[College of Faith] was held to negative 100 total yards against Tusculum College in Tennessee this season, an NCAA record. The final score was 71-0.

****************
UD thanks Andrew.

Eight of the fifteen American university football teams that dominate the “most flagrant chaplaincies” list also dominate the “most team arrests” list.

“MOST FLAGRANT CHAPLAINCIES“:

Auburn University
University of Georgia
University of South Carolina
Mississippi State University
University of Alabama
University of Tennessee
Louisiana State University
University of Missouri
University of Washington
Georgia Tech
University of Illinois
Florida State University
University of Mississippi
University of Wisconsin
Clemson University

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MOST ARRESTS:

1) Washington State: 31
2) Florida: 24
T-3) Georgia: 22
T-3) Texas A&M: 22
5) Oklahoma: 21
T-6) Iowa State: 20
T-6) Missouri: 20
T-6) Ole Miss: 20
T-6) West Virginia: 20
T-10) Florida State: 19
T-10) Tennessee: 19
T-12) Alabama: 18
T-12) Iowa: 18
T-12) Kentucky: 18
T-15) LSU: 16
T-15) Marshall: 16
T-15) Oregon State: 16
T-15) Pittsburgh: 16
T-19) Arkansas: 14
T-19) Michigan: 14
T-19) Oklahoma State: 14
T-19) Purdue: 14
T-23) Auburn: 13
T-23) Colorado: 13
T-23) Kansas: 13

[Costas] said that the bottom line for [university] higher-ups is that the consumers of football and basketball games generally prioritize athletic performance over academic success.

“If they found out that half the team was composed of illiterates, but the team went to the Rose Bowl or to the Final Four — they had that choice — or they had the choice of a competitive, entertaining team, but everyone was a legitimate student, most of the alums and most of the people in the stands would choose ‘A,'” Costas said.

 

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… Boeheim is still number one among the Syracuse faithful … [and] any mere university administrator [had better not] even think about removing Boeheim as head coach.

As with most major college coaches, Boeheim is virtually untouchable and clearly a more important figure on campus than the university president. Indeed, there are many presidential careers that have crashed and burned seeking to control powerful coaches and booster organizations.

… The scandals at Syracuse and North Carolina, the shadows over Duke, the many scandals of the past and future will not vanish. The only thing that ultimately will vanish is the integrity of American higher education.

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

[The Syracuse scandal is about the ways in which] perfectly nice universities with wonderful faculty and illustrious alumni turn themselves into trash bins.

…Boeheim says he’s “not going anywhere.” The question is why that’s his decision, and not school President Kent Syverud’s. The simple answer is that no one has the authority to criticize Boeheim, much less fire him.

Presumably Syverud, who has been on the job for only a year, is not an unethical man, nor [University of Tennessee Chancellor Jimmy] Cheek an amoral one. Both have respected records. Syverud is a legal scholar, and Cheek an award-winner for teaching excellence in agriculture who has worked hard to lift Tennessee into rankings of the top 50 research universities. (Full disclosure: I have met Cheek and like him and have occasionally donated money to Tennessee women’s athletics.) But no lone tweedy president or chancellor has the clout to stand up to coaches and athletic directors backed by power bases of rich fanatical donors.

[T]here are people who actually dislike football and openly criticize many of its institutions.

A columnist in the University of Tennessee newspaper (Tennessee! Athletics! A blog like this one couldn’t survive without UT athletics!) shares some of his shock and awe at the presence of football haters (He doesn’t really mean football haters. He means people who don’t like or who don’t care about the football program at UT.) on his campus.

People who mainline booze up their ass and then hold surrealistic press conferences about it – now that’s nothing to write home about at UT; but people who fail to come out for the games… Are you fucking kidding me? Actually??

Tennessee’s athletic department, along with most other large football schools in America, is historically very profitable. [Yes, the lad believes most large football schools are profitable. I mean, look no further than the king of large football schools, the University of Texas.]

Colorado State, one of America’s more markedly delusional, testosterone-run universities, has just said goodbye to its slightly too-delusional athletic director, Jack Graham.

To be sure, everyone in charge there – trustees, high-level administrators – appears to share the whacked-out, Blanche DuBois personality I’ve isolated so often on this blog when talking about schools like University of Nevada Las Vegas (panting to build a $900 million stadium) and Colorado State. Like Blanche, they have much less money than they need to live the grand life they fantasize for themselves; but – again like Blanche – this in no way stops them from traipsing around telling everyone that they’re rich and grand.

CSU, for instance, insisted its rich gentleman callers (to allude to a different Tennessee Williams play) would give it mucho millions toward the big ol’ football stadium it was gonna build. Indeed, just the other day the soon-to-be-erstwhile CSU AD – Graham, that is – announced to a gathering that fund-raising was going swell, swell! But then right after that

CSU’s vice president for advancement Brett Anderson told the Coloradoan a day later that only $24.2 million had been raised as of June 30…

Bummer! Blanche DuCSU sits around in her gauzy duds waiting for gentleman callers to cough up $110 million… She has always depended on the kindness of strangers… And then… the pathos of no one showing up…

On the other hand, Graham is a university coach, so his exit will be a little more secure than Blanche’s:

[CSU] still [has] to pay his annual $260,000 salary in monthly installments through November 2016…

For, you know, doing nothing… Standard operating procedure, and one of many reasons why big-time sports are such a boon to the American university…

But anyway. When the Lord closes a Blanche window, he always opens a new Blanche door.

Tyler Shannon, who represents the pro-stadium group Be Bold group on the advisory committee … says donors have committed quite a bit more money to the stadium than the $24.2 million that’s already in the bank.

It’s all still hush-hush, mind you! We can’t let the information out yet! But there’s a LOT more money where that came from, believe me!!

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

Local commentary sees the same DuBois pathos in play:

Please. Fort Collins is an affluent community. Just say it like it is. [CSU’s president] finally figured out that CSU completely botched selling the community on the project, and anti-stadium proponents effectively derailed the project. [CSU’s president] finally became uncomfortable, which was not unreasonable. Making music with Graham wasn’t working, and [the president] decided to save [his] reputation and let Jack go because Jack wasn’t giving up his dream.

Presumably CSU’s president has been peeing himself over the idea that the now-gone AD (a multimillionaire) was another Phil Knight (a billionaire). That Graham would, uh, ride in like a Knight in shining armor? … to put the few extra cents needed for the stadium into the piggy bank… ?

Sad, sad. Butterfly net time.

I hope most of us can agree that these two outcomes would be less than optimal.

Yet the hard-headed report just issued by the Education Trust suggests that we’re certainly headed there. Fancy schmancy schools don’t take in enough Pell Grant people and risk becoming gilded ghettos. Why should the American taxpayer subsidize that? Trailer park techs take in little besides poor people, many of whom never graduate. The students default on their big government grants. Why should we subsidize that?

So, reasonably enough, the authors of this report argue that if after a certain number of years a university can’t graduate anyone, or a university graduates only the sort of people who need little help from us to pay for their education, we should withdraw tax support from those places.

I’ll have more to say about this in a few moments. Ne quittez pas.

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

Hokay. Here’s the deal. It’s a great report – clearly written, tough-minded. The authors are correct that – since accreditation agencies won’t do their bit and shut down drop-out factories like Texas Southern University, a school the Education Trust report features – the federal government needs to shut them down via refusal of tax subsidies. Certainly the free market is doing its bit – enrollment at schools like Texas Southern is tanking – but, hard as this is to believe, it’s true that Texas Southern University and the many schools like it will continue to exist until the heat death of the universe. They will continue to function with only faculty, administrators, and football players. They will mutter vaguely about online programs or something.

And why will they continue to exist?

Look no further than Garnet F. Coleman. There’s a Garnet in every crowd, the local pol who believes in the “strong status of our proud institution, Texas Southern University” and makes sure hapless taxpayers keep throwing their money down a hole. Garnet thinks it’s fine that TSU is incredibly ineptly (and sometimes corruptly) run; fine that its athletic program (why does a school like this have athletics at all?) is deeply in debt, blahblahblah… Because TSU does so much good by failing to graduate students whom it burdens with lifelong debt…

In one of its more shameful editorial decisions, the New York Times two years ago agreed to play along with this madness. Sent a reporter down there who, without comment, quoted TSU’s president saying this:

He said his administration is taking a more hands-on, student-centric approach that should improve academic achievement, which he said had not previously received sufficient attention. Despite what the graduation rates suggest, Mr. Rudley said the campus is in the midst of a renaissance.

The reporter also gushed about new campus buildings, better maintenance of public spaces, etc. Yes, a renaissance was happening right now.

Or in a minute or two. Be patient, be patient.

The Education Trust people now introduce the startling proposal that we no longer wait, that we acknowledge the wasteful scandal of schools like TSU and shut them down.

Texas Southern University … fell in the bottom 5 percent of all institutions on graduation rates in 2011, graduating only 11.8 percent of its full-time freshmen within six years of initial enrollment. Some 80 percent of Texas Southern’s freshmen are from low-income families (i.e., Pell Grant recipients); 90 percent are from underrepresented minority grants and many are weakly prepared for college, with a median SAT score of 800 out of 1600 and an average high school GPA of 2.7. But so too are the students at Tennessee State University and North Carolina Central University, yet they graduate at rates more than three times as high (35.5 percent and 38.4 percent, respectively). In fact, Texas Southern performs at the very bottom of its closest 15 peer institutions and has for many years.

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Then there’s the other end of the problem: Rich kid schools.

Middlebury College in Vermont, for example, in 2011 fell in the bottom 5 percent of all colleges in its enrollment of low-income students: 10 percent. Yet equally selective institutions like Amherst College and Vassar College enrolled more than twice as many low-income students, 23 and 27 percent respectively. We see the same variation in the public sector. The University of Virginia, which ranks in the bottom 5 percent on service to low-income students, enrolled only 13 percent Pell students in 2011, whereas the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and the State University of New York at Binghamton enrolled 20 and 26 percent Pell students…

And here’s a fascinating mystery:

There are high-achieving, low-income students whose academic credentials place them well within the band of elite colleges’ current admission standards but who for a variety of reasons do not apply to or enroll in these selective institutions. Nearly two-thirds of low-income students with high grades and SAT scores do not attend the most selective institutions for which they are qualified, compared with just over one-quarter of high-income students with similar academic credentials.

Counterintuitive, huh? You’re a genius from Missoula but you don’t go to Harvard, which is desperate for you. Why not?

Well, begin by reading this essay by Walter Kirn, a kid from Minnesota who accepted an offer of admission from Princeton. Although UD has difficulty believing the story Kirn tells about being kidnapped by a castle-dweller, she finds the rest of his account of being middle-class at Princeton credible. Not only were these four years of social hell – of being made to feel poor and outcast – they were intellectual hell as well, as Kirn tells it.

We laughed at the notion of “authorial intention” and concluded, before reading even a hundredth of it, that the Western canon was illegitimate, an expression of powerful group interests that it was our sacred duty to transcend — or, failing that, to systematically subvert. In this rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.

… the University of Tennessee staggers piteously along like O in her tiny mules and painfully cinched waist, America’s campus epicenter of sadomasochism.

Paralyzed by debt and despair –

Tennessee’s situation makes frighteningly clear the high cost of bad coaching hires, as the athletic department owes $7 million to recently fired coach Derek Dooley and his staff on top of $11.4 million paid out in buyouts to other football, baseball and basketball coaches. Declining attendance has also taken a toll on Tennessee’s financial situation as it has proven difficult for the school to fill the stadium when losses outnumber wins. Ironically, improvements to the stadium that sits partly empty helped drive the expansion of the debt.

– UT lashes out at others and itself in a perennial bacchanalia of desperate perversion. [Trigger warning goes here.] Its students inject themselves anally with alcohol. They lie still while fellow students pour hot sauce over their penises. They’re asking for it! If you won’t pour the Tabasco on the front, they’ll inject the Zinfandel in the back. One way or another, the University of Tennessee is going to punish itself for…

For what? O’s motives are notoriously obscure… Imagine trying to understand a drunk and masochistic institution that’s fucked itself over financially forever.

Maybe one good way to think about Tennessee’s current life of the mind is to recall another literary work – Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. Imagine that, instead of the reckless racing of cars, the Australians, as they await apocalypse, decide to fuck and suck themselves to oblivion.

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

A reader sends in a limerick:

Does my penis go well with Tabasco?
Does this Zinfandel into my ass go?
Front porch or back door,
What college is for
Is much more than you learn in a class, bro.

How bizarre to find this sentence in a review of a new book about big-time university football. The reviewer recounts (and the book recounts) a routinely sordid chapter in the life of a routinely sordid sports whore – the University of Tennessee – and then the reviewer suddenly offers that phrase: unbecoming of a university.

UD was pulled up short by it, since never in her long athletics-blogging life has it occurred to her to consider more than a handful of the sports factories about which she writes universities. She doesn’t write about them because they are universities. She writes about them because they are illegitimate recipients of state and federal tax dollars and tax breaks because someone thinks they are universities. She writes about them because maybe if enough people realize they are not universities they will be shut down and we won’t have to keep paying for them.

The governor of the state of Tennessee has said it as directly as possible: The university itself is imperiled unless UT’s football team wins games and fills its stadium.

“If you want to be bottom line about it, it shows why UT-Knoxville has to be good in football,” Haslam said. “You have a whole program that’s set up with a 100,000-seat Neyland Stadium, and it’s a program that supports all the other sports other than basketball and provides scholarships back to the university.”

And – he didn’t need to add since everyone knows it – the school, entirely because of sports, currently carries TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in debt.  Yeah baby you read that right. So there have to be bodies in UT’s big new incredibly expensive stadium; the team has to win…

Only it’s losing, see, so the stadium’s kind of empty and all the coaches that doomed the team and the school have to be paid off in the millions of dollars to go away and WOW! Where can the rest of America sign up? What a great way to run a university!

… places like Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and of course Montana, where the University of Montana’s football team seems to have a wee rape problem.

The ongoing controversy began in late 2010 when several sexual assault allegations, including two women who said they were drugged and gang raped by members of the football team, spurred a local investigation of the school. Last month, University President Royce Engstrom fired the football team’s head coach and athletic director. One member of the team, Beau Donaldson, was charged with rape and has pleaded not guilty.

It’s so bad, the feds have come in to investigate; and you know how much they appreciate the federal government in those parts. They don’t need some guy from Washington to tell them how to handle the fact that players on their football team – including the quarterback – keep getting accused of rape. But the Justice Department points out that it’s not “the number of allegations,” but precisely “the response” on the part of the university that has drawn its attention. When you’ve got so many people charging rape, perhaps something’s wrong internally. Perhaps your school doesn’t take rape seriously enough.

Anyway, I’m just moseying toward my main point here, about the coverage of another problem at UM – a massive budget deficit.

The University of Montana is facing budget cuts across campus because of a significant drop in enrollment, and most departments are being asked to help shore up a $5.7 million deficit.

726 fewer students than last year have enrolled this year, and plenty of people think it has something to do with all the bad publicity. Parents might not, for instance, want their kids to go to a school which seems to be the main reason Missoula is called the The Rape Capital of America.

That deficit isn’t just about the students who aren’t there to pay tuition. Ask Penn State how much money athletic scandals cost.

So… What’s UM’s athletic department doing to help out with the deficit it almost certainly had a great deal to do with creating?

A local reporter, who breathes not a word of the rape scandal, explains:

Athletic director Kent Haslam told us that his department will curtail some maintenance on facilities to help with the cost-cutting, saving about $150,000.

They’re on the case!

Now that the University of Tennessee done chugged Coach Dooley’s butt clear out of the football program, consider the words in my post’s title. They were written not long ago by a Tennessee person who, given Dooley’s string of losses and that big ol’ empty expensive football stadium he and the guys were playing in, was anticipating his firing and reviewing UT’s situation.

It is not a good situation. It’s possible that even the constantly shifting gaggles of good old boys running UT are capable of grasping this.

The university’s athletic department posted a $3.98 million budget deficit for the 2011-12 fiscal year in part because of buyouts it was paying to [Phil] Fulmer, former athletic director Mike Hamilton, former men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl and former baseball coach Todd Raleigh.

The football program is on probation until August 2015. The NCAA handed Tennessee a two-year extension of its probation Friday after ruling former assistant Willie Mack Garza provided impermissible travel and lodging for an unofficial visit by former prospect Lache Seastrunk…

Dooley’s buyout will cost UT an additional five million dollars. Other millionaires on his staff will almost certainly also be fired, and they too will get million-dollar buyouts.

One of their hotly recruited players has been named as a suspect in the theft of objects from campus. Dooley knew he was a thief when he recruited him; he had a record.

The eyes of the world have been riveted to UT’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and its wine-enema-loving brothers.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things. Blog posts are supposed to be relatively short, and I haven’t yet gotten to why Knoxville is an attractive tourist destination.

So let’s take up the statement in this post’s headline. Although UT has a long history of filthy coaches and a filthy program; although its football program is on probation; although it has impoverished whatever academic value it had by continuing to give money to its filthy sports programs; although its sports programs recruit criminals; although the frat system that comprises the core of its football fans is currently a national laughingstock; although it will have to take millions and millions more from the school’s academic mission to hire a big-time coach (if it doesn’t, not only all of its investments in sports facilities — like its “eye-popping new athletic facility, a virtual Taj Mahal with cascading waterfalls, state-of-the-art technology, and workout areas that rival the U.S. Olympic training facility in Colorado Springs” — implode, but UT students almost certainly stage riots) — despite all of this, the culture of UT sports is a real fine drawing card for Knoxville. People want to be part of this picture.

And talk about generation of revenue! Football season lasts “up to eight weekends” a year!

Yes! For the sake of those few precious autumn days, a public university in the United States of America has turned itself into a tattered stinking whore.

Once they find the veteran cheater-coach they think will save their lives, the stench from UT will rise even higher.

UD will be there to sniff it — every aroma of the way.

———————

UD thanks Mike.

A lot of people are saying this about Penn State football.

But pause.

Reflect.

What is left of Penn State without football? It’s the same question you’d need to ask about the University of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and a host of others. A few scattered academic departments; a demoralized student body transferring out in search of a tailgate; yawning stadia assuming the aspect of meteor craters.

The silence alone will kill most of the stragglers. Campus will come on all scholarly-like, and drinking will go from post-game debauch to post-Soviet despair. Here and there amid the twilight-of-the-superheroes vastation, crazed, tattered philosophy faculty will wail like Diogenes while enflamed remnant-students throw stones at them.

[University of Alabama football coach Nick] Saban’s deal now runs through Jan. 31, 2020, and his total financial package will average out to $5.62 million per year. He’ll earn $5.32 million in 2012, and with raises built into the deal, would go up to $5.97 million in the final year of his contract in 2019…

Defensive coordinator Kirby Smart went from $850,000 to $950,000. Also, first-year offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier will earn $590,000. Both Smart and Nussmeier have three-year deals.

Outside linebackers coach Lance Thompson, back for his second stint at Alabama after coaching at Tennessee the last three years, received a two-year deal and will make $375,000.

Of the Crimson Tide’s 10 assistants, counting strength and conditioning coordinator Scott Cochran, seven make at least $310,000 annually.

UD don’t even blink at this shit no more.

Not so much good ol’ universities like Tennessee with almost fully criminalized sports teams… Not that, onaccounta she done read about that for five, ten years goin’ on now… No, UD don’t even blink at the way the local rags report this shit.

I mean, look at it from the rags’ POV. Every year, all year, including the summer, they know they’re going to have to report constant devilry on the part of their local gods, like say the football players at the University of Tennessee. Scary stuff – driving around dead drunk, beating people on the streets of Knoxville, taking part in armed robberies …

So – in order to hold fast the faith of the people, there’s a formula their scribes use for every incident. UD will cite this article – one of thousands of clones – to clarify.

1.) First they remind the people that it’s been eons since they had to put the last player in jail. I mean, really, to be fair, the team’s been clean for an incredible stretch. (“[T]he football team’s arrest record remained clean for nearly five months…”)

2.) Then the assistant director of fuckups gets on the horn and tells the scribes the school is vaguely aware that something vague has happened and they’re looking into I guess or they sure will soon as they know something but it’s real early days and let’s be fair. (“We’re aware of an incident…”)

3.) Now, without giving any detail about the incident, you go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about the position the guy played, the effect on game strategy of possibly losing this guy to suspension or jail or whatever, etc. (“The position is one of the Vols’ biggest concerns…”)

4.) Next, testimonials. (“He made a mistake but he was not causing trouble.”)

5.) Wrapping up, another reminder of the amazing crime-free stretch. (“UT coach Derek Dooley’s continued efforts to clean up the program’s run of recent off-field troubles and change the culture appeared to have paid off, as the Vols were nearly through the entire summer without any incidents.” Have you ever tried to get through an entire summer without getting arrested?)

6.) And finally: The players’ court date is checked against the team’s practice schedule. (“His court date is scheduled for Aug. 4, the Vols’ third day of preseason practice.”)

… between a local columnist’s bland recitation of the reasons why the University of Tennessee has had a fall-off in football ticket sales (the economy, bad match-ups, etc.) and some of the commenters on his story, who stress the thug problem.

I can’t name another school that has had two car loads of 8 thugs driving around town holding up convenience stores with guns and weed in the car. Can you?

Yeah, that was a bad one. But the incident was one of many incidents over the last few years involving UT players. Is it possible that there’s a tipping point, even for UT fans? Could their amazingly well-honed cognitive dissonance (There they go down the field, our fine University of Tennessee student athletes!) (The latest one is an armed robbery? Yikes.) be losing its edge?