Zzzz… wha’?

How bout this.

In fact, an analysis of Forms 990 for approximately 100,000 organizations filing the annual report to the IRS in 2014 published recently by the Wall Street Journal found 2,700 nonprofit officials were paid more than $1 million. Although most were administrators at hospitals and universities, there were also many football coaches and executives at endowments like the Harvard Management Company. Nonprofit organizations respond that they are trying to attract the best candidates and are merely adopting compensation practices similar to those in the private sector.

Get it? See what happened? TAKE TO THE STREETS. FLOOD YOUR REPRESENTATIVE’S OFFICE WITH EMAILS. THIS IS A SERIOUS MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE.

Do I need to spell it out for you? Do you see what’s happening here?

You want to spend your kid’s tuition money on sky-rocketing multimillion dollar salaries for coaches and on twenty million dollar a year compensation for university money managers, and here comes the IRS to tell you that these aren’t appropriate non-profit expenditures! They even have the gall to say that giving all that money to coaches and money managers diverts tax-exempt money from students and shit! Whatever that means.

So they’re putting a crushing new tax on excess non-profit compensation, which means universities are likely to pull back on these amounts and you will have to pay the managers and coaches less.

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I know. So far this is all numbers and abstractions. Here is an actual story, from the University of Kentucky, of how it will be.

“The excise tax that was levied in the new tax bill is big,” [UK athletic director Mitch] Barnhart said. “That will have an impact on every athletic department.”

A change in the tax code requires non-profit entities to pay a 21 percent excise tax on payments to its five highest-paid employees that are making more than $1 million a year.

For every dollar over the $1 million mark, UK must pay the 21 percent tax, which for UK Athletics includes the salaries of men’s basketball coach John Calipari, football coach Mark Stoops and women’s basketball coach Matthew Mitchell.

According to figures reported to the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2017, Calipari was the highest-paid person on campus that year at $7.24 million, followed by Stoops at $3.9 million and Mitchell at $1.28 million.

The university also will be paying the excise tax on the salaries of Phillip Tibbs ($1,195,600), a physician, and Michael Karpf ($1,123,179), who ran the medical center until recently, UK spokesman Jay Blanton told the Herald-Leader.

With the new salary bump and potential bonuses outlined in the new amendment to Barnhart’s contract, the UK athletics director might top the $1 million mark in the near future. His base salary will be $1,025,000 starting in 2020, per the amendment.

This year’s figures were a part of the $147.7 million dollar 2019 budget approved by the university’s Board of Trustees recently, simply noted as “escalating operating expenses.”

How will these escalating expenses be paid? The same way other expenses are.

“How we make up for it on the other side is really difficult,” Barnhart said. “We have to work at that.”

I know you can do it, guys! A grassroots campaign of outraged professors, students, and parents will take to the streets and have that punitive 21% rolled back before you can say Nick Saban.

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Again, here’s the challenge, stated simply:

Every organization that pays a salary of more than $1 million per year to any of its top five earning employees will face a stiff new 21 percent excise tax. That means any nonprofit-designated charity, college, and hospital that routinely asks us for donations, or charges expensive tuition or medical bills will have to justify paying those high salaries against a hefty new tax.

Get out there and do what has to be done: justify.

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Know your enemies.

In [a recent] email to me, [tax law professor John] Colombo wrote, “Big time college sports is already a cesspool of money, and the federal government doesn’t need to be subsidizing 50-yard-line seats or skyboxes at the University of Alabama or Notre Dame, or Michigan or anywhere else.”

Amazingly, both the House and the Senate now appear to agree with Colombo. A spokesman for Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — and a Texan — told the Austin American-Statesman that the deduction is “the epitome of a special-interest loophole” and that it was forcing taxpayers to “subsidize front-row seats and luxury boxes for wealthy boosters.”

Now that Tariq Ramadan is in police custody over alleged multiple, strikingly violent, rapes, let’s cut right to the chase, and recall Mona Eltahawy’s brilliant Foreign Policy essay on the widespread hatred of women by men in the Middle East.

Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating “virginity tests” merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is “not severe” or “directed at the face.” What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it’s not better than you think. It’s much, much worse. Even after these “revolutions,” all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian’s blessing — or divorce either.

How can anyone be surprised that, according to several women who have now spoken out, a man who refuses to condemn stoning female adulterers, a man who wrote the preface to “a book that cites the Qur’anic passage enjoining husbands to beat their wives under certain circumstances,” allegedly carried out particularly thorough and vicious assaults against women? And these were women who approached him to tell him how much his work meant to them.

French journalist Caroline Fourest (catch her film, Red Snake, about women soldiers fighting ISIS, when it comes out) began hearing from victims years and years ago (she wrote a high-profile book attacking Ramadan for other reasons). Rumors have abounded for years and years. And yet this country tried in 2004 to recruit him to a professorship at – of all places – the University of Notre Dame, and only evil Homeland Security’s refusal to let him come here kept Notre Dame from offering the same hearty defenses of him that Oxford University ultimately offered.

At this late date in the history of scandalous Baylor University, we shouldn’t be surprised that this very assertively Christian University lacks the basic moral clarity a local newspaper columnist displays. “[W]hat Zamora did was illegal. But to me it’s not about the legality and more about what Zamora’s actions say about him as a person. A good, kindhearted, person doesn’t abuse innocent animals.”

[Baylor] fans just endured a disgusting sexual assault scandal and many are having a hard time supporting the team after that. But we were told all the guilty parties were removed from the team, so we’re not rooting for sexual predators. Baylor shouldn’t turn around and ask those who stood by them to root for an animal abuser.

Actually, Baylor just stonewalled – rather than endured – its way through a sexual assault scandal. It was dragged kicking and screaming to doing the right thing.

Baylor University is that most curious thing: a Christian institution seemingly designed to encourage cruelty and viciousness.

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

What I’m talking about at Baylor goes beyond the moral dissonance demanded of all serious football fans – you must adore a sport so freakishly violent that its beau idéal is Richie Incognito, even as you tell yourself you’re adoring clean-cut all-American fun.

But that’s nothing. That’s step one. Now place yourself at Baylor. Or at Notre Dame. Pile university and Christianity on top of all that dissonance. Reconcile vast mass worship of a hyper-concussive sport, quite a few of whose standout players feature, on the field and in their private lives, exactly the sort of lunatic aggression you’d expect, with some stubborn vestigial notion in your mind, some vague remembrance, that the bloody ritual you’re adoring takes place on hallowed intellectual and spiritual ground.

It should be difficult to enjoy yourself unadulteratedly under these conditions, as the bullies, brawlers, domestic abusers, rapists, and animal floggers (fuck academic cheaters; forget cheaters; c’est entendu) bloody each other down there…

But hey. Turns out not only isn’t it difficult; it’s easy. It’s a pleasure.

Because – to state the bleeding obvious – violence is the primary object of worship in the world of Baylor University. You’re sitting in Waco – home of last year’s enormous bikers-with-guns melee/massacre. You’re sitting in the heart of Trump territory. Your choice for national leader is the man who has turned a presidential election into The Rime of the Ancient Tackler.

Strangely, you don’t even like nobly violent people; you cheer on chickenshits like Trump – a man who crapped all over a war hero because he was captured and “I like people who weren’t captured.” You cheer on players who beat up women, children, and animals.

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

Some like it hot.

Hot and bloody.

It’s the Baylor way.

… officers.”

Or, as the Notre Dame University football program would put it, GAME ON!

Buy a drink and pull a chair
Up to the edge of the dance floor
Bouncers bouncing through the night
Trying to stop or start a fight

Six University of Notre Dame football players got in so much trouble between last Friday night and Saturday morning that UD is worried they won’t be ready for church today.

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But that’s the least of it. Six players is a lot for a team to lose, and there’s a season of football to be played.

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No, no, calm down. They’ll all be back on the field in minutes. America’s most famous Catholic university offers compassion to its students who carry loaded unregistered handguns, beat up policemen, and resist arrest. After Friday and Saturday, there’s Sunday, when you receive forgiveness.

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

So. Six Notre Dame FB players arrested overnight. One more and [Coach] Brian Kelly gets a free sub, I think.

Rick Gregg

Oh yeah? This commentary in the aftermath of UNC’s two-decade-long massive academic fraud ups the the rhetoric-ante and informs us that universities have souls, UNC has a soul, and it’s looking at its soul being ripped out.

Most immediately, the soul-threat the writer has in mind is trouble with a couple of accrediting bodies; but you and I know that beyond a brief probation, UNC will be fine. The NCAA has let it off lightly and so will the accreditors. All will be well. Indeed, UD has no doubt that in a few years things will have so supremely settled down that UNC will be inaugurating an improved academic fraud game plan for its athletes and other interested students.

But this matter of a university’s soul… UD has done some scooting about online, and people do make a habit of assigning souls to universities. The soul seems to be a central meaningful place or group: the library, the faculty. It may be a common faith (Notre Dame’s Catholicism.) Or it may be non-profitness rather than commercialization.

Here’s the Soul Man himself, Cardinal Newman:

[The university] is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation.

Or in UNC’s terms:

It is almost unbeatable in its knowledge of free throws; it is almost its own search-firm in its knowledge of football recruits; it has an almost supernatural advantage in its freedom from standards and integrity; it has almost the repose of sleep, because nothing can enlighten it; it has the beauty and harmony of hunky competitors.

By which UD means that while most writers, after Newman, consider a university’s soul some central meaningful spiritual/intellectual aspect of the place, after UNC, writers will need to take on board the fact that the only soulfully alive place on some campuses seems to be the athletic department. Surely the soul of Penn State, Auburn, Baylor, Alabama, the University of Oregon, and UNC lies somewhere in the vicinity of the locker room. And that is a soul that no accrediting body can rip out. Only a bad coach can do that.

Things have taken a sinister turn at Boston College, where despite raking in huge yearly sums simply by being in a big-time league, the entire university, starting with its president, is suffering from ACCedia – the dark night of the soul in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Unlike its sister affliction, acedia, which refers to a “gradual indifference to the faith,” ACCedia involves a gradual indifference to being a fan. The money’s still coming in, the games are still being staged, but no one cares, and almost no one shows up in the stands.

Allow UD to draw from her years of experience writing about university football and basketball in order to suggest some reasons for this strange turn of events.

The big glaring reason is this one: You’re either willing to give your full soul over to football, or you are not. You’re either fully committed to your completion percentage, or you are not. You’re either willing to spend most of your school’s money on athletics, admit academically unqualified players, and wrest all control over sports decisions from the school’s president, or you are not. Boston College languishes in a limbo of less than thorough football fervency.

To be sure, BC is doing some things right: It has appointed as the highest-paid person at a Catholic college a man whose every other word, on national television, is fuck. “[The football coach’s] profane sideline behavior [was] most damaging [during] a nationally televised loss to Notre Dame at Fenway Park, first when a camera focused on Addazio shouting the F-word, then when he received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for berating the officials.” You want a Christian role model at the very top, a signal lesson in how to behave if you want to earn the lord’s rewards, and Steve Addazio fits the bill.

And you want to schedule hard-hitting games.

In one of BC’s most embarrassing episodes last season, the Eagles defeated a stunningly inferior team from Howard University, 76-0, the game shortened by 10 minutes because of the mismatch.

That’s the kind of gladiatorial combat that puts butts in seats. Another way Addazio is earning his money.

But utter spiritual alignment with football does not end here. “God does not want you for a fair-weather friend,” as Marilla says to Anne at Green Gables farm, and the Boston College community has not yet learned this lesson. Being a fan is not merely about cheering on wins; it is about cheering on losses as well. If you cannot maintain enthusiastic faith in a team that loses most of its games, you are demonstrating a fundamental incapacity to perceive the divinity of sport.

The solution must begin in the soul – the collective soul of Boston College. UD suspects, for instance, an insufficiency of gridiron liturgy during public worship at BC. At every possible point during the mass and other sacred occasions, football (and basketball, if there’s time) should be invoked. BC has much to learn from Notre Dame here. And from Florida State.

… background, the film The Hunting Ground begins to generate commentary.

Along with institutions like Harvard, Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “The Hunting Ground” takes on the fraternity system — in particular, Sigma Alpha Epsilon — and even throws down a challenge of a sort for the National Football League with a not-so-subtle suggestion that teams should think twice about drafting one of the top college prospects, Jameis Winston.

Mr. Winston, the Florida State University quarterback, is the focus of one of the film’s more incendiary segments. The Heisman Trophy winner in 2013, he was accused in 2012 of sexual assault by a female student. He has asserted his innocence, did not face criminal charges and was recently cleared of violating Florida State’s student code of conduct by the university. He is widely expected to be among the first several players chosen in this spring’s N.F.L. draft. But “The Hunting Ground,” directed by Kirby Dick, makes a mockery of Florida State’s investigation, and Mr. Winston’s accuser, Erica Kinsman, speaks publicly about the case for the first time in the film, at length.

Charlie Weis. The now-fired Kansas football coach didn’t do much winning on the field in Lawrence (6-22) — but has any coach ever benefited more financially from not winning?

Kansas buyout. According to published reports, Kansas will have to pay Weis $5.625 million to fulfill his contractual buyout.

Notre Dame buyout. The Fighting Irish canned Weis in 2009 after he went 35-27 in South Bend over five years. According to a USA Today report, the total price of Notre Dame’s buyout (which is ongoing) of Weis will be $19 million.

Almost $25 million. By my figures, that means Charlie Weis will make $24.625 million over the course of his life for not working/getting fired.

… note that when the New York Times went in search of a sage, gravitas-rich voice on the absolutely shocking academic fraud at Notre Dame, they could only find Dave Schmidly.

Schmidly! Dave! Dave – comic-book ex-president of the unbelievably corrupt University of New Mexico; a man who tried hiring his son for a high-level university position [scroll down for some Schmidly posts]; a man drummed out of office by faculty… Yes, get Schmidly on the the phone! He’ll have something sage to say!

And he does. He obligingly knits his brow for the New York Times about how, you know, competition to recruit the best football players “increases the likelihood of people cutting corners.”

Dave would know about that! Why interview lots of people for a $90,000 a year UNM job when your kid’s sitting right here?

… Eh. It’s not as though the NYT could find a clean president of a big-time sports university to interview. It’s more a kind of how far down the list do we want to go thing… Donna Shalala? Yikes. No. Hey, there’s Tressel! He even used to be a coach! … Oh yeah. Scratch that…. Next…?

At Notre Dame, Touchdown Jesus scores the biggest touchdown of his life.

… football is also one of the world’s highest-profile Catholic universities: Notre Dame. ND has long been a very scandalous university sports location. I’m not talking only about several players being under arrest or investigation at any given time – that’s routine. I mean that people there positively worship not only coaches but the very grass their coaches walk upon. This is strange and unsettling behavior.

As was the behavior of one of their football players last month. He was arrested for “head butting and punching vehicles” and then threatening to kill the police who were called to the scene.

Beating up cars, using your head to butt cars… more strange and unsettling behavior at a university that’s really gone over the top in terms of the bizarre and the dangerous.

Football is a religion, they say, and its god, these days, is the Godzillatron, the Adzillatron, the Jumbotron… like the deity, this massive high definition video screen with massive advertisements screaming at you from the moment you enter the stadium to the moment you leave, goes by many names…

Ever since 2009, when the University of Texas got the first one in the country, dozens of other American universities have gotten their own monster video display. The one proposed for a new stadium at the University of Nevada Las Vegas will run the entire length of the field.

What’s strange about the massively expensive Adzillatron is that everyone hates it; and indeed many people point to it as contributing in an important way to the emptying out of the university stadium. Where’d everyone go? Why are many students – even at places like the University of Alabama – not going to the games, or going but leaving early? Tons of explanations have been offered, but UD thinks that the phenomenon of the Godzillatron, while only part of the answer, is an illuminating focal point for any discussion of the terrific fiasco for which contemporary American university football is headed. Of course one has to toss into the too-disgusted-to-attend mix all the scandals – criminal, hemorrhagic, sexual, academic – plus all the overpaid coaches and castrated presidents blahblah… But the heart of university football is the stadium experience, and if that experience had been able to retain a shred of authenticity, the fiasco might have been averted.

Here’s what happens at a [Mississippi State] football game these days: 3rd & 7, we’re on defense, tie game, offense calls timeout. [Colubus Ortho Harlem shake, Kiss cam]. Everyone’s attention is drawn to the jumbotron, away from focusing on the task at hand – getting our defense pumped to stop the other team!

I don’t need a bunch of distractions. I’m there to watch a football game.

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

[University of] Michigan football fans don’t just love football. They love Michigan football — the history, the traditions, the rituals — the timeless elements that have grown organically over decades. They are attracted to the belief that Michigan football is based on ideals that go beyond the field, do not fade with time, and are passed down to the next generation — the very qualities that separate a game at the Big House from the Super Bowl.

After the 2013 Notre Dame game, [our Athletic Director] said, “You’re a 17-18 year old kid watching the largest crowd in the history of college football with airplanes flying over and Beyonce introducing your halftime show? That’s a pretty powerful message about what Michigan is all about, and that’s our job to send that message.”

Is that really what Michigan is all about? Fly-overs, blaring rock music and Beyonce? Beyonce is to Michigan football what Bo Schembechler is to — well, Beyonce. No, Michigan is all about lifelong fans who’ve been coming together for decades to leave a bit of the modern world behind — and the incessant marketing that comes with it — and share an authentic experience fueled by the passion of the team, the band and the students. That’s it.

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Coach says: Thou shalt have no other Godzillatrons before me. Narcotic simulacral standardized screen gigantism is the heart of the postmodern doctrine being preached… Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled… But keep thine eye upon the Godzillatron which I have given to you and thine lip upon the fruit of the vine which also I have given unto you, and rest in the arms of the Lord forever… And yet in their ornery unpredictable way Americans are beginning to break away from the faith. They seem to be experiencing it as inauthentic. Not the true faith.

[T]he fiasco over locker-room bullying between the Miami Dolphins’ Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito reminded everyone this season how eccentric football now is culturally — not because of a hidden health problem, but just in its explicit, inherent violence. The battle fought in the press between the players’ “sources” unveiled football as a dark, subterranean hive of old-school warrior values and character-building sadism. Taunts and racial imprecations were openly justified, the way military floggings once were: as salutary hide-tougheners.

It’s funny to watch jock schools like Colorado and Chapel Hill hyperventilate about their integrity when football, in all its dark subterranean hiviness, is such an important part of their institutions.

This blog has duly chronicled several sadistic university football coaches (basketball too, of course, but we don’t want this post to get too long) – men who, with each new revelation of their treatment of players, get fired and then passed off to a new school.

Maybe football should be spun out and – in accordance with its actual nature – made just one more non-academic bloodsport:

It is interesting how the increasingly popular spectacle of mixed martial arts (MMA) competition so quickly secured a perimeter of social acceptance for itself. MMA is not only violent; it is violence. But the risks are blatant enough for us not to pity the competitors. (Their locker rooms are probably pretty crude places, too.) Football players, by contrast, are not supposed to be pure, uncivilized instruments of brutality. They are supposed to be technicians, strategists, artists whose work involves only a limited element of cruelty.

Moreover, they are nurtured in a system of universities as “student-athletes,” and a corrupt, increasingly bizarre system at that. The game grew out of educational establishments in the first place. No one is trying to integrate MMA with the curriculum at Notre Dame or Harvard; MMA was invented too late for that.

Think of this observation when you read (as you often read) commentators arguing that the solution to the problem of corrupt university football is to make football an academic major. As the game gets more and more purely violent, its claims to intellectuality, disciplinarity, grow.

… a West Virginia newspaper.

It begins with a July 6 letter from good ol’ Wade Gilley, president of Marshall University (background on Marshall here) in the ‘nineties. Wade went on to head the University of Tennessee but had to leave onaccounta he did a few things that seem like they didn’t sit well with other people there. Yeah, ol’ Wade had to scoot.

Now Wade’s letter is a model of its type. What you got here is the good ol’ boy reminiscing bout the good ol’ days when men was men and Marshall was a beautiful paradise of football, football, and football.

I … remember being invited to a national meeting of 20 university presidents and 20 Fortune 500 corporate CEOS in the late 1990s and hearing many positive remarks about Marshall. In fact, Father Malloy, the president of Notre Dame at that time, approached me at a reception and said, “Wade, some of us were just talking about the success of your football program and we were wondering just how it happened.”

And that’s just one story about rich important people flocking around me wanting to know my secret of success!

After sharing more stories about how fantastic football is for universities, Wade concludes:

And there is no doubt that football, which is largely self-supporting, has been and will be a positive factor in promoting Marshall’s national image.

A little nay-saying (“Self-supporting? Hardly.”) does pop up among the commenters, but a July 13 opinion piece from a Marshall finance professor really puts the kibosh on the thing. Dallas Brozik is a hard-nosed guy and he ain’t having any of it.

Despite the fact that one of his students, on Rate My Professors, says Dallas doesn’t like English majors, Dallas writes really well. Let’s see how he does it, step by step. Scathing Online Schoolmarm will interrupt his piece with comments in parenthesis.

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Wade Gilley’s recent letter concerning the ongoing discussion about the Marshall University budget was quite interesting. [Now usually SOS complains about the profoundly uninteresting word interesting. But Dallas here’s going to use it slyly, in the manner of Oscar Wilde…] Just as a magician uses sleight of hand to mislead the audience, those who wish to keep the university budget a black hole keep spreading misinformation.

I have no doubt [Brozik will repeat the formulation I have no doubt throughout his piece.]   that Dr. Gilley met with folks at all levels who commented on our football team, which at the time had a winning record. Sports always makes good small talk. I have no doubt that we had the best athletes and coaches despite the legal and criminal records of some of these individuals.  [Note how slyly Brozik has already gotten two points across:  Gilley’s a maundering fool; and the teams he’s teary-eyed about were pretty smelly.]

I have no doubt that Dr. Gilley met a person whose daughter had chosen to go to law school at a certain university, supposedly because of the school’s athletic program. I also have no doubt that I would not want this person to represent me in a court of law unless it is about sports law.  [Brozik’s calm, reiterated I have no doubt is wonderful.  It signals a kind of elaborate emotional self-control, a determination to be gentlemanly and long-suffering about Gilley.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been an important factor in the increase in enrollment at Marshall. Dr. Stephen Kopp became president on July 1, 2005. For the academic year 2005-2006, the official enrollment of the university was 13,920. The official enrollment for 2012-2013 was 13,708. This implies that the football program, or whatever, created negative enrollment growth.  [Oh, don’t confuse me with numbers!  And that or whatever is wonderful too  – another sly polite little suggestion that Wade is somewhat whacked out.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been a very positive economic growth factor for Huntington. Since Dr. Gilley’s time, the population of Huntington has decreased and many businesses have closed. The 2012 State of Well-Being Report from Gallup-Healthways ranks Huntington as 188 out of 189. Check the want ads section of today’s paper to see how many job openings exist and at what levels. There has been no economic miracle in Huntington over the last several decades, football or not. [You can see ol’ Wade putting a hand over each ear at this point and saying LALALALALA I can’t hear you I can’t hear you…]

Wade Gilley left Marshall under his own cloud [We won’t even go into his University of Tennessee cloud.]; why he wants to get involved in this discussion is strange. He has no dog in this fight. He is old news. He admits he has little insight into the current budget situation, but he has no doubt that a football program which is not self-supporting promotes Marshall’s national image. Dr. Gilley is entitled to his opinion, but opinions are like bellybuttons; everybody has one but very few should be aired in public.  [SOS would drop the way down-home belly button thing.  Brozik doesn’t need it; and it breaks his terrific tone of restrained contempt.]

Dr. Kopp promised “transparency” in April.  [Only in his last paragraph does Brozik turn to Marshall’s current football-concussed president.  Nice move.  It puts MU’s latest loser squarely in the company of Gilley.]  He still has not opened the books for review, even though state law requires him to do so. The current problem is one of accountability for state funds and the tuition and fees paid by students. Those who try to frame this as an anti-sports question are either misled or trying to be misleading. The budget for Marshall University is important to the entire community, and that budget should be examined. The time for opinions is over. It is time for action. It is time for Dr. Kopp to live up to his promise of transparency and open the books.