… perhaps from an overdose, and instantly a sports writer starts talking on-field replacements.

His death coincides with the release of the book Basketball Junkie.

A newspaper reader describes the leadership of the University of Alabama:

For the person that called about Jim Tressel running Ohio State: Who do you think runs the University of Alabama? It’s definitely not any of the presidents or trustees or board members or anyone else like that. His name is Nick Saban. He runs everything at the University of Alabama.

UD‘s blogpal, Gregg Easterbrook (he of the famed Christmas Letter), takes a wide-angle look at university athletics.

Some excerpts:

[N]early all universities lose money on sports. Recently the NCAA reported that only 14 Football Bowl Subdivision programs clear a profit, while no college or university in the United States has an athletic department that is financially self-sustaining. Nobody in FBS — not Alabama, not Auburn, not Oklahoma, nobody — has an athletic department that pays its own way.

At many colleges and universities, athletic programs cannibalize donations that might have gone to education.

[H]igh coaches’ salaries don’t even result in programs that make money, the way high coaches’ salaries in the NFL result, at least, in profit.

[I]n football, Ohio State has a 1-to-5 ratio of staff to students: while in English, the staff-to-student ratio is 1-to-280. Divide the latter by the former. In staffing terms, Ohio State treats football as 56 times more important than it does English.

The Columbia football coaching staff has 14 people, including a chaired coach — the Patricia and Shepard Alexander Head Coach of Football. Not the football coach, the Head Coach of Football.

It is difficult to believe Auburn really needs an athletic director, an executive associate athletic director, five senior associate athletic directors, four associate athletic directors and a guy with the title senior associate athletic director & CFO.

Well. Auburn. Reason not the need. I got nowhere else to go!

… for years.

Now, with the FBI investigating the university’s research institute (it’s “the contracting arm of the university, farming out millions of dollars in research work to professors and others on behalf of all manner of clients, including NASA, Boeing and the U.S. Army”), presumably for theft, things at A&M have gotten so chaotic that the situation is simply impossible to follow. It obviously involves conflict of interest, incompetence, and cover-up, but who really knows? The university doesn’t seem to have an actual president at the moment… or, rather, the pro tem guy in the job seems all messed up in the conflict of interest and as a result lacks authority… Whatever. If anyone cared about, say, the students at that school, they’d shut it down and send them all somewhere else.

The UAH professor who defied Bishop and shut down her massacre speaks.

… [Debra Moriarity] worried that any attempt to tighten security could have negative consequences. “There is evil in the world; it is unfortunate that good people are hurt by that. But a university is a place of free thought and freedom to explore ideas and to search out new knowledge and you don’t want to put anything in place that dampens that.”

Moriarity returned to her office on Wednesday and said she plans to resume teaching next week. She predicted that, with the help of anti-anxiety medication, she would be able to sleep Wednesday night.

“I’ve been talking to family and friends and just getting their support helps you deal with it,” she said. “I think right now most of us want to get back there and get things going, make plans for who is going to cover classes.”…

“Do I think that salaries are too high nationwide? Yes, I certainly do, but we can’t control the marketplace,” Boren said.

Boren is David Boren, current president of the University of Oklahoma. And what he’s doing is called passing the buck.

Actually Boren can, to a remarkable extent, control the marketplace. Rich brainless schools like his (see also the University of Alabama), who care only about sports and therefore offer millions of dollars to coaches are the leading edge of the salaries problem. They’re setting the pace, see.

Boren should check to see whether he still has balls. If he does, he should take a stand on the issue.

The problem is not that abstraction, the marketplace. It is that very real entity, the greedy coach and the greedy coach’s agent.

Now y’all sit down with those people, see. You tell them you’re a university, not a football field, and you tell them what you think a reasonable salary for a coach – as opposed to your university’s president, or, say, the president of the United States – would be.

‘Course, here comes another non-abstraction: Your paralyzing fear of your student body and your alumni. You’ve let their moronic passions overrule your sense of what the university should represent. You say to them I’m gonna stop the madness right here right now.

They say to you You’re out on your ass.

So what? So what, Boren? So you take yourself out of the president’s office and you write a book about how you were sent packing from an institution of higher learning because you wouldn’t pay a football coach five million dollars. You give interviews. You make a little documentary. Whatever. You piss off a lot of stupid people who, because they’re both stupid and pissed off, unwittingly reveal all sorts of other scandals at the university, sports related and non sports related. A big ol’ mess, like the one going on at the University of Illinois right now.

See now, that’s a good thing. That’s changing the world for the better, Boren, and I seem to recall you used to be a politician with a modicum of self-respect and a desire to make the world better.

Alabama A & M has stopped functioning. Corrupt, inept, the school’s finished. It continues to operate as a set of buildings inside of which taxpayer money is wasted.

The situation fascinates UD, a veteran university-watcher. If a university falls in the forest, but no one gives a shit, does it make a difference? Does the university go on lying there, deadwood drawing state appropriations?

It’s a story worth following.

This university does not really exist. There’s no there there.

Here’s the latest news.

The trustees of Alabama A&M University are attempting to organize another meeting some time this week to review the three finalists for the school’s top job.

The board of trustees met in Birmingham on Saturday, but five trustees did not attend. Without at least seven voting members, the board could take no official action regarding finalists for university president.

… Jerome Saintjones, who handles public relations for the university, said today that he expects to know by Tuesday when trustees will meet again.

Trustee Robert Avery said he was asked about a possible meeting Saturday, but said he would not be available. Avery, who did not attend the meeting in Birmingham, suggested the board stick to its regularly scheduled meeting at the end of the month.

Lynn Sherrod, a Madison County district judge and A&M trustee, also did not attend the Birmingham meeting. She said she needed more thn 24 hours to review the materials related to the candidates.

“I am very hopeful that this board will come together,” said Sherrod. “The university needs a permanent president, but the board needs to take every precaution to get the best available person.”

Total free fall. Shut it down.

Thuggery is mainstreamed at the University of Alabama…

That’s not quite right. It’s celebrated; it’s an occasion for amusing witticisms, as it was for the Alex Murdaugh defense attorney who pointed an assault weapon at the opposing table and said “Tempting.” In this case it’s Haw look at me I carry guns so much officials have to check me for them before I play basketball. Haw.

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Don’t bother Bama none that they recruit murderers and accessories to murderers. Guns? Everybody’s got ’em and fuck you.

The fact that he’s done this intro throughout the season is no excuse for his failure to read the room.

Huh? Who says he ain’t reading the room? What room? The US House chamber?

Anyway Brandon Miller’s pregame pat-down can’t hold a candle to New Mexico State’s pre-game introduction, where each basketball player pulls off his pants and invites the other players to finger his anus.

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Here’s a guy with absolutely no sense of humor. Boo.

[T]he most impressive achievement [Alabama Senator Richard] Shelby leaves behind is the military-industrial complex he supplied with lavish federal aerospace and defense contracts in Alabama’s 5th Congressional district, which sent [Mo] Brooks to Washington to chew off the “Big Government” hand that fed it. The local monument to the senator’s powerful career is the Shelby Center for Science and Technology at the University of Alabama Huntsville. The building is best known as the scene of the 2010 mass shooting in which Amy Bishop, a biology professor denied tenure, pulled a semi-automatic pistol out of her purse during a faculty meeting and executed three colleagues (she pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence).

On the bipartisan gun-safety bill recently signed into law, Shelby voted against even sending it to the Senate floor, leaving his A+ NRA rating unbloodied.

Shelby’s presumptive successor is of course a champion of the “God-given Second Amendment,” but she also sells herself as a “Mama on a mission.” To a future Senator [Katie] Britt, that means that “our children should be taught to love this country” — a nation so exceptional that our children die at their school desks in order to preserve our freedoms.

Dropped out. At very outset of his professional career, fined $20,000 for a late hit. Arrested for trying to carry a Glock 19 onto a plane. The University of Alabama watches with excitement for Quinnen Williams’ next move!

She killed both of her adult children – and then herself – with a gun (or guns) she had in her house. Why did Marsha Edwards have guns? The police are saying very little – not about guns, or a final note, or substance abuse issues, or psychiatrists… With the exception of one neighbor who apparently called her a “very, very unhappy woman,” we got nuthin. We got lots of the use of the word “tragedy,” and lots of Give God the Burden, which UD finds mighty odd for a double murderer. Of her own children.

What is it about some women who kill? UD‘s reminded of ol’ Amy Bishop, who shot her brother to death and was sent home to mommy. I understand you can’t do anything to Marsha Edwards now (Bishop, decades later – after she mass-murdered her University of Alabama colleagues – was indicted for the fratricide), but we should at least find out why a murderously deranged mother was able to buy a gun and kill her kids with it. She lived in a wealthy, ultra-safe, gated community… Why the gun? Can we ask when she bought it, or if she got it from a friend, or whatever? It’s the thing that ended three lives – shouldn’t we know something about it?

As the Marsha Edwards story vanishes into that tragic woman plus the cosmic mystery, it leaves the stink of the normalization of a household appliance able to be used with stealth, ease, and one hundred percent fatality.

Professor Bishop, like the Aurora mass shooter, opened fire shortly after she learned of her termination (at the University of Alabama); and like the Aurora shooter she did the deed during a meeting with colleagues. And like the Aurora shooter, she had quite the violence/mental illness history (she sent bombs to perceived enemies; she shot her brother to death) and should never have had access to a gun. How much of the scary criminal background of these two employees did the university and the factory know about?

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.”

… for three clever University of Alabama students.