Put aside the question whether the academic joke, financial catastrophe (UD thanks John for the link), and criminal bacchanalia university football represents makes it a terrific fit with American higher education. Put aside the fact that multiple high schools are unable to field a team because so few guys (thanks for the link, Charlie) are stupid enough to take part. Put aside the ritual militarization of high school games, with fights and gunshots becoming a structural part of the fun. (As Ravi, one of my readers, puts it, we’re heading toward “open carry on the gridiron.”)

Look merely at one professional team, the Raiders, which recently boasted the Three Violent and Insane Stooges (all were rapidly suspended or dumped or whatever).

UD doesn’t get it. If you really want to watch an insane obese male lumber about destroying everything in his path, you’ve already got the President.

… and nobody came.

Poor Rutgers.

… a $480,000 gift to an administrator fired almost as soon as he started is a drop in the bucket. Behold my recent Rutgers posts. Of course you and I know that the gift is rather in the way of a bribe not to disclose the institutional corruption the guy witnessed. I’m sure he’ll play along.

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Not everyone plays along.

… Rutgers-style.

This was a couple of years ago. The student’s question went to the immense disparity in the president’s salary and various coaches’ salaries. Annoyed that the president blew off the student, Mr UD pressed the president on problems in the athletics program.

The president of the University of Maryland responded to Mr UD along these lines: There’s little I can do about the program, and the program can blow up at any time.

UD has always been rather astonished by the president’s honesty; because this of course is the fundamental truth of all big-time university sports programs. The jock school president – in the favorite words of the second-highest paid employee in the entire state of Maryland – is a pussy bitch and a bitch pussy and a pussy pussy and a bitch bitch pussy pussy pussy.

And the jock school’s big-time sports program can indeed blow up at any time. If you know even a little about how they’re run – and the people who run them – you know why these programs keep blowing up.

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

Real men die for the University of Maryland football team, like 19-year-old Jordan McNair, who didn’t get much of a life, but at least lived it taunted as a pussy and tortured to death by a first-rate football power.

[S]ome number of Maryland football staff members probably belong in prison.

Which is to say that just as the university’s president anticipated, the program, having killed a player, has now blown up.

You need to go back to Rutgers’ celebrated basketball coach Mike Rice to get a sense of the sick sadism characteristic of the man we Maryland taxpayers each year pay $2.5 million. I mean, try reading through all of this without puking (puking by the way is something the UMD coach makes his players do … part of the school’s force-feed ’em til they’re monsters regime… ).

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

A Deadspin report concludes:

One perfectly reasonable question is why Durkin, Court, and Robinson, at the very least, haven’t already been fired. Former Maryland football staff members say the current coaching environment of the program is intimidation-based; current and former players say these men routinely use intimidation and humiliation as motivational tactics; current and former players say they have a pattern of pushing teenagers past the point of complete physical exhaustion, in some cases to weed out and punish players they’ve targeted as unwanted. A pattern has been described that makes what happened to Jordan McNair a likelihood, if not an inevitability, but it says deeply troubling things about what Maryland’s athletic department deems as acceptable coaching behavior that Durkin’s tactics weren’t rejected long before now.

But we know why they weren’t rejected. It’s really not about “what Maryland’s athletic department deems as acceptable coaching behavior,” because Durkin and Court were after all hired at great expense to torture teenagers to the point where they can win football games. It’s about Maryland’s administration.

So look at what the president of the university said to Mr UD. He has no control over the program. His job is to resolutely look the other way, and to irritably say nothing to people who insist on questioning him about a program over which, officially at least, he has authority.

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

It’s a mad mad mad mad world. Over in the shabby humanities buildings they’re committing seppuku if they fail even for a moment to use scrupulously sensitive, politically correct, language; in the sports palaces, they’re getting in front of 19-year-olds’ faces and spitting pussy and faggot and fucker and shit and bitch at them while making them run on a hot field until one of them actually dies from the abuse.

Far out.

But routine reality at many of America’s big-time sports universities.

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UPDATE: In response to another coach (Will Muschamp, South Carolina) passionately defending Durkin, since much of the reporting about his program is based on anonymous sources:

A player is dead, but Muschamp is more worried about attacking ESPN’s article and the staffer giving them information.

Glorious University of South Carolina.

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

As usual, Deadspin has the most trenchant response to Muschamp.

Boat check? That’s a new one on UD. Looked it up and all, and found nothing. I think the writer must have meant blank check?

It’s from an article about how Rutgers University does things like give an administrator who lasted one year in his position “a $480,000 sabbatical” year. Rest and recovery after a job well done! Plus you promise not to tell everyone how filthy the school is, right? Cuz we gave you all that money?

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UPDATE: UD thanks Brian, a reader, for explaining “boat check” to her.

It’s too good a last name for a murder mystery writer to pass up, and one Kennedy Killingsworth stars in a series by Betsy Brannon Green.

Meanwhile UD‘s buddy Mark Killingsworth, an entirely actual econ professor at Rutgers, continues his real world, who-did-in-Rutgers-University, investigation in a series of opinion pieces in the NJ Star-Ledger.

Here, though, the mystery merely lies in the numbers — as in, how does Rutgers lie about the athletics deficits that are doing it in? — not in the reason the numbers have added up over the years to a current $47.4 million.

You can of course list particular things that have happened at the school. A commenter on Mark’s piece nicely describes one part of the deal in this way:

[It’s the old] wash/rinse/repeat cycle. Hire expensive coaches. Give them extensions which are not warranted. Coaches under perform, teams are terrible, fire/buy them out and then repeat.

Or, in Mark’s words:

[A]thletics deficit spending makes bigger deficits and lots of embarrassments, including personnel decisions that led to four athletics directors in nine years, three football coaches in seven years and over $9 million in severance pay.

But as to the larger mystery: No mystery at all. Put a bunch of unsupervised guys together, give them funny money, and WHEEEEEEE…

… I mean… If you’re having trouble knowing where to laugh (there are many laugh-locations), UD will insert parenthetical LOLs to help you.

Ready?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Oh right. I need to remind you that … well, let UD‘s pal Mark Killingsworth remind you. Read this.

Ok? Now are you ready? Here goes.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

It’s been another difficult week being a Rutgers football fan. Keith Sargeant of NJ Advance Media reported on Wednesday that starting safety K.J. Gray and reserve linebacker Brendan DeVera had been dismissed from the program. On Thursday night, Sargeant reported as many as eight players were currently under investigation for credit card fraud [LOL] by the Rutgers police department. Sargeant’s colleague, James Kratch, also reported that Gray was recently charged for an incident in June that included driving with an open container and possession of marijuana. Training camp is less than three weeks away from beginning and the Rutgers football team already has their backs against the wall this season. For fans, this Friday the 13th certainly feels like another horror film sequel.

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.

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

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.

UD has long said that in a few years schools like Rutgers – run by jokesters and jocksters – will begin phasing out their economics departments, or at the very least introducing litmus tests for new hires.

Econ professors are among the very few on any campus who can actually run the numbers on athletics programs. The loudest among these professors often have access to the local newspaper’s opinion columns, and they can stir up outrage against massive sports deficits. The cleanest thing to do will be to shut them, and their departments, down. You could, short of that, hire only economists who have demonstrated that no amount of sports-related deficit is too great to outweigh their adoration of athletics.

Meanwhile, Rutgers has the curse of Mark Killingsworth, an econ prof who relentlessly, in opinion piece after opinion piece, chronicles what he describes as the brainlessness and insanity of that school’s president and board of trustees as they drive the place into incredible debt.

[The] real [athletics] deficit for 2016-17 can now stand up and be counted: it 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.

If you think this is bad … there’s worse. From the university’s response to another OPRA request, I learned that Rutgers currently has an outstanding total of $33.13 million in “internal debt” — the last of which won’t be paid off until 2030.

… The members of Rutgers’ Board of Governors have shown that, collectively, they are either too ignorant or too timid to do anything to restore even the most modest degree of fiscal sanity to Rutgers athletics: for them, anything goes. Apparently, they don’t understand, or don’t care, that athletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.

The only way to shut this guy up is to dump his entire department – call it a fiscal emergency, brought on by a temporarily high athletics deficit.

UD‘s having trouble making sense of this story. Give her a moment.

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And here’s the obligatory I AM STUNNED TO DISCOVER THAT A (choose one from Column A)

FOOTBALL COACH

BASKETBALL COACH

ATHLETIC DIRECTOR

is a super-sanctimonious-Christian fraud! You never see that combination at our universities! You never see a noisy pious moral scold who turns out to be a greedy horny cheating little shit!

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Hearken, ye sinners! O list, ye lost ones!

The Hugh Freeze saga at Ole Miss haveth everything. It haveth the alleged recruiting violations, the former player on the holy draft night of 2016 who telleth of the cash payments, the aggrieved former coach (Houston Nutt), the disciples from the NCAA Committee on Infractions, the lawyers, the escort service, the “misdial” to the escort service, the suggestion from the athletic director that perhaps the “misdial” was part of a “pattern.”

It haveth the mingling of the gods on the fields and the gods in the sky.

“I don’t stand over them, make them do it,” coach Freeze sayeth of his players and his religion to Kent Babb of The Washington Post in 2014. “Certainly they hopefully see that it’s important to me and maybe the way I live and the way these other coaches live. Maybe it attracts them to it.”

The Twitter feed of the man from Independence, Miss., doth lineth with his Bible.

Here we seeeth the juxtaposition that will never stop astounding, the one that has breathed through the whole story of this most American of games since Rutgers playeth Princeton in 1869 and the legend goes that a witnessing professor hollereth: “You men will come to no Christian end!”

Here, a grubby game (and deliciously so) intersects with a peacocky purity.

A perennial jockshop joke on this blog, CMU is shutting down the academic apparatus of the school to put on football games no one attends. Faculty is too expensive there, which creates a drag on the school’s sports subsidy.

Explaining this to professors and students in an open forum is certainly a challenge, but UD finds CMU’s approach to it impressive and instructive (pay attention, Rutgers).

1. Provide a safe house for the president [“CMU President George Ross was not in attendance.”]. A popular variant of this is to have the president attend, but be sure she has just been appointed the most recent of twelve or so interim presidents in the last three or four years. This allows the president to be there, but to explain in answer to all questions that she doesn’t know anything.

2. In their answer to all questions, administrators in charge of the public meeting must never use the phrase “student education,” and instead always use the phrase “student experience.” The adjectives holistic, organic, comprehensive, all-around, full, multifaceted, diverse and community may precede the phrase.

3. Constant references to the infinite delicate complexity of the budget are a must; the audience must be made to understand that a vanished faculty and behemoth empty stadiums and a president who presides over this outcome always getting raises are all, according to the math, budget imperatives that keep the university in glowing health.

If you follow University Diaries, you know that her response to the recent spate of banning confessionals is why did it take you so long. But anyway.

He told [one player], in front of the team, he should transfer to a “transgender league,” multiple players said.

At some universities, basketball coaches just go ahead and call players cunts or fags. At UD‘s GW, the coach allegedly goes that extra mile, lifts his comment above cliche, looks for a fresh way to say it…

Speaking of saying, though… Faced with some pretty persuasive evidence that GW’s got a real angry paranoid at the helm (don’t make his daughter cry), pulling down one of the highest salaries on campus (Don’t know how much. Will guess. Around $500,000? With this and that, could be a lot more.), UD‘s institution is abundantly not talking.

[GW’s Title IX coordinator] did not return an email, and a school spokesman said he was not available to comment. Interim Provost Forrest Maltzman declined to comment through a spokesman. Despite repeated requests, the school made no officials available for interviews. The school declined to answer questions about its inquiry into [Mike] Lonergan, or even acknowledge it, saying it does not comment on personnel issues as a matter of policy.

——

Brian Sereno, the executive director of athletics communications, did not immediately return the [GW] Hatchet’s request for comment.

——

Hokay! Get the message!

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

Gets a bit colorful now, and UD knows that her readers are sensitive souls. So – SELF-ABUSE WARNING.

Five current and former players said Lonergan told players [GW Athletic Director Patrick] Nero requested the practice tapes so he could masturbate while viewing them in his office. The players said Lonergan also told them Nero had engaged in a sexual relationship with a member of the team. Players said they found those comments to be shocking and offensive, with no grounding in reality.

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

You’re expecting some concluding words of wisdom?

Oh, go ask Bobby Knight and Mike Rice and the rest of them. They’ll tell you what it takes to win.

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Actually, UD does have some words of comfort for GW, as this story rapidly goes viral.

You know you’re one of the big boys when a whacked out scandal about your allegedly whacked out coach hits the mainstream media. You cannot buy the sort of publicity the school is about to get. Think of what that Saturday Night Live thing about Mike Rice did for Rutgers (start at 1:00)…

(Lonergan recently turned down a job offer from the selfsame Rutgers. People there seem to think they, uh, dodged a bullet. A second bullet.)

But okay look let’s take that last bit out of its parenthesis so that UD can share with you the following thought. This country is close to hiring as head coach a man just like Rice and Knight (Knight was in fact invited to speak at the Republican convention) and (allegedly) Lonergan and the scads of other abusive and twisted university coaches UD has followed over the years of this blog.

Every time Donald Trump steps on the brutality gas he wins more votes. Every time coaches step on the brutality gas they win more games.

It is quite obviously the way you win.

Because for every one sadist, there’s apparently one million masochists.

I have no idea what to do about it. Just noting it.

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

Here’s a tweet:

Don’t know why coaches and schools refuse comments in these situations.

So yeah it’s odd and dumb to say nothing even as the story goes really really big. UD will tell you, if, like this guy, you don’t know why there’s this initial silence, what’s going on.

Think lots of moving parts. As we speak, an extremely large and complex institution is gathering and consulting with amazing numbers and types of people. Lawyers. Public relations experts. Players. University spokespeople. Administrators. Coaches. Trustees. Boosters. Atlantic 10 people. NCAA people.

You better believe that Lonergan is also lawyering up like mad. People like Lonergan are not in the business of losing. Lonergan is just like the Ur-Lonergan, who says

“We’re going to win so much. You’re going to get tired of winning. you’re going to say, ‘Please Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don’t win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I’m going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again.’ You’re gonna say, ‘Please.’ I said, ‘Nope, nope. We’re gonna keep winning.’

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

And all of this is taking place in the typical university context of interim provosts and ever-rotating deans and presidents who have just announced they’re leaving. Yet you need one strong singular voice in crises like these. It’s gonna take a bit of work.

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But wait, UD! Wait!

How did it happen?

Okay, so here’s the drill. Ambitious university is all agog because it’s got a respectable basketball team that brings in fans and revenue and attracts media attention. Sure, they’ve heard reports that suggest the coach may be el mayorly crazed motherfucker, but what coach isn’t? Bobby Knight threw chairs at people and today he’s an elder statesman. Florid complaints start to come in from the players, but it’s just a few malcontents and anyway when they get truly pissed they leave the program. Problem solved.

And now the new amazing contract with all that money, and the wins, and the adulation, have, let’s speculate, made the coach feel his methods are brilliant and he can get away with anything (see Coach Trump). His behavior maybe becomes so bizarre that a critical mass of players finally goes public with the problem.

The university now desperately needs a run and gun game, but because they’ve been in denial all they can do is dribble while Rome burns.

Judge Aaron Persky probably regrets his decision to go unconscionably easy on young gifted and white Brock Turner in the Stanford University rape case, but it’s too late now. He has sealed his and Turner’s legacy.

On the up side, this historic case has riveted national attention to rape, much as Rutgers sports hero Ray Rice’s elevator ride brought us all together on the subject of domestic abuse. Although Rice provided graphic evidence of his ability to physically destroy an opponent, he has of this writing been unable to secure another NFL placement.

Another up side: Unlike the open air gang rape during Spring Break at Panama City Beach —

The video shows several men assaulting an incapacitated woman on Panama City Beach while a crowd of spring-break revelers watches…

— which the crowd filmed but didn’t give a shit about (police only discovered it later, when they got hold of the video), the Stanford open air rape drew the attention of two students, who held down the rapist and called the police.