Many N.C. State fans stopped their “Wolf! Pack!” chant during Syracuse’s starting lineups long enough to strongly boo Boeheim when he was introduced. Others sang the chorus from the Village People’s song “YMCA” during Syracuse’s early possessions as a reference to some of the violations outlined in the NCAA’s report that were connected to a local YMCA.

Another fan held up a sign: “Jim, will play for grades.”

(For earlier posts on what UD calls coacha inconsolata, just put the phrase in my search engine.)

“Shouldn’t we start holding presidents, chancellors and the heads of departments accountable? …. They lay it all on the coach.“

Seven times in 27 hours!  An English comp instructor’s dream!

I had to let it happen, I had to win

Couldn’t stay all my life legit

Looking out of the window

Staying out of the fraud

So I chose winning

Running around, trying everything new

The NCAA wouldn’t matter at all

I never expected it to…

Don’t cry for me, Siracusa!

The truth is my contract buyout

Leaves me a rich fucker

So farewell you suckers…

… judge that Syracuse University has misbehaved.

I guess they would know.

Read the hilarious everything plus the kitchen sink list of violations that these two wise men of the university athletics scene perceived within the Syracuse program here.

It would take an Ionescu – or a Molière ? – to capture the absurd convolutions in this NCAA decision, with Hypocrite #1 sternly determining the proper punishment for Hypocrite #2…

But let’s not go there.  Let’s instead enjoy some highlights:

Syracuse had a written [drugs] policy; however, the head basketball coach and athletics director admitted they did not follow the policy. The athletics director said the department followed an “unwritten policy” because the written policy was confusing. As a result, basketball students who tested positive on more than one occasion were not withheld from practice and games, as the written policy directed.

One, two.  When you can’t count, things get confusing!

These guys could count high – like, up to a million in salary and shit… But the lower end of the scale… (UPDATE:  Sorry: Two million.)

Syracuse discovered and self-reported 10 violations in this case, which primarily involved men’s basketball but also football. The self-reported violations, dating back to 2001, include academic misconduct, extra benefits, the failure to follow its drug testing policy and impermissible booster activity. The other violations found included impermissible academic assistance and services, the head basketball coach’s failure to promote an atmosphere of compliance and monitor his staff, and the school’s lack of control over its athletics program.

Well, that says it all, doesn’t it?

And it says it all for most other big-time athletics programs.

Sometimes shit happens and the school ethicist has to resign.  But most of the time most of the programs look exactly like Syracuse.

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Syracuse/Basketball:  The legend continues.

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Okay.  One more thing.  UD wonders how Syracuse faculty – even students? – feel about the man who earns by far the highest salary on campus also running – for years and years – a program so filthy that even the NCAA had to notice.  UD suspects no one cares.

Or worse:  It seems to UD that Americans admire slimy winners – Ira Rennert, Donald Trump…

But it’s not just Americans.  It seems to be universal.  Russians absolutely adore Vladimir Putin.

Syracuse to Jim Boeheim:  Kick me again, Master!   (“Syracuse loves basketball more than life itself, and Boeheim probably more than basketball…”)

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And there’s more!  UD‘s pal Dave sends her this absolutely wonderful description of the way online courses work in the athletics program.  As you know, UD has long called online courses the salvation of university athletics programs, especially now with the Independent Study scam on everyone’s radar… And you wanna know why?  Read and learn.  Learn how Coach Boeheim earns two million dollars every year.

[A]thletics staffers were actively posing as basketball players, logging into their university accounts, and reading and sending emails to professors as if they were the players.

No student!  No muss, no fuss!

A Deadspin writer summarizes:

Rather than requiring the players hand his assignment to a tutor, getting it back completed, and turning it into his professor, Orange players could stay out of things altogether and let the tutors just pretend to be them at every step.

And it never occurred to any of those professors all those years… I wonder why not.

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More boys in the band.

West Virginia was placed on two years’ probation for 360 infractions in 14 sports in its speakeasy. For all this, though, exactly one person was punished — an assistant women’s gymnastics coach. Gymnastics! Assistant! Crack down on a women’s sport! Hey, now that’ll get all those assistants in football and basketball to straighten up and fly right.

Not only that, but the director in charge of the Mountaineer speakeasy, Oliver Luck, was himself not implicated. No. Instead, he moved on — are you ready for this? — to the NCAA, where he is now executive vice president of regulatory affairs.

LOL.

… chilling effect.

…. university.

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UD thanks Dirk.

… that.

When figuring out your university’s very own response to the empty stadium problem, don’t you see it’s gotta be one way or the other. You can cater to drunks – collegiate and professional football attracts lots of drunks – and you can have people bring alcohol to the event and you can serve alcohol at the event, etc.

Drunks like to be drunk, so this policy will certainly attract them; but on the other hand you’ve now got … well, let’s have this guy explain why he stopped going to Redskins games.

The tipping point for my decision not to renew came in the opener of the 2010 season, a Sunday night game against the Cowboys. In the middle of the second quarter, nature called and I needed to visit the restroom. As I was walking down from my 15th row seat, a young lady pointing to her pink Tony Romo jersey was blocking the row as her team was driving down the field. I asked her nicely if I could get by, but that just made her clutch the jersey harder and push it toward my face. As I raised my voice in an effort to make her understand my situation, an extra from the cast of Swamp People in a Jason Witten jersey popped up.

“Hey, you gotta problem, buddy?” asked Mr. Bleary Eyes.

“Um… yeah… I want to get out.”

Apparently to him, them’s fightin’ words. As he approached me in my burgundy LaRon Landry jersey, Ms. Pink Romo finally got out of the row to try to settle her man down, and I passed by.

“Stop! It’s not worth it!” I heard her say as I walked away.

But Swamp Witten kept following me. As I reached the mezzanine, his girlfriends’ clutching arms and desperate words finally registered in his addled brain, and they returned to their seats.

Now, I was not afraid. I stand over six feet and weigh 280 pounds. The guy was drunk, and a strong wind could have knocked him over. But I’m a 35-year-old adult, and this was ridiculous. I’ve never had to deal with a drunken fan harassing me in my own living room.

Nothing says university like a stadium bristling with police watching your every move and hauling the royally pissed out of their seats. What to do? You could offer rewards to make sober people attend anyway. You could basically, in other words, pay people to sit next to the drunks. At Syracuse University, whose stadium has the desolate air of a late Samuel Beckett play, a local reporter asks his readership about rewards. Goodies for people who, as he puts it, “behave themselves”?

Judging by the comments, his readers are skeptical.

We want our rights! And we don’t care how! We want our revolution… NOW.

Income inequality hits the American university! Sports slaves at Syracuse and Boise State are moving their slow thighs, and what rough beast slouches toward Alabam’ to be born?

Why do they have the friends at the top? Why do they have the jobs at the top?

Boise State’s president rages against the NCAA big boys muscling out mid-major programs like Boise State by making it more and more expensive for schools to compete. In a spectacular instance of the pot calling the kettle black, President Bob Kustra attacks “programs that look less and less like they bear any relationship to the university’s mission and role.”

Ah, mon Kustra! Here’s your school! Here’s your school! Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! “It seems they are never satisfied with their bloated athletic budgets,” hisses Kustra, whose own budget bulges like an Idaho spud on steroids. Then he gets real high and mighty.

It is sometimes hard to believe that our finest universities and their presidents are behind this effort to fuel what the former NCAA President Myles Brand termed the “arms race” in Division 1 athletic budgets. You would think that the primacy of the academic mission and the long-held principles of amateur athletics would trump the drive toward commercialism and professionalism in the athletic department. You would think that university presidents would be up in arms at the way the NFL and the NBA use the universities’ athletic departments as training camps and minor league clubs for professional sports.

It is beyond me why university presidents are so quick to fall in line with powerful conference commissioners who seem to be calling the shots with these NCAA reforms. But I have no doubt why the power conferences are working to separate themselves from some Division 1 universities who still see the value of equity and fairness in athletic funding. Lately, those pesky mid-major programs such as Boise State and many others have showed up the big boys for what they are – wasteful models of athletic spending that cannot be justified.

Little late now to be moving them slow thighs, ain’t it, Kustra? You didn’t give a shit about evil commercialism until the big boys began making your school pay through the nose to stay in the big leagues. Now you sound like ol’ UD herself with all that excellent rhetoric about universities having something to do with academics.

Face it. You’re poor. And the poor stay poor. Accept your caste.

It’s a little late for Syracuse, too. Faculty there has finally decided to squawk about that school’s wasteful degrading ridiculous sports program. A local reporter talks to an economist who specializes in sports.

“Pay is up for coaches, pay is up for administrators,” [Andy] Schwarz said. “Athletic departments are hiring people, building new facilities. It doesn’t look like any losing business that I know of. But if you can say you’re losing money, there are a lot fewer questions. You don’t have people asking what you can do for them. The only people annoyed at you if you’re losing money is a few faculty members, and you can sort of manage that.”

At Syracuse four of the five highest-paid university employees are members of the athletic department, including athletic director Daryl Gross and women’s lacrosse coach Gary Gait. Gross, basketball coach Jim Boeheim and former football coach Doug Marrone all made at least $150,000 more in 2013 than they did in 2012, according to tax documents released by the school last week.

But the program’s losing money, see, so lay off, Little People of the Faculty.

Faculty of Syracuse University! You’re poor. And the poor stay poor. Accept your caste.

At one time, trading a scholarship for athletic performances made sense. There wasn’t much money available in college sports even in the revenue producing sports of football and basketball. But as TV money seeped into the industry, coaches were paid more and more money and colleges felt they needed to spend more money to get the best available coaches to recruit and instruct. State legislatures approved astronomical raises for coaches and in many states where public colleges are part of the college sports industry, the football or basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees… Millionaire coaches like Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim bristle at the idea of paying college players even though the industry is flush with money from television and marketing partners…

College sports are not-profits. The industry has a blanket antitrust exemption that allows schools who play in college football bowl games to skip paying taxes from bowl game earnings. Yet NCAA members are getting billions from TV, and hundreds of millions alone from the Final Four weekend. At the same time, players are no longer content with missing out on their earnings. Dr. Harvey Schiller may have predicted the future for the industry, becoming a professional entity because there is too much money at risk for it not to happen.

The professionalization of our academic McDonalds (billions and billions sold) continues, with increasingly insistent arguments being made against the maintenance of non-profit status for athletics money, and for endowment money. Because it’s the same thing, isn’t it? Athletics and endowment?

If Harvard University generates a thirty-five billion dollar endowment (a number of other Ivies are not far behind), all of it in very significant ways protected from taxation… And if because of this astronomical profit people like Harvard investment managers get multiple millions in salary each year from the institution, and people like coaches get multiple millions in salary each year from the institution, but very little of the billions left over are spent for academic purposes (Harvard notoriously hoards its endowment; revenue sports players aren’t paid), why should we be surprised that communities surrounding McDonald’s schools are constantly challenging their tax exempt status in court? That Felix Salmon’s much quoted statement has it that Harvard is “a hedge fund with an educational institution attached“?

All of this is a small element of the immense income inequality debate in America today. CEOs like Gilead’s John Martin taking home almost $100 million each year are the real attention-getters in this debate. Yet America’s John Martin problem is a straightforward one: It is about capital markets and unlimited greed. Easy to grasp that.

And of course most of the people in this country have no trouble – applaud, in fact – one man or woman pulling in any amount imaginable for themselves. Ten years from now, Martin’s yearly compensation with be five hundred million. Bravo! Job well done. No upper limits, and people who question upper limits are jealous losers who have to be restrained by the state or the next thing you know it’s Kristallnacht.

Fine, okay, but does the same psychology pertain to high-minded non-profit universities becoming greedy billionaires? Even in America, there’s some vestigial sense that universities are different from John Martin. That sense could grow, could come to understand itself more clearly. And if that happens, there’s trouble ahead for the most profitable McDonald’s franchise-holders in the land.

Longtime readers know that UD has a little house in the wilds of upstate New York. (Here’s the area of the house, in all its glorious back of beyondness.) Not much you’d call an event ever happens there. On the evening of July 4, you can sit in the front field and watch silent fireworks pop over the Catskill range. On other evenings, you can watch galaxies and satellites and shooting stars in a true dark sky.

Soon, maybe, you’ll be able to see and hear drones.

The new central NY drone test area doesn’t yet reach as far south as our place; but it’s not that far, as the drone flies.

UD understands that “all the pieces appear to be lining up for the eventual introduction of routine aerial surveillance in American life, a development that would profoundly change the character of public life in the United States.” She is in fact very interested (as is her hero, Don DeLillo) in the fate of privacy generally in postmodern America. She’s old-fashioned enough to find it strange, thinking of herself stepping onto the side deck of her country house of a morning and looking up at a little whirlygig that might be transmitting to Fort Drum the number of chips in her chocolate chip scone.

God knows I’m a good target. There’s nobody else around – just Les UDs on the top of their hill, in their house at the end of a driveway edged by evergreens planted by our long-ago neighbor Wojciech Fangor. (“At the beginning of the ’50s, he started to work with architects such as Stanislaw Zamecznik, Oskar Hansen, Zbigniew Ichnatowicz and Jerzy Sołtan.”)

Les UDs hope to be there in August. Maybe it’ll be The Summer of the Drones.

Brown University’s finest.

Steven Cohen remains on Brown’s board of trustees, an inspiring reminder to students there that you can run “the first large Wall Street firm in a generation to confess to criminal conduct,” a firm whose corruption is “unprecedented in the history of hedge funds,” a firm that has become “a symbol of financial wrongdoing,” and still be a Brown University trustee! Go ahead and be HUMongous financial wrongdoers, kiddies! The more money you make, the more likely you’ll be named to the Brown Corporation!

How humongous, you ask? The man’s a fucking pioneer! He’s making history! The SEC, emboldened by its success against Cohen, is said to be going after a number of other university trustees and honorary degree recipients.

[The SEC is] weighing a criminal charge against JPMorgan Chase [headed by Syracuse University commencement speaker/honorary degree recipient Jamie Dimon] related to its role as Bernard L. Madoff’s [Yeshiva University trustee] banker…

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UPDATE: MattF, a UD reader, links to this important background on Cohen. UD thanks him.

— Putting Syracuse University’s Orange Madness to shame.

American university sports events get more and more violent, so much so that it wasn’t much of a story when, last year at this time, Syracuse University was host to multiple fights and one stabbing at their “Orange Madness” opening basketball event of the season. Police swarmed the building and everyone was ushered out before the event was scheduled to end because security couldn’t control all the fights.

Big deal. The life of the mind.

But yeah sure, as the chancellor said up there in my headline, we promise to do better next year.

So here we are and “how could this happen?” asks the local paper. How could it happen that Syracuse University, in designing this “family friendly” event to prevent last year’s violence, hired Ace Hood? Ace Hood…

After a night rocking to songs about fucking bitch pussies and shooting the fuck out of everyone with your arsenal, Syracuse will be ready for the football and basketball season!

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UPDATE: Now that we’ve gotten a glimpse into the culture of the Syracuse athletics department and many of its fans (why not hire Ace Hood?), it’s time to cancel his act because a few malcontents object to his brilliant subversive lyrics.

Wonder how much his cancellation fee is. Yet another excellent use of university funds.

Everyone’s wondering who his replacement will be.

How about something for the girls? Rihanna!

… Upstate Medical University?

They’ve even placed him in an “undisclosed off-campus” location!