Not only is the president who helped steer the University of Kentucky into the ground about to retire, but, as reported here, a loud, contrarian faculty member is about to take a seat on the board of trustees.

And not only that, but the big tall Turkish guy UK was counting on coming to campus for a semester and playing basketball for them (no one reporting this story even pretends he’ll be a student, or that he’ll stay for more than three months) might not be able to make it.

… “Is this a misprint or what?” [Former University of Kentucky All-American Frank Ramsey] said when he saw that the K Fund donation required to reserve his second-row [Kentucky basketball] seats would leap from $1,350 to $5,000 per ticket.

… [He] decided not to renew his tickets near the floor.

… “I agree the university has the right to price their tickets,” he said. “I’m sure they’ve done a lot of research on it before raising the prices 300 percent.”

Actually, the increase in required K Fund donation for the first four rows represents a 370 percent markup.

… “(Paying) $10,000 just for the right to buy two tickets in Lexington, Ky., with this economy the way it is statewide — just seems they would have to have something to back it up…”

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Lexington Herald-Leader

… Is [UK basketball coach John] Calipari shady? No question. Everybody knows that the two college programs he coached prior to Kentucky — Massachusetts (1996) and Memphis (2008) — both had their Final Four appearances vacated by the NCAA. And, yes, there are already TMZ reports that NCAA investigators are snooping around Kentucky.

Who knows what the NCAA might find.

Agents paying players?

Players with bogus SAT scores?

A university administration that admits athletes who don’t have the academic credentials or desire to be in college?

Sounds about like every other big-time program to me.

The only difference is John Calipari understands that his program is nothing more than an NBA developmental league.

He is at least honest about the dishonesty that contaminates college athletics.

… comments on the DUI arrest of a University of Kentucky basketball coach. It’s the coach’s fourth DUI arrest.

Enough has to be enough — even for a Kentucky basketball coach.

Point Two: Nobody can hold a candle to the state of Kentucky.

Who’s gorgeouser — University of Louisville, or University of Kentucky?

Well, Louisville’s got Pitino. University of Kentucky’s got Calipari.

But UK also has Gillispie.

Don’t tell me he’s not there anymore. Every time he gets in that big ol’ Mercedes and starts weaving toward Lexington, the University of Kentucky gets a plug. Plus there’s his big ol’ lawsuit to remind us of his ol’ Kentucky home.

Gillispie [has] sued the university in federal court in Texas, alleging that the school’s athletics department owes him $6 million for firing him two years into a seven-year agreement. The university says he never signed a formal contract and the school doesn’t owe the money.

So – winner hands down – University of Kentucky!

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The New York Times elaborates:

It is an otherwise lovely state, known for the mint juleps and jaunty hats of its Derby, the bluegrass and the rolling hills, but Kentucky has an alter ego when it comes to college sports, and let’s just say that alter ego should be checking into therapy any day now.

In one padded cell, you could put Kentucky’s basketball coach, John Calipari, blithely humming away despite the complete shambles he left at his last college, Memphis, and the one before that, Massachusetts, two Final Fours that supposedly didn’t happen…

Meanwhile, Calipari’s predecessor, Billy Gillispie, was arrested early Thursday and charged with driving while intoxicated.

And all of that looked positively sane compared with Louisville Coach Rick Pitino’s calling an impromptu news conference Wednesday about his simmering sex-and-blackmail scandal to lambaste the news media for covering his simmering sex-and-blackmail scandal…

In the case of Todd’s university?  Not much.

Return with me now to those glory days at one of this country’s establishments of higher learning, when Rick got down on his knees and begged Sebastian Telfair to gain his education at the University of Louisville. Telfair said yes! I will pursue my scholar/athlete career at your fine school, playing basketball, living in a university-provided brothel, and giving a big ol’ fuck you up the ass to my fake classes, all on the taxpayers’ dime — and the people of Kentucky could not have been more grateful and excited. To make matters even more wonderful, sports-mad James Ramsey, who would go on to become the nation’s highest paid public university leader by the simple expedient of stealing everything at UL that wasn’t nailed down, had just been appointed UL president!

Truly the stars were aligned at this fine school which some have taken, cruelly, to calling the U of Smell.

And now… Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! as Humbert would say: Look at this tangle of thorns.

Rick had to be gotten rid of because of sex, recruiting, financial and anything else you’d like to add scandals. Reduced to coaching Greek basketball, where the chain smoking, flame throwing fascists in the stands turn every game into a terrifying slaughter (holy shitkos), he is currently suing UL for forty million dollars haha nahnah got you you’ll pay up the ass for being mean to me while I was building a winning team even though we had to vacate all our wins cuz they was SO SO SO dirty. I’ll get you back, UL.

President Ramsay was forced to resign in disgrace for the aforementioned larceny plus overseeing the most pornographic sports program in the United States. UL’s suing him to try to get a few tens of millions back (it’s all been plowed into multifarious mcmansions up and down the Florida coast), and the latest on that is that during his reign Ramsay apparently told the then-chair of the board of trustees that a fellow trustee had bankrolled the brothel for the boys!! I do declare (fanning my lace stays with my perfumed hankie), it takes a whole lot for UL to do anything that would generate italics, bolding, and double exclamation marks, but this school constantly exceeds expectations.

… Uh, where we were? Oh, the hotly recruited Telfair... He was last seen ranting like a madman in court, where he was sentenced to prison for carrying spectacular weaponry (‘three loaded handguns, a submachine gun, ammunition, extended magazines and a ballistic vest’) in his car.

Zzzz… wha’?

How bout this.

In fact, an analysis of Forms 990 for approximately 100,000 organizations filing the annual report to the IRS in 2014 published recently by the Wall Street Journal found 2,700 nonprofit officials were paid more than $1 million. Although most were administrators at hospitals and universities, there were also many football coaches and executives at endowments like the Harvard Management Company. Nonprofit organizations respond that they are trying to attract the best candidates and are merely adopting compensation practices similar to those in the private sector.

Get it? See what happened? TAKE TO THE STREETS. FLOOD YOUR REPRESENTATIVE’S OFFICE WITH EMAILS. THIS IS A SERIOUS MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE.

Do I need to spell it out for you? Do you see what’s happening here?

You want to spend your kid’s tuition money on sky-rocketing multimillion dollar salaries for coaches and on twenty million dollar a year compensation for university money managers, and here comes the IRS to tell you that these aren’t appropriate non-profit expenditures! They even have the gall to say that giving all that money to coaches and money managers diverts tax-exempt money from students and shit! Whatever that means.

So they’re putting a crushing new tax on excess non-profit compensation, which means universities are likely to pull back on these amounts and you will have to pay the managers and coaches less.

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

I know. So far this is all numbers and abstractions. Here is an actual story, from the University of Kentucky, of how it will be.

“The excise tax that was levied in the new tax bill is big,” [UK athletic director Mitch] Barnhart said. “That will have an impact on every athletic department.”

A change in the tax code requires non-profit entities to pay a 21 percent excise tax on payments to its five highest-paid employees that are making more than $1 million a year.

For every dollar over the $1 million mark, UK must pay the 21 percent tax, which for UK Athletics includes the salaries of men’s basketball coach John Calipari, football coach Mark Stoops and women’s basketball coach Matthew Mitchell.

According to figures reported to the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2017, Calipari was the highest-paid person on campus that year at $7.24 million, followed by Stoops at $3.9 million and Mitchell at $1.28 million.

The university also will be paying the excise tax on the salaries of Phillip Tibbs ($1,195,600), a physician, and Michael Karpf ($1,123,179), who ran the medical center until recently, UK spokesman Jay Blanton told the Herald-Leader.

With the new salary bump and potential bonuses outlined in the new amendment to Barnhart’s contract, the UK athletics director might top the $1 million mark in the near future. His base salary will be $1,025,000 starting in 2020, per the amendment.

This year’s figures were a part of the $147.7 million dollar 2019 budget approved by the university’s Board of Trustees recently, simply noted as “escalating operating expenses.”

How will these escalating expenses be paid? The same way other expenses are.

“How we make up for it on the other side is really difficult,” Barnhart said. “We have to work at that.”

I know you can do it, guys! A grassroots campaign of outraged professors, students, and parents will take to the streets and have that punitive 21% rolled back before you can say Nick Saban.

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

Again, here’s the challenge, stated simply:

Every organization that pays a salary of more than $1 million per year to any of its top five earning employees will face a stiff new 21 percent excise tax. That means any nonprofit-designated charity, college, and hospital that routinely asks us for donations, or charges expensive tuition or medical bills will have to justify paying those high salaries against a hefty new tax.

Get out there and do what has to be done: justify.

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Know your enemies.

In [a recent] email to me, [tax law professor John] Colombo wrote, “Big time college sports is already a cesspool of money, and the federal government doesn’t need to be subsidizing 50-yard-line seats or skyboxes at the University of Alabama or Notre Dame, or Michigan or anywhere else.”

Amazingly, both the House and the Senate now appear to agree with Colombo. A spokesman for Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — and a Texan — told the Austin American-Statesman that the deduction is “the epitome of a special-interest loophole” and that it was forcing taxpayers to “subsidize front-row seats and luxury boxes for wealthy boosters.”

Now that Rick Pitino’s out of commission, America’s filthiest, cheatingest, richest, college coach, John Calipari, struggles with the lamestream media:

Q. What is your reaction to the whole FBI investigation of college basketball? …

JOHN CALIPARI: Well, what’s out there right now is a black eye. But here is the thing for everybody here: I don’t want to come across as uneducated or dumb. None of us know where this thing’s going. So for me to really comment much on it, I mean, I don’t know where all this is going.

Obviously, what’s happened to this point isn’t good. At this point I don’t think me commenting without knowing all the facts is the right thing to do.

Q. How do you react to Mark Emmert’s statements yesterday? Do you think the culture of college basketball is so hopelessly corrupt that something has to change?

JOHN CALIPARI: I read the statement. I kind of liked it because at a point in there he mentioned about the students. At the end of the day, this is about the student-athletes.

I would say, again, this isn’t the format for me to go full boat in this. I would say if we make decisions about these kids, what’s right for these kids, we’re going to be right. If the NBA is worried about the NBA, and if the NCAA is worried about the NCAA, if each individual institution is just worried about themselves, and the last thing we think about are these kids, we’re going to make wrong decisions.

… Q. There’s a decent chance that next week Rick Pitino won’t be the coach at Louisville. Will you miss the rivalry in coaching against him?

JOHN CALIPARI: Look, it’s unfortunate, all the stuff that’s come down. But let’s talk about my team, please. Does anyone here have a question about my team, please?

Q. One more question about the FBI.

JOHN CALIPARI: Anybody have a question?

Q. Wait a minute. This is a Media Day, not Coach Day. I am entitled to ask a question.

JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.

Q. You cannot answer it, fine.

JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.

Q. The FBI reportedly has expanded into looking at Nike. Kentucky is a Nike school. What reassurance would you give your fan base, the Big Blue Nation, if they’re anxious about what this could mean?

JOHN CALIPARI: Again, you’re asking like you know something that I don’t know.

Q. That’s all I know is right there. If a fan would put two and two together…

JOHN CALIPARI: Wait a minute. We don’t know what you’re saying, if it’s true. Do we know if it’s true?

Q. It’s been reported.

JOHN CALIPARI: Oh, that makes it true.

I have no comment to it. I mean, we haven’t been contacted. The NCAA hasn’t contacted us. We’re going about our business of coaching this team.

How about a basketball question since it isn’t my day.

Did you click on that first Calipari link? The one that takes you to years of coverage of this vile, greedy, cynic? I think you should.

It was while reading his letter of termination, signed by the latest vague desperate interim nowhere man running the University of Louisville yet deeper into the ground. As she read the guy’s list of Rick’s evil evil deeds, which must be listed in this letter in order for the school to fire him with cause and get a forty-four million dollar discount on the transaction, the following exchange from Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? began running through my head:

George: You can sit there in that chair of yours, you can sit there with the gin running out of your mouth, and you can humiliate me, you can tear me apart … ALL NIGHT… and that’s perfectly all right … that’s OK…

Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!

George: I CANNOT STAND IT!

Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!!

George: (Quietly.). That is a desperately sick lie.

Martha here is ol’ Rick, hotly sought after by UL and paid seven million dollars a year because no one cheats their way to a championship like Rick; because Rick’s a winner who sees what he wants in a restaurant and fucks it right there on the table; he’s a guy whose recruitment coaches run whorehouses in basketball dormitories, and whose program pays the biggest bribes to high school players, and… Louisville married him for it!. It wanted a world of gin-pissed vulgarians and pin-striped dress for success hypocrites to keep the ball rolling, and it correctly identified and highly rewarded Pitino as THE man to provide it.

But now! Now, just because of a teeny DOJ and FBI crackdown, it’s suddenly ooh what a nasty unethical person you are! We cannot stand you!

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

I’m afraid Rick is well within his rights, just as Martha is, to point out that these qualities and behaviors are exactly why UL fell so expensively in love with him in the first place. UL loved him so much that they let him sweep up most of the money available at the University of Louisville. It is impossible to find words to describe how much UL loved Rick Pitino, but it is quite possible to look at the immense money, power, and adoration they gladly gave him all those years. Because he won championships, and that’s all UL cares about and ever will care about because it’s Kentucky and it’s UL and that’s that. The next strutting multimillionaire fuckhead they bring on board to win championships will do exactly the same things to win them. Rick knows this, and has a right to feel aggrieved.

… All the sad sad pieces in the local rags ’bout how the University of Louisville was lookin’ so good and then hell all hell broke loose and now look at the mess we’re in… Boo hoo! Everybody’s cryin’ for UL, for Louisville, for the state of Kentucky… Everybody’s favorite current phrase: Fall from grace…

What state of grace? The school went from being a lowly commuter campus to a jockshop. All under the larcenous eye of the ex-president — a guy the school is likely to sue in order to see if it can recover some of the funds he, er, took.

No, UD doesn’t think valedictories are quite the right tone … For a university that… Well, let’s tell everyone what you did, UL.

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Short version: YOU WERE A VERY VERY BAD BOY AND THEN YOU GOT CAUGHT.

Longer version: You had a very long run as a bad boy and you made a lot of money. Your bad boy president and his cronies made a lot of money. Your bad boy basketball coach and his staff and some of his players made a lot of money. You won a lot of games by bribing the best high school players to commit to UL. You ran a house of prostitution inside one of your dorms and provided the prostitutes to sixteen year old recruits and their fathers. Bad, bad, bad. Naughty, naughty, naughty.

Still, for a long time you didn’t get caught, and your professors were silent and your trustees were silent and your students whooped at the games and your coach collected his annual seven million dollars and everything was great. And then you got caught.

That is, like bad boys everywhere, you gambled. You gambled that you wouldn’t get caught. You were Kentucky Gamblers, and this is the only valedictory you’re getting, courtesy of Merle:

… This Kentucky Gambler planned to get rich quick.

… But a gambler never seems to stop till he loses all he’s got
And with a money-hungry fever, I played on
I played till I’d lost all I’d won, I was right back where I’d started from…

Time to wheel onstage at the University of Louisville John Dowland’s melancholy air.

Now that the school’s longtime chiseling president and his cronies (some of them? most of them?) have been, uh, made to absent themselves from felicity, the question is: Shall we sue to get back at least a little of the tens of millions they seem to have .. taken? Or shall we, as we desperately seek a new president, say fuck it – We’ll never find a non-larcenous president if we’re on the front page of every paper in the country – UNIVERSITY SUES PRESIDENT FOR MILLIONS IN STOLEN FUNDS — a national embarrassment, a school universally ridiculed as the U of Smell for years of financial and sexual scandals… Plus it’ll cost a fortune to sue these assholes…

ON THE OTHER HAND! It somewhat rankles that Ramsey took all our money and bought four houses and …

Auditors determined Ramsey was paid $12.4 million by the university and the [university’s fund-raising] foundation [which Ramsey also ran!!] from 2010 through 2016, including $7.2 million in deferred compensation. The report shows Ramsey and eight other employees collected $21.8 million in deferred compensation, apparently without foundation board approval.

Two days after his forced resignation last July, Ramsey and his wife paid $800,000 in cash for a 4,200-square-foot home in Miramar Beach, Florida. They also own two other Florida properties purchased for a combined $1.08 million, as well as a $470,000 home in Oldham County.

Yeah, don’t worry ’bout little Jim Ramsey!

“Don’t worry about me. Nobody is more blessed than Jim Ramsey of Fern Creek, Ky.”

Little Jimbo! Blessed, blessed, a thousand times blessed! Just a little ol’ fella from Fern Creek, Ky!

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All the rats are scrambling:

[E]x-foundation officer Kathleen Smith, who was fired in June, [has reportedly] recently moved about $800,000 worth of properties to limited liability corporations.

I mean, the endowment was just sitting there:

[T]he foundation’s officers and directors depleted the university’s endowment to fund excessive spending on compensation, football tickets and bad investments in real estate and start-up companies.

Hate to quote myself, but…

How did U of L get so bad? Just put it together. Just put it all together: The southland, good old boys, football, basketball, sex, and money. Add a hundred jiggers of Kentucky bourbon for a brilliant finish.

This here’s a BIG ol’ story, folks. Hold on to your hats.

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Words fail me.

… eventually. Until that time, gutter-school University of Kentucky’s football coach Mark Stoops will have to content himself with a behemoth salary and a $12 million buyout – a buyout so obscene that this utter loser of a coach, playing to rapidly emptying stadiums, seems to have UK by the balls.

Stoops entered 2016 with a sense of security thanks to a whopping $12 million buyout that Kentucky, after dropping $126 million on a stadium renovation and $45 million on a new training facility, seemed unlikely to pony up and pay no matter how this season unfolded.

But one of America’s poorest states will pony up. (And it’s actually $18 million.) You know it will. When the only games going at your state university are football, basketball, bourbon, and coal, you’re going to spend what paltry resources you have on those games and nothing else. You have a proud legacy of filthy coaches, crime-ridden teams, blahblahblahblahblahblahblah to protect.

This advice, culled from one of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino’s many motivational books, seems to have been taken to heart by Katina Powell:

Powell kept five journals with details of her escort escapades, sexual encounters, murdered relatives and activities at the University of Louisville. Most of the U of L services she provided took place in the men’s dormitory where basketball players reside. Her main contact and the man who paid for her services–the school’s former director of basketball operations and former graduate assistant, Andre McGee–kept Powell and her girls busy from 2010 to 2014. She has hundreds of text exchanges with him to set up her services as well as pictures of her girls with players and recruits.

She seems to have recorded everything.

One other note of interest as we begin to, uh, bone up on this story, is the fact that the journalist who first reported the story, Pat Forde, co-wrote a book with Rick Pitino and is (was?) apparently his buddy. Hm.

The University of Memphis is a stinker of a sports factory with a venerable history of violations and voided seasons. Mafia-style basketball coach John Calipari brought his special approach to coaching to UM a few years ago (he’s now at Kentucky) and got them wins and voided wins in time-honored fashion and fine. We all know the deal and who cares about the voided part? We still won. We won the way you win in big-time university sports: Hired an incredibly expensive cheater (“Cal probably doesn’t have to cheat now as much as he used to, but he’s still the standard. The rest of us can’t even deal in his league. He’s the best.”) who cheated us there. So?

Oh but now some moral purists at UM are balking at honoring Calipari at a campus event as he’s inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame because oh no he was a cheater and because of him we had to void our wins.

Listen up.

[F]ans are mad… because Calipari left in the midst of an NCAA investigation into Derrick Rose’s eligibility, which eventually voided the 2007-08 season and the Tigers’ Final Four appearance. This is rich, because they sure didn’t seem to have a problem with Calipari’s methods when his teams were marching deep into the tournament every year, even though his previous Final Four appearance with UMass was also voided because Marcus Camby accepted money and gifts. They also think he stole Xavier Henry, who had signed a letter-of-intent, and DeMarcus Cousins, who had verbally committed, away from Memphis as he left, as if those players should’ve been forced to attend Memphis after the coach that recruited them left.

John Calipari is a good basketball coach and a great recruiter, and in some ways his open recruitment of one-and-dones and promise to get them ready for the NBA is the most honest arrangement in college basketball. Sure, he almost certainly looks the other way as his players and programs commit NCAA violations, but it’s not as if Memphis didn’t know that when they hired him, and it’s hardly as if he’s the only college basketball coach doing so.

Or put it like this:

[Memphis fans are upset because] Calipari’s 2008 Final Four run with Memphis was vacated by the NCAA after star player Derrick Rose was found to have cheated on his SAT. (Even though Calipari himself was never found at fault — and even though rule-breaking and rule-bending is ingrained in the culture of supposedly “amateur” college basketball.)