You wonder sometimes what it really comes down to, the sort of people and customs it creates. You wonder about the actual daily nitty gritty of university life at schools where nothing matters but sports.

I’m not talking about the big public stuff, the big five-part Sports Illustrated feature on T. Boone Pickens’ Oklahoma State University and its multidimensional pigswill. I mean the microculture – the way people talk to each other; the way they dress; the way they interact, one on one.

For that, you need two types of stories that routinely hit the news:

1. the sadistic coach; and

2. the sadistic hazer.

These two highly placed boosters carry the microculture in a way we can see, a way chronicled – since it maims people and generates trials and lawsuits – by the local and national press. Oklahoma State’s macroculture is the five-part series; OSU’s microculture is the secretary of the Interfraternity Council who pulled a loaded gun on pledges when they said they wouldn’t take a bullet for their brothers. He didn’t shoot them, but in his rage he shot out the window of the pick-up in which they were sitting. Because they obviously had no idea how serious the brotherhood of boosters was at OSU.

My post’s headline comes from a voice mail the women’s lacrosse coach at the University of Louisville sent to one of her players. The university’s system of spies had spotted a player wearing a shirt with the name of a competing university on it.

Darby, change your clothes, don’t bother coming to practice today. Do you know that I just got a phone call about you wearing a Michigan State shirt? You obviously have no idea how serious athletics is at the University of Louisville. I do not want to see your face today until after practice, but your butt better be up in my office with a Louisville shirt on your chest when practice ends.

Winston Smith would have no trouble recognizing this message. It is the functional equivalent of mandating burqas for university women.

The University of Louisville – read about its vile, all-enveloping sports culture here (scroll down) – is now enjoying national coverage of this coach and her alleged abuse of the students on her team.

Are you beginning to see how twisted these all-American settings are? Looked at from both macro and micro perspectives, the nation’s sports sluts get sicker by the day.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm reads the sports news.

Nothing says finger-lickin’ dignified like having your university graduation ceremony at KFC YUM!

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And now you got some reporter complaining about Rutgers University in this here headline:

CORPORATE SALES OF STADIUM NAMING RIGHTS FURTHER SULLIES COLLEGE ATHLETICS

First off, I think we can agree that big-time college athletics has long since reached sully-saturation, so let’s lose the further.

Second, High Points Solution is an information technology firm! That’s classy! It ain’t Kentucky Fried Chicken! Rutgers should count its lucky stars.

He’s more than reached that tipping point where accumulated institutional embarrassments demonstrate the failure of his presidency.

There’s the graduation rate.

There’s Rick Pitino (scroll down).

There’s the last dean of the school of education. (Background here.)

This list (I’m sure I’m missing stuff) describes a university president totally asleep at the wheel. Why hasn’t he been fired?

… this blog keeps its eye on its beloved University of Louisville, scummiest school in these United States. I mean, Louisville is only one of zillions of dirty jockshops awaiting its NCAA fate because it bribed players’ families or took money from commercial interests to steer players toward them or blahblahblah same old shit … This just in: Big time university sports is weawy weawy filfy doity… But when it comes to athletic as well as academic corruption, no one does it like Louisville.

And mes petites – Now that the American university has disappeared as an empirical-world phenomenon, the only happening place on campus is the basketball arena/football stadium, haunt of the heinous.

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.

Vanderbilt’s immune system worked: Scammers were unable to find anyone to bribe in order to admit the rancid rich.

Fact is, not all American universities are criminal in this way. Yale and University of Southern California certainly are: Both seem to offer multiple avenues of corrupt access. But there are other Vanderbilts out there, schools that avoid, among other things, hiring greedy shits to coach their students. (Along those lines: Did the University of Rhode Island not know why its new tennis coach was fired at Georgetown? How could they have hired the dude?) As this big-time story evolves, I think we’ll see more and more universities touting their … well, their legitimacy.

For the record: The more you monetize these non-profit settings – the more you look like, say, Yeshiva University, which spawned Madoff, Merkin, Rennert, and Wilf, the more bad actors you’re incubating across the entire system. People get the message, people! Look at the University of Louisville with its high-profile, highly-paid, low-lifes, from athletics to the office of the presidency. What do you think other people at the university, pondering this cast of characters, are going to conclude?

… moral exemplar suspends moral exemplar.

– has long assumed, correctly, that its ridiculous trustees will listen to the shit the athletics department tells them year after year about taking care of that pesky deficit. Crazed highly-paid coaches, some still working for the school, others suing the school; games in which no one takes any interest; student athletic fees through the roof; academic quality in the toilet; a deer in the headlights president and an empty-threat legislature – you know the drill. Trustees know the drill…

Cuz everything’s gonna be fine as soon as the athletics department not only kills the deficit, but starts making HUGE money. Hold onto your Stetson!

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But every now and then there’s a kind of … eruption on the part of one of the trustees. One of them suddenly flies over the cuckoo’s nest and lets out his anger at having been lied to and infantilized for years and years and years. It never seems to happen at our most craven sports factories – Auburn, Nebraska, Louisville – but it can certainly happen elsewhere. Because it’s very rare and beautiful and precious and fleeting, like one brief brilliant flash of a peacock’s tail, we take note of it here at University Diaries.

Rob Doughty, president of the UNM Board of Regents – which is responsible for signing off on years of consistently failing budgets from [the] university’s athletics department – says he feels he’s been lied to and won’t rubber stamp any future athletics budgets nor consider forgiving any of the department’s estimated $7.5 million deficit before seeing significant changes.

… “I want to know right now, in front of everybody, why are we [this much] in the hole when I was promised last year that we had a balanced budget?” Doughty intensely questioned.

… “I’m very upset today. I feel like this Board of Regents and the folks that were there, and especially me, were misled and were told things that weren’t true. And [athletics was] making false promises.

“And, I have to say, that in my time at this university in the last four years, as I sit here today, I think I’m as mad as I’ve ever been…. I think the projection line was done just to balance the budget…. [I] want to know what research was done, what analysis was done to really back the projected figures.”

Hey can’t put one over on Doubty Doughty. That projection line was done just to balance the budget!

I’m sorry, kiddies. Either all of these people are idiots, or this is the way they want things to be. It’s a way of life. You don’t get to break in, a century after the cargo cult has established itself, and say Maybe building a landing strip for magical gifts won’t make the magical gifts appear…

… but so’s the NCAA.

The life of the mind, USA, 2018.

Onward and upward at America’s most notorious public university, the University of Louisville.

The vice-chair of the scandal-plagued University of Louisville’s board of trustees takes note of the fact that when your university has devolved to what whatshisface would call a shithole, it breeds a bit of animosity on the faculty when $55 million is found to make your stadium bigger.

SONG OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE
BASKETBALL RECRUIT

‘Come,’ they told me
Pa rum pum pum pum:
‘Your dorm has whores for free.’
Pa rum pum pum pum.
‘You’ll play at KFC.
Yes! KFC YUM!
It’s facing bankruptcy.‘
Pa rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum

After bribery
Pa rum pum pum pum
We lived in luxury
Pa rum pum pum pum
They brought their gifts to me
Pa rum pum pum pum
Rick’s boys took care of me
And we all kept mum
We all played dumb
Rum pum pum pum

Feds came to talk to me
Pa rum pum pum pum
‘Bout our conspiracy
Pa rum pum pum pum
UL told Rick to flee
Pa rum pum pum pum
He sued, and they sued he
And everyone’s scum
Shitting their bum
Rum pum pum pum

Yes, I played for you
Pa rum pum pum pum
Feel a bit dumb

Indeed, we knew that was coming.

What you might not have known is the other big news:

Rick Pitino has just been named Academic Provost at the University of North Carolina!

[University of Louisville Athletic Director Tom] Jurich’s pay was essentially ill-gotten gains taken directly from players such as first-round NBA Draft pick Donovan Mitchell, whose television appeal and jersey sales produce the revenue. Yet Mitchell must be content with whatever crumbs the school illicitly tosses him? Throw open the market. Let’s see who clamors for Jurich’s jersey. Or whether the public would rather see him in prison clothes.