Nevada, our most mentally challenged state, is about to spend eight hundred million dollars on a 60,000-seat stadium for one of the losingest university sports teams around: University of Nevada Las Vegas football.

In an era where it’s been proven time and time again that building new sports and entertainment facilities doesn’t necessarily immediately create a return on investment — in fact, it often does the opposite — there is still no hesitation to go with the bigger is better model of property development.

It will feature a 100-yard long Adzillatron – the entire length of the field. It’s one thing to hurl shrieking sixty-yard long ads at captive audiences; at one hundred yards, there’s really no getting away from them.

The best commentary UD has so far seen on this comes from a reader of SB Nation:

It’s pitiful.

But we’re Vegas and we do stupid shit like this all the time.

They are a special elite among American universities – schools so indifferent to education and so sports-obsessed and so lame that the only news we hear out of them is big talk about – or investigative reports about – their stupid and/or corrupt athletic programs. The University of Louisville is the trend-setter here, but consider that perennial UD favorite, the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Although sports at UNLV is hemorrhaging money (Scold, scold, scold, say the regents, except they’re the group that cheered the school on and made it possible for it to lose all that money), its loser coach is peeing his pants over the prospect of a new immense $1.9 billion football stadium to accommodate all the people who don’t go to his team’s games.

UNLV would share the stadium with the soon-to-be-relocated Oakland Raiders, see, and excellent local characters like Sheldon Adelson will put up most of the money, see?… Are you getting as excited as I am? This vast structure will have the world’s largest Adzillatron spanning its entire length, so none of the twelve thousand people in attendance (and what amazing optics those numbers in that huge space will be for UNLV) will miss one millisecond of constant shrieking gargantuan commercials. The markings on the field will of course say RAIDERS rather than Rebels, and in general UNLV’s status in all of this will be that of a poor overlooked orphan cousin but it will have to put up I dunno around $200 million. BUT what’s $200 million when you already have a five million dollar budget deficit? Just add it to the fucking deficit! Big deal!

Oooh, but speaking of deal – Sheldon’s feelings got hurt in some way and he has pulled all of his money out. BUT Goldman Sachs will pick up the slack!

BUT Goldman Sachs has pulled out of the deal too!

I mean, it looks as though sharing a hot sweaty bed with casino gambling was too much even for the obscene NFL… But poor UNLV! It has no problem with the lower depths, but it might lose that big new stadium anyway…

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Yeah and now that the deal’s falling through you got all these local naysayers…

It is high time lawmakers, now meeting in regular session, reconsider the state’s commitment of room tax money to this harebrained, half-baked scheme to enrich billionaires.

Instead of sticking tourists with a 0.88 percent hike in the room tax, lawmakers should let them keep that money to spend on food, drink and gambling, which net nearly 10 times as much in tax revenue.

… Lawmakers should note that there is no stadium price tag in the bill they passed, and the stadium backers flatly refused to consider capping public funding at 39 percent of the cost of construction. It was $750 million or no deal. The cost of the stadium when first proposed was a mere $1 billion. It ratcheted up from there. What is to stop the Raiders from building a $1 billion stadium, tapping the taxpayers for three-quarters of the tab and getting the state to make the estimated $900 million in road improvements needed to access the stadium?

Besides, does UNLV really need a new football stadium, when it can’t fill the one it has? One that has adequate traffic access off a major freeway and abundant parking. Why is there a need for a stadium on or near the campus, when 93 percent of students live off campus?

Oh shaddap.

America’s dumbest state builds a stadium.

Yet another American university – this time it’s Temple – is up against the CAB (Cock And Balls) problem.

In response to its president’s decision to build a football stadium, a local writer slowly, painstakingly, in the manner of a kindergarten teacher, explains why it’s total madness…

Temple has nowhere near enough money to compete in the big leagues.

In fact (let’s put this as simply and slowly as we can…): State taxpayers already hugely subsidize the money-hemorrhaging program, and the stadium will add another hundred million of debt.

At best, Temple would play six or seven [poorly attended] home games a year at the new stadium — even if it doubled as a track-and-field site, you’d still end up with a hulking facility (and, probably, parking lots) that go unused the vast majority of the year.

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So how do we account for the president’s absolute conviction a new stadium will be great, great, GREAT?

Well, it’s like answering the question Why does the University of Nevada Las Vegas president think a billion dollar stadium will be equally great?

It seems clear to UD that these men are thinking not with their big head, but with their little head.

UD proposes a clause in the president’s contract mandating, upon a majority vote of the faculty senate, a regime of Depo-Provera.

… you can’t be bothered to make any public statements about a very high-ranking faculty member who’s also – according to a number of reports – an outrageous plagiarist.

I mean, it’s a matter of priorities. Do you wanna look at this? Or do you wanna look at some pointless little English professor getting punished for plagiarizing “from at least 160 works over the course of his career”?

Yes, we pay this guy close to $150,000 a year and give him a fancy title AND he has the distinction of having plagiarized an entire article by UD‘s very own dissertation advisor, WJT Mitchell! But hey. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

… in which student leaders at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (a school that’s a perennial source of ridicule on this blog, by the way) object to the – everyone’s trotting out the usual adjectives – obscene, outrageous, grotesque – payment she’s getting to give a speech at the school. The students, who attend a university constantly and, uh, outrageously raising tuition and fees, a school about to build a billion dollar football stadium, are shocked that anyone would be handed $225,000 to read an hour’s worth of platitudes (an hour? maybe less) written by someone else. (UD will enthusiastically vote for Hillary when she runs, so look elsewhere for an anti-Clinton screed.) (And don’t get me started on the mystery of who wrote her memoir.)

Not long ago, Clinton got $300,000 to do the same thing at UCLA.

UD ran the give a speech for $300,000 thing by Mr UD, and though far from a populist, he too was shocked. For him too something in this transaction – you fly me out, put me up in a nice place, watch while I read a speech, have one of your fund-raising arms give me $300,000, and fly me home – seemed very wrong.

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The dustup has me thinking about John Edwards, a presidential candidate with … call them money problems. Remember? This is a from a long profile in Esquire:

Edwards was taking a beating in the press. The two $400 Beverly Hills haircuts that were mistakenly charged to the campaign, his yearlong employment at a New York hedge fund, the revelation that he took large fees for speaking engagements — all of it has been drowning out his message.

“They’re calling you a hypocrite,” I said.

Edwards looked at me, kind of annoyed, kind of resigned. “The truth about me is that I come from a very normal background. Early in our marriage, Elizabeth and I had very normal lives. We got financially successful because I won a bunch of cases. So we had money far beyond what we would ever have expected to have. And I think that part of our life, the financial life, is pretty privileged. You know, that house you went to is a really nice house. But I don’t think either one of us has believed that anything’s changed about us.

“Yes, of course, having money, having people around me, being able to buy a nicer shirt or whatever without having to worry about it, or going to dinner and not having to worry about it, that’s all true, that has changed. But I don’t think it changes anything about me as a person. The people who are critical, well, they don’t know me, they’ve never been around me. They don’t know me personally. That’s what I really believe is the truth.

“Because of the background I come from, I always feel a personal connection with people who are struggling…”

Large fees for speaking engagements… though back then they were probably a piddling amount, like $100,000… Not long after he was president of Harvard, Larry Summers made $135,000 for one speech at Goldman Sachs… That’s nothing…

And what was Edwards’ defense? That despite the absolutely enormous house he’d built himself, despite all of the other gazillion dollar expenditures, he wasn’t a hypocrite because his essential ordinary humble self was unchanged.

Beyond the on-the-face-of-it unpersuasive nature of this argument – unimaginable sums of money clearly had changed him, as such a staggering life transformation would change anyone – there’s the deeper but even more obvious truth that how you use your wealth reflects your morality. Edwards used his in a profligate and narcissistic way; and to add insult to injury he did this while lecturing the nation on the shame of there being Two Americas.

And sure, there are two Americas, which is the heart of what Hillary’s up against. I mean, there are several Americas, but for the purpose of addressing this problem, her problem, there are two. There’s middle-class America, represented by the shocked UNLV students; and there’s Tom “Kristallnacht” Perkins’ America, represented by Brown University’s Steven Cohen (personal wealth $9 billion) and Harvard University’s endowment (approaching $35 billion). And the real problem, ironically enough, since UNLV is a university, is ignorance. The student leaders do not know about, let alone understand, this other America, the America whose one big daily existential issue is what to do with all of its money. People are always bothering Harvard about spending more of its endowment, but Harvard is kind of at a loss. They spend and spend – they’re building an entire other campus, for god’s sake – and it’s still around 35 billion. Cohen is constantly purchasing palazzos and Picassos, but, like some character in Alice in Wonderland, the more he spends the more he makes. This is The Spending Down Problem, the one problem that continues to bedevil our rich country’s large number of super-rich people and institutions. What the hell do we do with it all?

If you understand the problem from this angle, you’re not surprised when people come to your university, read some lines, and get a check for $225,000. The country is bulging with people desperate to dispense their money somehow, somewhere.

Since UD believes the students’ problem is essentially one of education, she has a proposal to make. Our universities should offer – perhaps in the business school – a History of Personal and Institutional Wealth in America, with an emphasis on the last ten years or so, when so much wealth has accumulated in private hands that most observers have trouble believing the numbers, much less the Spending Down Problem. (Review of required text here.) This course would allow America’s university students to look at $300,000 for a speech at their school (not to mention prepare them for the eventual escalation of these fees into the millions) without blinking.

… when it’s all about screens, it’s only a matter of time before the classroom and the stadium disappear. Why go to class if it’s about playing on your computer while some fool at the front of the room plays with PowerPoint? Why go to a football game if it’s about forced, game-long watching of football-field-length mega-screens (the famed Adzillatrons) screaming ads for used cars at you, while you wait for the people who control the home viewer’s television screen to decide those ads are over and play can resume? Why would any rational, self-respecting person continue either of these degrading and pointless activities?

Let’s be more precise. Let’s look at fabled sports school University of Michigan.

This spring, the Michigan athletic department admitted what many had long suspected: Student football ticket sales are down, way down, from about 21,000 in 2012 to a projected 13,000-14,000 this season.

The department has blamed cell phones, high-definition TV and student apathy sweeping the nation. All real problems, to be sure, but they don’t explain how Michigan alienated 40 percent of its students in just two years — and their parents, too.

Forty percent in two years. Wow. Let’s see how they did it!

1. Since the game-day experience is so wonderful, you raise “the price from $195 for six games in 2013 to $295 for seven games.”

2. “Because just about every major college game is televised, ticket holders have to endure about twenty commercial breaks per game, plus halftime. That adds up to more than 30 minutes of TV timeouts — about three times more than the 11 minutes the ball is actually in play.”

3.

While TV is running ads for fans at home, college football stadiums too often give their loyal season-ticket holders not the marching band or — heaven forbid — time to talk to their family and friends, but rock music and, yes, ads! To its credit, Michigan doesn’t show paid advertisements [most other universities do], but the ads it does show — to get fans to host their weddings at the 50-yard line, starting at $6,000, and their corporate receptions in the skyboxes, starting at $9,000 — Michigan fans find just as annoying.

Yes, advertising in the Big House does matter. Americans are bombarded by ads, about 5,000 a day. Michigan Stadium used to be a sanctuary from modern marketing, an urban version of a National Park. Now it’s just another stop on the sales train… Fans are fed up paying steakhouse prices for junk food opponents, while enduring endless promotions. The more college football indulges the TV audience, the more fans paying to sit in those seats feel like suckers.

(By the way, all of this will be okay when the University of Las Vegas builds its new football stadium with the world’s largest Adzillatron. Las Vegas is Suckers Central.)

4. While waiting for the ads to finish so those precious eleven minutes can begin to tick, fans can contemplate the AD’s “$1 million salary, almost three times what [the previous AD] paid himself — and yes, the AD does pay himself — plus [the current AD’s] $300,000 annual bonus, which contributes to a 72-percent increase in administrator compensation; not to mention an 80-percent increase in “marketing, promotions and ticketing”; and a 340-percent increase in “Hosting, Food and Special Events.”

… for the University of Nevada Las Vegas —

Several resort industry officials on the UNLV stadium authority board balked at the list of taxes suggested to pay for the stadium. Some questioned why tax dollars are being considered at all.

“I don’t support the use of public funds,” said Paul Chakmak, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Boyd Gaming. “The state and the county have fiscal needs. To prioritize a stadium ahead of those seems like it’s not the right place. We all have to be responsible.”

Kim Sinatra, senior vice president and general counsel for Wynn Resorts, said, “A billion dollars is a lot of money. If we want to spend a billion dollars on UNLV, is it a stadium?”

— UD is pleased to see that a true understanding of the logic of the university football stadium is still there, and at the very highest levels:

[The university’s president] tied the stadium project to UNLV’s larger aspiration of becoming a top-tier research university…

… but I will do my damnedest to post – want to write, for instance, about the failing fortunes of that big ol’ University of Nevada Las Vegas stadium the boys have in mind to build once they get hold of hundreds of millions of tax dollars… The current UNLV stadium isn’t empty enough for them — they want one that will be bigger, cost more, and attract even fewer people. But I’ll just post this for the moment, since I’m worried about losing my connection….

How to approach the delicate topic of football culture and the gifts it has given the American university? It’s not merely the obvious stuff – the pointless stupid scary violence that scads of sports heroes like Richie Incognito bring to campus (idle Google Newsing turns up the latest helmet-bashing-in-the-campus-locker-room, this one at the University of Delaware, where last February another player “was charged with assaulting three other students at a party.”).

This violence has turned professors into police:

Days after the incident, [an Oregon State student who got beaten by team members] said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

The violence is hard-wired, of course, into the coaching of both university football and basketball, so that on a routine basis latter-day Bobby Knights are filmed and parodied (start at 1:15). The coaches are quickly replaced, sometimes by women, who are symbolically part of the clean-up routine cuz you know women just want to mother the team and would never be violent…

In fact, let’s pause there and think about the incredibly important role of women in big-time university sports. I don’t mean merely as tools of recruitment (several schools attract players via, er, dates with carefully selected female students), and objects of rape, assault, and harassment (see, most recently, the Norwood Teague unpleasantness at the University of Minnesota). And I don’t mean merely the importance of trotting out mom, post-assault, on Good Morning America. (Or, as Matt Hayes puts it, “GMA’s utterly repulsive decision to allow De’Andre Johnson on television to apologize for punching a woman in the face.”)

I mean, think about Donna Shalala’s tenure as president of Miami University. Her main role was as cover for a team that got in big on-field brawls and whose best buddy was Nevin Shapiro. She was like the Good Morning America mom times a hundred. They kept wheeling Shalala out to apply the back of her hand to her naughty charges, and this routine actually worked for a while.

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A local commentator asks incredulously where the University of Minnesota found the likes of Teague (the answer is that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a search firm). “Were the other finalists Bill Cosby and Donald Sterling?”

Donald Sterling, Zygi (“bad faith and evil motive”) Wilf, these are the guys who give professional basketball and football such a great name… And, as the commentator suggests, there’s not a lot of discernible difference between professional and big-time university football. Even in the matter of violence, there’s the NFL…

In the N.F.L., … fits of violence hardly blacklist players chasing roster spots. The day after punching [Geno] Smith, [Ikemefuna] Enemkpali latched on with the Buffalo Bills, whose new coach, Rex Ryan, has created a haven for wayward players…

(What a sweet, Victorian, girly way of putting it! A haven for wayward players! Like Ikemefuna’s teammate, the aforementioned Richie Incognito! The way Jane Addams created a haven for wayward girls! SWEET.)

… and there’s college ball, where getting kicked out for violence means the same thing it meant for Ikemefuna – you just find another team.

All of which is why, as UD has often recommended, universities with big-time football need football coaches, not academics, as presidents. (See Jim Tressel.) In a pinch, a politician will do. You could also go with a figurehead, a Queen Elizabeth to Nick Saban’s prime minister. But you’ll keep getting stories like the one coming out of the University of Minnesota as long as you take some guy – some random polite reflective well-meaning university denizen – and hand him the management of what is essentially a professional football team.

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The petri dish for university football culture is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their new field design is all about Vegas. A sample headline:

UNLV REBELS WILL BE PLAYING FOOTBALL ON ONE BIG CRAPS TABLE IN 2015

“The team’s field and uniforms now reek of the Strip — it’s glitz, gold, gambling and most importantly, its promise of future fortunes.”

This is a team with one of the worst records in university football. An appalling record. Very few people show up to their games. Season tickets sold last year: 3,890. In response, the university decided to build a $900 million, 55,000 seat stadium with an Adzillatron spanning the length of the field. Although they’ve cut back on that original plan, they’ll surely come up with something like it. And they’ve got yet another miracle coach who’s going to shock everybody with the greatest comeback story this side of Elvis.

The local paper and some faculty and students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas are trying to attract some general attention to the state’s latest education-related embarrassment:

[T]he agency that oversees higher education in the state lifted large parts of an early draft of a think tank’s report word-for-word…

Their complaint features the Nevada System of Higher Education chancellor because he’s the one who should have humbly acknowledged when the story broke that his organization acted hastily in using another person’s writing (the writing seems to have been circulated in a routine, not-for-quotation, preliminary way), especially in the context of competitive bidding for state funds.

Plus, news-cycle-wise, it’s less than optimal that only a few weeks ago the system’s highest-profile university – UNLV – barely managed to fire a highly esteemed and compensated professor who has been plagiarizing pretty much everything he writes for about thirty years. The plagiarism was pretty well known… pretty well documented… but until the Chronicle of Higher Education began using a yellow highlighter on this guy, UNLV dragged its ass.. And even then, a member of the reviewing committee argued that he shouldn’t be fired!

Throw into the Nevada higher education mix that the only thing you consistently hear about universities there is that some jerks want to build a billion dollar football stadium (‘Kim Sinatra, senior vice president and general counsel for Wynn Resorts, said, “A billion dollars is a lot of money. If we want to spend a billion dollars on UNLV, is it a stadium?”’), and, well, nuff said.

Of course this local columnist is right that the state of Nevada has a jaw-droppingly bad ed rep; but she errs in assuming even a non-desperate effort to change this.

UD has for years followed the states of New Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, and Nevada (UD‘s Big Four) as they run their primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools into the ground.

Not one of these states seems to know how to run schools, much less care about running them.

Nevada in particular – entertainment capital of the world – is all about building The World’s Largest 800 Million Dollar University Football Stadium and stuff like that. It’s clear the state doesn’t even know what universities are. Or – again – care. The center of its world is Las Vegas.

Las Vegas. Nevada’s tax base relies on drawing stupid people to the state, and it’s done a bang-up job. State leaders understand there’s, uh, negative utility in drawing smart people.

So who can be surprised that no one there knows what plagiarism is, much less knows that you shouldn’t do it? The same local columnist expresses amazement that the University of Nevada Las Vegas for years housed a high-profile professor who has been loudly called out as a plagiarist since “his 1990 doctoral dissertation at [the] University of Toronto.” She seems surprised that UNLV seemed disinclined to do anything about this guy until the Chronicle of Higher Ed did a big story about him. A commenter at Retraction Watch notes:

UNLV management were probably too busy hushing up scandals with the basketball team to worry about something as trivial as plagiarism on a massive scale…

The columnist seems just as surprised that the Nevada System of Higher Education “copied large sections of [a Brookings Institution] draft report and submitted it to legislators as NSHE’s own proposal.” Why not?

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!!

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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.

America’s dumbest state dumps the dome on its flagship university’s sooooooooper dooooooper fuuuuuuuuture stadium, and UD is disappointed. Où sont les $900 million 55,000 seats d’antan?

The University of Nevada Las Vegas is talking about shrinking the mofo too! This place was going to be huge, and its Adzillatron was going to extend the entire length of the stadium!

Remember this picture?

Well, forget it. Everything’s going to be smaller. Plus, to get a more accurate sense of the place, take all the people out of the shot.

At UNLV’s state of the athletic department address and free lunch held last week at Buca di Beppo near campus, the Rebels’ new sports marketing guy said football season-ticket sales were at 84 percent of last year’s total. Which at first sounded promising. Until somebody said UNLV sold only 3,890 season tickets last year... [W]hen it comes to revenue streams, which is what the UNLV football team must generate to become self-sufficient, just how much is 84 percent of 3,890 season tickets sold anyway?

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Meanwhile, there’s another tragedy in the making at Colorado State University. Their stadium was going to cost a pittance compared to UNLV’s – only $226.5 million – and they were real sure they could drum up a lot of that via all those football fans out there in Fort Collins, so…

Two years after CSU announced efforts to raise private money to build the stadium, fundraising totals do not look promising. Officials acknowledged in July that the university has raised just $24.2 million as of June 30 for the stadium, less than a quarter of the amount that CSU President Tony Frank has sought to raise by this October.

Wha’ happened?

And why, wonders this University of Central Florida administrator, doesn’t our university have the same draw? Why doesn’t anybody come to our football games? Why can’t he swell with UCF pride at the same full attendance he sees at aquariums and amusement parks? “I … cringe when our football team is featured on national TV because the camera might pan up beyond the lower bowl or near the end zone, where seats are often empty.” The university has more than done its bit – it shuts down classes altogether when there’s a big game, for instance…

But here’s the thing about Central Florida University. Empty its football stands might be, but the school itself – qua school, if you know what I mean – is insanely overcrowded, with extensive reliance on massive lecture halls, online courses, PowerPoint automata instead of teachers, etc., etc. In fact, UCF is one of University Diaries’ online makeover schools, universities she believes should simply accept reality and shut down their physical campus.

Given the nature of UCF, would you go to a football game there if you were a student? What do you suppose this high-security (cheating and cameras are rampant) dystopia means to the typical student? A place to pick up a degree, sure. But little more.

Yet why, the UCF administrator asks, do students not understand that

the university’s investment in athletic programs and student-athletes is an important part of UCF’s move to enhance its brand and image, and full support by fans can be a major contributor to that end.

It’s the same deal at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, which is about to build a billion dollar football stadium:

[The university’s president] tied the stadium project to UNLV’s larger aspiration of becoming a top-tier research university.

What is there about spending all our money on sports will make us a great intellectual institution that these people don’t understand??