here’s a typical recent article about it in the local press.

First sentence:

Missed budget projections, lingering debt and low game attendance have all contributed to serious financial troubles at the University of New Mexico Athletics Department.

There’s no there there, see? No one’s at the games – UD is surprised the teams show up – nobody’s in budgeting … The schools I’m talking about, located in America’s nature wonderlands, are an extension of their magnificent silent mountains, their deep echoing oceans, their stretches of frozen tundra…

Crucial to this vast chasm is a really stupid and corrupt state legislature, and all three of these states have them. A certain dance is danced, to be sure… I mean, like clockwork, when a school like New Mexico is in such profound shit that it demands more money from the state, the state says whoa wait uh what’s up over there? What you guys been doing? Didn’t we, uh, give you some money…? Don’t we give you some money every year…? So the head of the House appropriations committee pledges to

take a “fine toothed comb” to the UNM Athletics budget before determining what additional funding looks like, if any.

“We are going to dive into these numbers very closely,” Rep. [Patty] Lundstrom said. “The questions I am going to ask are about compensation packages. I want to know what benefits these coaches and the athletic director have. I want to know how much over their base pay they are receiving of taxpayers’ dollars.”

Yeah cuz for the last hundred years or so while the school lies there on the ground dead all the money we send you goes to the athletic staff and NOW’S THE TIME WE MEAN IT THIS TIME WE’RE REALLY GONNA …

UNM’s Athletics administrators and coaches are among the highest paid state employees. While [AD Eddie] Nunez has made cuts to programs to save dollars, he hasn’t made any cuts that would personally affect his own personal finances or the personal finances of his staff. The high salaries and many benefits that UNM Athletics administrators and coaches are entitled to by their employment contracts have remained untouched…

…[S]everal salaries [are] above $300,000 per year with a variety of 13 different types of benefits ranging from free-use vehicles to media pay, promotional pay, incentive bonuses, season tickets to games, country club memberships, retention bonuses, free spouse travel to games and in one case a relocation expense totaling nearly $20,000.

[Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: a variety of 13 different types is redundant. Just write 13 different types. You could even write just 13 types. The high number jumps out more if you just go directly for it.]

The AD’s response to this fact is a beaut. In an entire culture of stupidity, it still manages to stand out.

“I am a supporter of incentives because to me, it incentivizes people to do something. If they achieve it, some great things are happening.”

SOS will not attempt to parse this, because she is old and fragile; she will merely remind you that the athletic program at New Mexico is a debacle.

– has long assumed, correctly, that its ridiculous trustees will listen to the shit the athletics department tells them year after year about taking care of that pesky deficit. Crazed highly-paid coaches, some still working for the school, others suing the school; games in which no one takes any interest; student athletic fees through the roof; academic quality in the toilet; a deer in the headlights president and an empty-threat legislature – you know the drill. Trustees know the drill…

Cuz everything’s gonna be fine as soon as the athletics department not only kills the deficit, but starts making HUGE money. Hold onto your Stetson!

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But every now and then there’s a kind of … eruption on the part of one of the trustees. One of them suddenly flies over the cuckoo’s nest and lets out his anger at having been lied to and infantilized for years and years and years. It never seems to happen at our most craven sports factories – Auburn, Nebraska, Louisville – but it can certainly happen elsewhere. Because it’s very rare and beautiful and precious and fleeting, like one brief brilliant flash of a peacock’s tail, we take note of it here at University Diaries.

Rob Doughty, president of the UNM Board of Regents – which is responsible for signing off on years of consistently failing budgets from [the] university’s athletics department – says he feels he’s been lied to and won’t rubber stamp any future athletics budgets nor consider forgiving any of the department’s estimated $7.5 million deficit before seeing significant changes.

… “I want to know right now, in front of everybody, why are we [this much] in the hole when I was promised last year that we had a balanced budget?” Doughty intensely questioned.

… “I’m very upset today. I feel like this Board of Regents and the folks that were there, and especially me, were misled and were told things that weren’t true. And [athletics was] making false promises.

“And, I have to say, that in my time at this university in the last four years, as I sit here today, I think I’m as mad as I’ve ever been…. I think the projection line was done just to balance the budget…. [I] want to know what research was done, what analysis was done to really back the projected figures.”

Hey can’t put one over on Doubty Doughty. That projection line was done just to balance the budget!

I’m sorry, kiddies. Either all of these people are idiots, or this is the way they want things to be. It’s a way of life. You don’t get to break in, a century after the cargo cult has established itself, and say Maybe building a landing strip for magical gifts won’t make the magical gifts appear…

It’s a far less interesting place without the legendary Schmidly/Locksley partnership (read these posts if you haven’t just eaten); but, you know…

The shadow of your smile
When you are gone
Will color all my dreams…

The Locksley buyout and various Schmidly initiatives are gifts that keep giving… And of course when it comes to athletics in particular UNM continues really, really sordid, and things get worse and worse. Let’s quote a bit from a recent article:

In one of the poorest states in the nation, can UNM, which has only one of its 21 intercollegiate sports teams (men’s basketball) turning a profit each fiscal year, justify receiving well more than $2 million per year in state subsidies for athletics? Can it justify student fees totaling $4 million, a figure that has more than doubled in the past two years despite the objections of student representatives on campus?

The new Schmidly says uh I dunno… bad situation I guess but can’t do nuthin…

“The debt service continues to be a challenge for us,” [the athletic director] said, referring to paying down the $60 million renovation of the Pit four years ago. “The financial model was predicated on a naming gift…”

The perfectly named Pit is the basketball stadium. The morons who run UNM promised up and down they’d get some bank or pizza parlor to buy naming rights, only it didn’t happen…

I mean, the financial model?? What a great way to put it. This might be more accurate: I and the idiots with whom I play golf figured we might get the funding if we told everyone…

UNM students paid $1.9 million in fees for athletics in 2011-12, with a majority earmarked at covering the costs of student admission to sporting events.

Then, despite the objections of undergraduate and graduate student representatives, came significant increases in those fees. In 2012-13 the students paid $3.2 million and that figure was right at $4 million this past year (2013-14).

“Student fees have been a godsend for us the last couple years. But we, historically, have been on the real low end, and now we’re probably right in the middle,” Krebs said. “But I think there’s a limit to what you can put on the backs of the students.”

In 2012-13, six of the 10 other schools in the Mountain West Conference received more money from student fees than did UNM, as did nearby regional schools New Mexico State University and UTEP.

“I don’t see a huge increase in the student participation around fees, but I do think some nominal increases are probably in their future,” Frank said. “How fast and how much is something we’ll talk to the students about.”

The last fees went up without any talking to anyone. Students objected to them and the school said fuck you. Clearly student fees in years to come will be predicated on the same financial model.

Correct answer: Nothing. You don’t want to know from NMSU because NMSU is NSFW – it’s the sort of obscenity from which decent people avert their eyes. Tens of millions of dollars in athletics debt… no one goes to the football games… no money for academics… and except for this guy and a few others no one gives a shit.

Here’s a sample from a letter the chair of the board of trustees wrote. I won’t quote from it because I’m one of those people who doesn’t enjoy puking her guts out, but you might enjoy it, so go ahead and take a look.

A couple of NMSU students actually thought trying to understand what the trustee wrote and then responding to it might be worthwhile, and UD applauds the effort. You should never give up on human beings, no matter how…

This is truly a clown school. This is truly a school with not a shred of dignity. And now this. One of their players is a violent shit who set off a huge on-court brawl. UD figures he’ll be back attacking opponents after a two-game suspension. After all, it’s New Mexico State.

Or, as a commenter on an article about New Mexico State University’s football team puts it, “I will never understand fans from these terrible academic/athletic schools that need to have their teams competing on the highest level just to have their brains beat in.”

Let NMSU stand for dozens of American universities allowing themselves to bleed out as institutions for the sake of big-time football.

Let us once more, on this blog, attempt to understand the masochism that insists – against the simple sanity of one’s own university president, and a state senator – that hurling your expensive team against opponents who will always beat you by ten, twenty, thirty, forty points is a good thing.

I don’t want you to think that anyone from NMSU actually goes to these games. I mean, a few people do, but for most in the NMSU community, group psychosis apparently has its limits. Most people there prefer not to purchase pricey tickets in order to watch the players for their school get their brains bashed in.

At the same time, though, enough NMSU people want to get seasonally excited about new coaches and paradigms and shit that they refuse to let the president and the state senator divert football money toward, uh, education. An anti-intellectual school in an anti-intellectual state, NMSU’s thing is to sit on its ass being stupid while its team gets brained. Our purpose is to figure out why this is.

It’s not the spectacle of the brain bashing itself, since few attend the games. If attendance were good, our problem would be solved: We love gore, and the NMSU football team guarantees it. But people avert their eyes.

Since total massive loss is equally guaranteed, could a campy delectation of failure itself have set in? Are the denizens of NMSU Wildean rascals…?

No. They are sincere, ever-hopeful, dog-like fans.

Here’s the best I can do. The Buddha speaks always of compassion, and what’s going on at NMSU is a communal exemplification of this primary virtue. The hopelessly broken – ever freshly broken – body of this football team exteriorizes for an entire community the first noble truth of human suffering. The team is a precious sacrificial vessel through which, ritualistically, NMSU attains not intellectual but spiritual enlightenment.

… joke schools.

[University of New Mexico Police Department spokesman Lt. Robert] Haarhues said UNMPD’s biggest problem is intoxicated tailgaters leaving the parking lot without attending [football games].

“More people end up leaving than going inside to watch the game, and that can be a problem with driving,” he said. “We are trying to get more people to stay, but the fact that people are leaving probably has to do with the lack of success of the team. If they were better, maybe more people would watch.”

UNM: Just a bar.