As the University of North Carolina sport scandal begins to take off, pay attention to the details. People use phrases like sports culture all the time (Penn State, we are told, has to confront its sports culture) but until you look at things like the background of the trustees at Auburn or the background of the people who run the academic support program for athletes at North Carolina, you don’t grasp the reality.

UD attended a university sports conference a couple of years ago, here in Washington, where a high-ranking administrator at a local university demanded to know why coaches and coaching staff were not professors. They are teaching, after all; and erasing the line between coaches and professors will heal the rift between athletics and academics, making the university one big happy family.

If it seems a grotesque idea, it shouldn’t. It’s already being implemented, in a way, at a lot of universities, where the president is little more than a sports nut with impressive corporate or political ties, several of the trustees played football or basketball for the school, and plenty of professors sit on sports-oversight committees and don’t do anything other than enjoy the free tickets and other perks they get to make sure they don’t do anything.

“The athletic enterprise has grown so large and so remunerative that it may not be appropriate at universities anymore,” said Lew Margolis, a [University of North Carolina] public health professor.

Yes, it has grown into the university, to the point where we’re supposed to shed tears because Penn State and its surrounding towns and villages will go bankrupt because of football sanctions. Penn State created and sustained a happy seamless valley where children got fucked in its showers by one of its coaches and now just because of that you’re going to remove the very basis of our economy and indeed of our valley life itself?

Take it out of universities. It’s of course fully appropriate for the larger culture, which laps up the much viler world of professional football. But it is really rather inappropriate at universities.

… of America’s multiple university football scandals is touched on in this letter to the editor:

The juxtaposition of a cartoon about the Penn State scandal and Steve Ford’s column July 15 on the [University of North Carolina] athletics/academic mess caused me to think that, in a perverse way, UNC-Chapel Hill should thank Penn State. If the national media were not caught up in Penn State’s football-related criminality, they might be focused on UNC’s mendacity instead.

It’s like – how far back does your football scandal memory go? Isn’t the University of Miami already gone? Everybody was mega-fretting over that one so recently… And the letter writer’s right – Chapel Hill’s beyond-grotesque academic scandal (and unlike Penn State and U Miami, Chapel Hill has until recently been seen as a serious university) has evaporated in the Penn State shower-mist.

It’s an American thing. UD’s married to a Pole who comes from an old accomplished family. He remembers everything and everyone from the fourteenth century on. UD’s a typical American. Comes from nuthin and can’t remember – doesn’t know – anything from more than a couple of generations back.

In the case of football scandals, Americans can’t remember anything from more than a month back.

In the most recent sports school scandal, North Carolina at Chapel Hill has asked a professor who offered pretend courses to football players to pay up.

UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp told trustees Friday that Julius Nyang’oro was asked to repay $12,000 for teaching a 2011 summer course as an independent study rather than a lecture.

Does anyone really think this guy — who was chair of his department, and who will be allowed to retire with full honors at this end of this year despite the fact that he taught tons of bogus courses — is going to pay the university this money?

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Longer article, with many important comments, here.

… essay? Opinion piece? Indictment? Not sure what to call it.

It appears in ESPN, of all places, and expresses a strange emotion – hopelessness, I guess. There’s something religious, something sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God about it. It recalls some of the most disgusting scandals in college football in the last few months, missing quite a few of them but touching on enough to make the tired point about the stinking corruption of the enterprise.

But this is a routine rhetorical strategy, beginning your article about the vileness of all aspects of university football by reviewing five or six of the most recent you-could-pukes. Usually the next step is to point out that even by those standards the Miami story startles; or people are getting upset but really the latest Chapel Hill vomit isn’t chunky enough to count… (Here’s a good example. Typical sentence: “After the last 12 months, which were filled with scandal and cover-ups and lies and payouts and allegations of child molestation and motorcycles and mistresses, The Ohio State recently reported something like four dozen secondary violations and we didn’t bat an eye.”)

Instead of this, the author goes all Ballad of Reading Gaol:

We make a monster of what we love, and to make a point about what our society honestly values, a writer might post here a comparison of the state-by-state salaries of head football coaches and governors… In the end we remain helpless against ourselves.

Each man kills the thing he loves, it turns out. As in the endlessly anthologized poem by James Wright about the beginning of football season in American towns:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

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We who are about to die for you losers salute you. Our mothers lie abed wondering why instead of fucking them our fathers want to watch us concuss.

Has another year of scandal and revelation and condemnation finally undone the sport? Are Petrino, Tressel, Paterno, Miami or Montana the beginning of the end?

C’mon. Does any casual fan, any casual reader, any casual viewer, any reasonable person anywhere at the beginning of the 21st century think of “big football schools” as anything other than big football schools?

As it was in 1905, it was another tough year for fans. How do you root for what’s on the helmet without worrying about what’s in it?

Yet we remain helpless against not merely our indifference to what’s in it but indeed to what’s on it. What fan really gives a shit whether it’s Auburn or Alabama? What you’re after is gladiatorial gore good enough to get you going.

… there’s always some little old lady who rises to iconic sucker status? There’s always some little old lady who explains in a tremulous voice how this nice man called her up on the telephone and was so sweet and patient with her and now he has the $150,000 she’d put away for her dotage…

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill looks like that old lady. Now that its latest disastrous football coach has retired, UNC is the sucker du jour.

Although the news came out yesterday that new Bucs coach Greg Schiano has hired his old friend and colleague Butch Davis, there have been conflicting reports about precisely what role Davis will have in Tampa Bay. And the reason for the conflicting reports appears to be an issue regarding Davis wanting to collect paychecks from the Bucs while also collecting all the severance pay he can from the University of North Carolina.

North Carolina fired Davis in July amid an NCAA investigation into academic misconduct and accusations that players received impermissible benefits from agents. According to the Tampa Bay Times, when Davis was fired the school agreed to give him up to $2.7 million in severance. (Because giving $2.7 million to a football coach who was fired amid a scandal is a great way for a public university to use its resources.)

Davis has already received $933,000 of that severance, but the rest of it comes in increments of $590,000 a year in 2013, 2014 and 2015 — but only if Davis is unable to find a coaching job. If Davis has resumed his coaching career, North Carolina can deduct his coaching salary from that $590,000, and if his coaching salary is more than $590,000 North Carolina doesn’t have to pay him anything.

So Davis is apparently hoping to work out a title with the Buccaneers in which he will “serve the Bucs in an advisory capacity” rather than become a coach, and therefore he’d be able to get paid by the Bucs while still collecting his full severance from North Carolina.

Haha Butch boy put ‘er there! Gotta hand it to you!

This University of North Carolina professor is certainly correct about her school; it cares far more for lower-ranked coaches than it does for philosophy professors… Yet she adds:

“It is what it is. It gives you an idea of where society places its value.”

Both of which are curious things to say. It is what it is — meaning nothing to be done… I wonder if she takes the same approach to her work in economics… unemployment rates, gross wealth disparities… they are what they are…

And then… way to blame it on society! As you may know, UD asks her students to avoid, in their papers, any generalizations about ‘society,’ because they almost always sound dumb…

In this case, for instance, society does not pay assistant university coaches hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill does. Many universities do not pay their coaches in the way UNC pays its coaches. As Balaban points out in her initial comment, UNC could give a shit about the life of the mind. Its resources go to athletics, and, with this latest scandal, to athletics-related public relations and litigation.

… without a stop at Communications.

Lucas Hanft, a Yale Daily News writer, complained as far back as 2003 that Yale had no Communications major:

We were watching the NCAA tournament when we happened to notice that (surprisingly) the majors of most of the players were stuff like communications, marketing schemes, or hotel management.

These are not majors offered by Yale College. Could Yale’s inability to recruit big-time athletes be the result of their now-seemingly narrow curriculum? Could this bastion of educational superiority be behind the times? Cornell has a school of hotel management, human ecology, and according to some, pharmacology. We can’t be left behind, sucking at the winds of change…

Yet nothing’s happened in all that time to change the majors at Yale. You still can’t major in communications.

Hanft is right to notice its popularity among big time college athletes. In an opinion piece about the big academic scandal going on at UNC Chapel Hill, Bomani Jones counts “seven communications majors” among the athletes being investigated:

When will more athletic departments uphold their end of the bargain and stop shielding athletes behind easy majors and preferred professors? When will they challenge their players to do things they never thought they were capable of scholastically, the way they do athletically?

… As long as education is treated as something to fit in around football, those people use the kids just as the agents Nick Saban so famously referred to as “pimps” do.

… Two and a half years ago, the Ann Arbor News published a damning series about the University of Michigan that detailed a patronizing system in which athletes were encouraged to take “easy” majors and shuffled into independent-study courses that sometimes involved as little as using a day planner. (And this was before Rich “‘Round the Clock” Rodriguez showed up.)

If the series made a ripple, the waters have long since stilled.

Majoring: It’s all about teamwork.

… IMG, the world’s largest sports marketing company, has recently acquired Host Communications, International Sports Properties and The Collegiate Licensing Corporation in order the create the most powerful and integrated collegiate sports marketing company in the industry. Colleges can’t generate this revenue from within. They need to partner with, outsource to or accept guarantees from entities like IMG and ESPN in order to maximize revenues. What determines the value of these deals? The answer, plain and simple, is winning. Thus, the immense pressure on athletic directors and head coaches to win conference championships and get to bowl games. When the pressure is this intense, the money this great and the scrutiny this acute, we should expect to see the best and the worst in people …

This is from a rather strange piece in Forbes about the commercialization of university football, and the shocking (to the writer, at least) academic and financial scandal now raging in the North Carolina Chapel Hill sports program. The writer correctly describes, here, the incredible distortions and corruptions attendant on having to win big if you’re going to justify the expense of your program, and maybe even make a profit (almost no universities do). But he describes the functioning of big time athletics programs incorrectly throughout the piece.

He argues, for instance, that all programs go to great lengths to hold down costs.

You need only revisit the recent private plane scandal at the University of Kansas, or consider how universities compensate coaches these days, to shoot that one down. How many schools have bought totally unnecessary, insanely expensive Adzillatrons for their stadiums? How many schools spend millions and millions of dollars every year in litigation with coaches and players any idiot could have seen were going to be trouble?

No – see – it’s like this. Bunch of cowboys ridin’ the bomb.