Regular televised “exposés” of the already fully exposed academic reality of big-time sports schools (the latest such broadcast is available for viewing on Tuesday, when HBO will tell you what you already know about what universities do to keep many of their revenue-sports players academically eligible) will, UD has long predicted on this blog, eventually disappear. Eventually most sports factories will make their head football coaches president of the university (Jim Tressel’s a candidate at Akron, from which he’ll make a move back to Ohio State; I think Nick Saban or one of his assistant coaches will be Alabama’s next president, etc.). The idea is a no-brainer: When you’ve got even a vaguely respectable academic at the helm, she’ll have enormous difficulty dealing with the SAT cheating, the fake classes, the hilariously named academic advising centers (“[A]cademic advising centers “operate as ‘schools within schools’ and are responsible for enabling student-athletes with elementary educations to graduate from big-time universities.”), and all the rest. But once it’s clear that your university really is just a sports factory, there’s no scandal to expose. The curriculum is all sports-specific; the trustees and administration are all former college athletes; there’s not a scintilla of pretense to intellectual activity, let alone intellectual respectability. It’s the wave of the future. It’s the only way to go.

Say it ain’t so! Two absolutely filthy university football programs meet on the field! Homicidal Hazers v. Tressel’s Prayer Group! C’mon! Everything about this match-up was exciting and fun. The score says a lot of it: 76 – 0, with Tressel’s disciples edging out FAMU’s merry band…

FAMU’s actual band, the famous one that kills its musicians, wasn’t there, despite everyone having been real excited about a match-up between Ohio State’s musicians and FAMU’s during half-time…

[A] hazing death in the FAMU band around the time the OSU contract was signed meant the band is just getting back on its feet now.

Just getting back on its feet… Sweet way to put it… The band’s long-ignored violent rituals finally ended up killing someone… But it’s getting back on its feet again, struggling up like little Colin in A Secret Garden! It’s not that FAMU’s embarrassed that when its bloody band takes the field Ohio fans will add insult to shutout by chanting things, as fans are wont to do…

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Oh, and the whole thing is even prettier than that.

The Florida A&M athletic department is digging out of a $6 million deficit. [And it] is looking for its 10th athletic director in the past 11 years.

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If it’s true that spectacles of this quality are going away, UD is afraid she might not be renewing her decades-long season tickets to such riveting autumnal all-American delights, these front porches of our universities, where what’s best about our academic institutions is broadcast all over the country and to the world.

But you know what? UD‘s been covering American university football for years, and she is absolutely – absolutely – certain that the guy in her headline, the guy trying to scare her, is wrong.

Tressel will be the first of many. Given current circumstances, nothing is more logical than handing the presidency of many of our universities to football coaches.

UD often finds poetry in the comments section of articles about big-time sports. This morsel appears after an article that has Urban Meyer, doting dad of Aaron Hernandez and fellow troubled tots at the University of Florida, sermonizing about how we’re all being terribly judgmental and “irresponsible” to recall Urban’s crime-clogged time at that school. How dare everyone suggest, in light of Hernandez’s murder charges, that Meyer’s recruitment and retention policies at UF somehow enabled Hernandez in his life of crime!

Like Jim Tressel, Urban Meyer is a man of God.

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When cornered, hide behind God.

When truly cornered, hide behind the little women.

… 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.

… Penn State has begun, this morning, to shake itself awake. It’s gotten rid of one and put the other on leave.

(Note: This is a very big, very fast-moving story. I’ve added a number of updates to this post.)

Penn State is football city, so each step of this gruesome process – getting rid of Paterno, accepting the appropriate share of institutional blame, settling the lawsuits sure to come, acknowledging the degree of cover-up, suspending the football program – will be infinitely slow and self-wounding.

I’ve often, on this blog, compared the guys on the inside of big-time university football programs to Blanche Dubois. Self-delusion, denial, and (as with Blanche) outright lies are what it’s about. Some programs – Kentucky comes to mind – have, like Dubois at the denouement, gone totally ’round the bend. Most are beginning-of-the-play Blanche: Brightly smiling and talking one hell of a good game; but, under that, just barely – season to season – keeping it together. Penn State is a strikingly self-deluded outfit and will take a long hard fall.

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“[I]t would be foolish to discount the possibility that, by the time the legal drama fully plays out, Paterno, Curley, Schultz and even Penn State president Graham Spanier all will be gone.”

At least Spanier can go out on a private plane.

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“The board of trustees needs to get hold of it so that they can get to the bottom of it.”

You can always count on a politician to find just the right words.

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The campus landmark – Penn State Creamery – … serves flavors of ice cream named after university celebrities. There is … something called “The Sandusky Blitz.” It might be wise for the owners to consider dropping that particular flavor from the menu.

Done.

“Time to go load up on the Sandusky Blitz at the Creamery. It will be replaced soon with the Curley Coverup and the Spanier Surprise!”

And the Paterno Panic.

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Two reasons Paterno and Spanier will melt as fast Sandusky Blitz appear here.

Tyler Barnard, a junior from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, said in Mamma Mia [restaurant] that he objected to the university paying for legal counsel for Athletic Director Timothy Curley and Gary Schultz, senior vice president for finance and business.

They have been charged with failing to report the alleged crimes, and with perjury.

“I want to start a protest movement saying I don’t want my tuition to pay for their screwups,” Barnard said.

Alyssia Motah, 20, a food science major who was among [a group of] protesters at the administration building, said the university needed to be held accountable.

“The reason they have been so silent is in part due to this football culture that we have here,” she said.

Students realize that, one, their university is little more than a tightly controlled football state. It’s degrading (it should be degrading) to perceive that you live in an oligarchy so powerful it can protect a flagrant sex criminal – and name cutesy ice cream flavors after him – for decades.

Throw sugar at the kiddies and they’ll play along.

Students also realize that, two, they’re subsidizing the sickness.

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All of a sudden, a football program where a star gets a new automobile from a booster now and then or a player gets a free tattoo in exchange for memorabilia doesn’t seem that bad. Penn State administrators are accused of failing to act on allegations of sexual assaults on children. Top that, Ohio State. Beat that record, Miami.

And the best question is this: If Penn State athletic coaches and administrators could look the other way when a 10-year-old is sexually assaulted on campus by a prominent former coach, what wouldn’t they do? What could possibly be beyond their capability to accept in order to protect the “good name” of the program?

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Michael Bérubé is Paterno Family professor of literature at Penn State. As incoming head of the MLA, he’ll be using that title a lot.

On Paterno:

[T]he PSU football system didn’t work for a lot of people in this instance. Why? Here’s the answer: Money, power and secrecy. While money has always been down the list of your personal priorities, the other two almost seemed paramount to you. You have had unequaled power in this town, whether you’ll admit it or not. Is there anyone else who can essentially ignore the university president and trustees? …

Perhaps the only conclusion I can come up with is you didn’t follow up because you didn’t want to. You were coming off back-to-back losing seasons, and you knew you were loaded for bear in 2002. If something came to light that summer, well, just perhaps PSU football implodes.

… [Do President Spanier] and those genius trustees think students are going to apply in record number to come to Pedophile State…?

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Congrats [to Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier] on being the second major university B10 president to look like a complete and total fool this year. Gordon Gee hoped Jim Tressel wouldn’t fire him. Now, you’re standing firmly behind two executives who allegedly failed to protect children from being molested, thus allowing it to go on for several more years.

Standing firmly behind and paying their legal costs out of student tuition money.

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The darker, more conspiratorial part of me really, really wants to hope that the coaching promotion [for a person who witnessed what turned out to be an anal rape] wasn’t a payoff [for not pursuing the matter after reporting it to the head of athletics], but many questions along this line will be asked.

[The people who run the BCS] have allowed their athletic programs to run completely amok. The two people who symbolize what the BCS stands for are, without question, Miami President Donna Shalala, who did everything but rename her school “Shapiro U” while currently jailed booster Nevin Shapiro was lavishing money on her and the one-time “U,” and, of course, Ohio State President Gordon Gee, whose two trademarks are his bow tie and his foot planted firmly inside his mouth.

It was Gee who made himself the Neville Chamberlain of college athletics last spring when he was asked if he would consider firing Jim Tressel as football coach and he replied with a straight face, “Fire him? I just hope he doesn’t fire me.”

The shame of it is that Tressel didn’t stay at Ohio State long enough to get around to firing Gee before Tressel left in disgrace. Of course, the NCAA, led by its top stooge, President Mark Emmert, has been so busy calling meetings and being shocked to learn that cheating is going on that it has yet to take any action against anyone — and will probably come down with a really hard wrist slap when the time finally comes.

John Feinstein, Washington Post

Just where do the pesky buggers go?

Well, whether it’s OSU, or any seriously sporty American university, it’s about lawsuits. (Can you imagine how many University of Miami tuition dollars are going to lawyers and public relations people and penalties and all?) The stinkier the program, the higher the cost of covering the stinkiness, or, when the smell escapes, trying to pay your way out of the malodor-closet.

Ever since Brother Tressel had his cover blown, OSU has been spending mightily along these lines. Among their many outlays: Dealing with an ESPN public records lawsuit.

ESPN stated in the lawsuit that producers at the sporting news network had made several public records requests for all emails sent or received by President E. Gordon Gee, athletic director Gene Smith, compliance officer Doug Archie and former head coach Jim Tressel, that included the keyword “Sarniak.”

Ted Sarniak is a businessman in Jeanette, Pa., closely associated with former OSU quarterback Terrelle Pryor.

… In addition to documents containing the word “Sarniak,” ESPN also requested several documents without success. ESPN said some of their requests were wrongfully denied for being overly broad.

And OSU said… and then ESPN said… For every “said,” add ten thousand or so dollars.

The Heisman winner and quarterback of the national championship team had a father who apparently had offered his son’s services to Mississippi State for $180,000. The national championship basketball team was on probation. One of the game’s premier programs (USC) already is on probation, with another (Ohio State) ready to follow. The Ohio State case already resulted in the earlier-than-expected departures of Buckeyes coach Jim Tressel and potential Heisman contender Terrelle Pryor. Over the past 12 months or so, the 2004 BCS championship, the 2005 Heisman presentation and the 2009 ACC football championship have been vacated. And now we have one division – the ACC Coastal – that has half its membership (Georgia Tech, Miami and North Carolina) in hot water with the NCAA.

But that only scratches the surface.

As you recall, we will gather this August in retreat, for one brief moment, far away from the busy bustle of the outer world, to think on our sins and, in sincere repentance, get them hence.

Are there scoffers? Naysayers?

[University sports corruption is] such a point of concern for Mark Emmert that he has convened a retreat for NCAA leaders in August to discuss the problem, play golf, and receive backrubs. The backrubs will be exquisite, and the results of the conference will be hey did we mention backrubs and golf? Seriously, backrubs and golf. That’s really worth the trip alone.

This is the voice of the devil. Do not heed him! The devil wants to banish tax exemptions from luxury boxes and cap what Kentucky can pay John Calipari. Do not heed him!

Gather, instead, with goodly folk like Brother Tressel, and think on how we can make our fellowship yet purer in the sight of God.

… say Richard Vedder and Matthew Denhart in Forbes, nothing will change in the supremely scummy world of big-time university sports.

Wannabe schools in the shadows of the Ohio States of the world often lose $15 million a year or more on sports, usually directly or indirectly financed by socking it to students, a large portion of whom do not share the enthusiasm of some alumni and others for whom sports is a passion. Even at these schools, it is difficult to find a football coach who earns less than $200,000 a year. Fans often claim these salaries are driven by market forces. Yet one doubts that a properly functioning market would ever provide such high compensation to the chief executive of a company that loses millions annually.

But back to that unless. I doubt it’s unless a herculean scandal occurs. It will occur; and it won’t happen at just one school. There will be, simultaneously, herculean scandals at, say, five schools. The national headlines, for weeks on end, will feature universities — universities — buried in piles of pig shit. People will definitely notice.

And what will happen?

They’ll replace the head of the NCAA with another guy just like whatzisface.

… uh whatever. You know. The latest shit.

Oh yeah. Ohio State.

… [T]his entire exercise is part of the grand hypocrisy that defines the N.C.A.A.

… [T]he only ones in this con game who can make money are the coaches, the athletics directors and the bowl officials.

… The [big-time college sports] beast devours coaches, administrators and college presidents, and enjoys a steady diet of athletes who help generate the revenue that has turned college sports into a billion-dollar industry.

A USA Today reporter asks the author of Onward Christian Athletes about “college sports evangelism” post-Tressel.

[B]ig-time college sports are a mess and a poor platform for the promotion of religious virtue. The central idea of sports ministry — use sports and famous athletic figures to promote the faith — seems more problematic than ever in view of what’s happened with Coach Tressel. …With regard to the concept of using sports as a platform to promote faith … At a certain point, the platform no longer works as a vehicle to promote Christianity, because the platform is corroded and decayed.

Here are two.

The first, from UD‘s old friend Dave, comments on the resignation, this week, of Ohio State’s sweater-vest-wearing coach, Jim Tressel:

A mountain of sleaze (size: Everest)
Has finally buried the sweater-vest.
On this day of slow news,
Free cars and tattoos
Have brought about change for the betterest.

The second has to do with a professor at the University of Houston who reportedly served his students marijuana on a trip abroad:

So how did I spend time in Ghana?
I guess you could say marijuana.
Some reefer and buddha,
With weed and construda,
And cannabis too if you wanna.

Andrew Sharp, at SB Nation, considers the latest Jim Tressel revelations:

… [J]ust what does a coach have to do to get fired? If Tressel’s still at Ohio State next fall, how can anyone associated with Ohio State keep a straight face? The moral high ground doesn’t really exist in college football, but you gotta admit, Jim Tressel sets about as horrible a precedent as anybody in the country.

As with many college football articles, this one is written with what you might call rhetoric-desperation. How much more intensity, the writer seems to ask, can I lend my language? How can my prose ever hope to measure up to the sheer unmitigated shittiness of big time university sports?