Football is a religion, they say, and its god, these days, is the Godzillatron, the Adzillatron, the Jumbotron… like the deity, this massive high definition video screen with massive advertisements screaming at you from the moment you enter the stadium to the moment you leave, goes by many names…

Ever since 2009, when the University of Texas got the first one in the country, dozens of other American universities have gotten their own monster video display. The one proposed for a new stadium at the University of Nevada Las Vegas will run the entire length of the field.

What’s strange about the massively expensive Adzillatron is that everyone hates it; and indeed many people point to it as contributing in an important way to the emptying out of the university stadium. Where’d everyone go? Why are many students – even at places like the University of Alabama – not going to the games, or going but leaving early? Tons of explanations have been offered, but UD thinks that the phenomenon of the Godzillatron, while only part of the answer, is an illuminating focal point for any discussion of the terrific fiasco for which contemporary American university football is headed. Of course one has to toss into the too-disgusted-to-attend mix all the scandals – criminal, hemorrhagic, sexual, academic – plus all the overpaid coaches and castrated presidents blahblah… But the heart of university football is the stadium experience, and if that experience had been able to retain a shred of authenticity, the fiasco might have been averted.

Here’s what happens at a [Mississippi State] football game these days: 3rd & 7, we’re on defense, tie game, offense calls timeout. [Colubus Ortho Harlem shake, Kiss cam]. Everyone’s attention is drawn to the jumbotron, away from focusing on the task at hand – getting our defense pumped to stop the other team!

I don’t need a bunch of distractions. I’m there to watch a football game.

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

[University of] Michigan football fans don’t just love football. They love Michigan football — the history, the traditions, the rituals — the timeless elements that have grown organically over decades. They are attracted to the belief that Michigan football is based on ideals that go beyond the field, do not fade with time, and are passed down to the next generation — the very qualities that separate a game at the Big House from the Super Bowl.

After the 2013 Notre Dame game, [our Athletic Director] said, “You’re a 17-18 year old kid watching the largest crowd in the history of college football with airplanes flying over and Beyonce introducing your halftime show? That’s a pretty powerful message about what Michigan is all about, and that’s our job to send that message.”

Is that really what Michigan is all about? Fly-overs, blaring rock music and Beyonce? Beyonce is to Michigan football what Bo Schembechler is to — well, Beyonce. No, Michigan is all about lifelong fans who’ve been coming together for decades to leave a bit of the modern world behind — and the incessant marketing that comes with it — and share an authentic experience fueled by the passion of the team, the band and the students. That’s it.

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

Coach says: Thou shalt have no other Godzillatrons before me. Narcotic simulacral standardized screen gigantism is the heart of the postmodern doctrine being preached… Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled… But keep thine eye upon the Godzillatron which I have given to you and thine lip upon the fruit of the vine which also I have given unto you, and rest in the arms of the Lord forever… And yet in their ornery unpredictable way Americans are beginning to break away from the faith. They seem to be experiencing it as inauthentic. Not the true faith.

… poll? What’s its secret?

Well, it’s a matter of priorities. Look at its public university system.

[I]t’s hard to find $900 million for a 60,000-seat domed college football stadium for a program that has had a winning record once in the last 13 years and resorted to giving away tickets for free to get people to go to its last home opener.

Sure it’s hard. Sure! No one ever said life was easy. But the state of Nevada knows what matters, and UD is sure it will devote millions of dollars to this initiative.

And anyway you can’t say Nevada students don’t care about basketball! The other night, UNLV’s student body president got so excited he got thrown out of a game!!

“I was the leader of our group,” said [Mark] Ciavola, a 39-year-old political science major and the campaign manager for Nevada Rep. Joe Heck, R-Las Vegas.

“If you feel you have to escort someone out, you escort the leader, but multiple people on both sides were yelling and gesturing,” he said. “None of the [University of Nevada, Reno] fans were ejected for throwing things at us, but perhaps no one saw that.”

More detail from Ciavola:

… Ciavola had tried to lead a group of about 50 UNLV fans around the perimeter of the court to chant “Rebels,” something he had done at last year’s game between the two teams.

He said they were stopped by a security guard or police officer who told them to return to the bleachers or they all would be thrown out of the game.

‘We went back to our seats, but as UNR starting tying up the game things really got heated and the entire stadium started chanting “F— the Rebels,’” Ciavola said. “The section in front of us was flipping us off and throwing things at us – a water bottle and crushed up paper — and finally we gestured back at them.”

Enter the University of Nevada Las Vegas board of regents warily.

It is as Freud wrote of entering the darkness of the soul:

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

It is as Joyce wrote of the obstetrical theater:

Enter that antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent. Quietude of custody, rather, befitting their station in that house, the vigilant watch of shepherds…

The psychoanalyst conjures what is darkest in us; the obstetrician conjures the violence of the birth trauma. Yet both are shepherds, custodians, healers …

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art…

You see the paradox…

And, in some similar sense, to enter that antechamber wherein reside the darkest, most primitive forces of the American university, and then to enter into what Blake called Mental Fight with them, is to emerge scathed. To read – to try to understand – the words and acts of the most primal energies at work in that bastion of enlightenment, the university, is to sense what Marlow must have felt in the forest of shrunken heads.

Let us then in studious quietude listen to them, the trustees of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, as they give a football coach with a 12-37 record a vast raise; as they build for a university community that does not attend football games a vast new football stadium; as they generate a $2.7 million athletics program deficit and make students and taxpayers deal with it… Let us hear their words.

“Maybe we’re being a little generous, but I thought about some of the other factors that were occurring,” Regent Robert Blakely said. “We’re in the process of trying to build a stadium. Having a successful football team is the biggest linchpin. Giving the football coach more of an incentive probably isn’t a bad plan.”

“I’m not enamored with the contract either,” Regent Michael Wixom said. “But I don’t want to jeopardize the momentum (Hauck) has created. [The coach’s most recent season was 7-6!] If we reject the contract, I’m afraid it will do immense harm.”

Regents directed Chancellor Dan Klaich to form a committee to look at best practices in contract negotiations with athletic coaches. However, Regent Allison Stephens said she wanted to see fair-market value and adequate compensation for coaches.

“I just fundamentally disagree that our role in fiscal management means that we have to nickle and dime and negotiate down people working in our institutions,” she said.

Some in the public, who came to support [the coach’s] contract renewal, agreed.

A $200,000 annual salary increase “is peanuts in the long run,” Rich Abajian, general manager for Findlay Toyota’s board of governors, told regents. “Football is the program that can pull you out of budget problems. … You’ve got to pay money to make money.”

It’s official.

Just sayin’! Not sayin’ Rule By Females would necessarily be better. But when you run a blog about universities and it’s all about undergraduates like Richie Incognito and trustees like Steven Cohen and coaches like Mike Rice you do wonder about Rule By Males.

When you see – frequently – headlines like this

WHY REPLACE A STADIUM THAT’S
ONLY HALF-FULL ON GAME DAYS?

it has to go through your head to consider whether men are led through life by anything other than dicks and wallets. I mean, why are Colorado State University and the University of Nevada Las Vegas (scroll down) going to build massive expensive empty new stadiums? CSU Athletic Director Jack Graham’s “dream of playing with the big boys,” says one local critic, really shouldn’t result in a university spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a slightly better located, slightly expanded, void.

Various fans explain to the newspaper that they go to the games, they get excited when they go to the games, and they get excited by the thought of competing with other schools on the basis of the magnificence of their stadiums …

Oh Giunchigliani really. Go back to Italy or get with the program. You live in Las Vegas, not Parma, man. When your local university has a football program this successful, you spend hundreds of millions on a new stadium. Get it?

Of the panel’s 11 members, only Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani addressed whether there was a need for the stadium. Nearly everyone else in the room — from UNLV President Neal Smatresk to the stadium board chairman Don Snyder — appeared to be poised to build some type of venue… Stadium board member Cedric Crear, a Board of Regents appointee, even went as far to say that a new stadium would “revolutionize our football program. This city wants a winning, big-time football team. I don’t want to be shy about saying that.”

Don’t be shy, Cedric. Say it loud and say it proud.

Even though some Strip casino companies such as MGM Resorts International said the previous stadium proposal of $900 million was too much, Snyder told the Review-Journal after the two-hour meeting that there is no price ceiling.

“Why not?” Snyder said when asked if the new stadium proposal could match the price of the old one.

… “The temptation is to cut out the bells and whistles. When you start cutting costs, there’s a tendency to look like all the other stadiums across the country. Then you get mediocrity and I don’t think mediocrity is acceptable in Las Vegas,” [another booster] said.

The last thing I’d associate with the Las Vegas public education system is mediocrity. The Las Vegas public education system is way, way, below mediocre.

… comes out in favor of a university-wide laptop in the classroom ban. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you know that UD has confidently awaited such a day, and that she trusts something similar will happen at other self-respecting campuses (Def. of self-respecting campuses: Places whose football stadium isn’t named after a prison). That is, UD has anticipated that the real energy in favor of serious bans will come not from professors, many of whom do ban them, but from students.

This is for obvious I’m all right, Jack, pull up the ladder reasons: What careth I, Professor X, if Professor Y’s students have a shitty classroom experience? I’ve worked out something good for my group.

But – as UD has told you repeatedly – this is a treacherously short-sighted POV. As the Duke editorial writers ask:

Why convene class if students are half-present, constantly disturbed by text messages, games and Facebook? … What is the point of holding class if people are not paying attention? This is not just about respect; it is also about the necessity of a physical college campus. The more time we spend on computers, the less important the on-campus college experience — which universities tout as a major benefit of an elite education — becomes.

If it helps you to think about this in terms of sports: Note current plummeting attendance at many university and professional stadiums. Why, why, why? Well, lots of traditional reasons (obscene drunks, long runs of losing games, outrageous ticket prices, passels of bad boys on the teams) PLUS a new one: The addition to many stadiums of vast Adzillatrons — screens that show you the game as it’s happening, and add constant massive shrieking advertisements. Fun! You’ve spent hundreds of dollars to be treated to a computer-generated as-it’s-happening rendition of the game while being held captive to wall to wall commercials. Where do I sign up for my $2,000 season tickets?… But it’s so much less fun with every game, ’cause I notice all the other people who used to sit with me and make it exciting to cheer are gone. They’re watching on their big screen in the respectable privacy of their own home…

And see it’s the same thing at universities. Why go there? It’s nicer to lie in bed and stare at your very own screen. And you get to that place, mentally, as a result of staring at screens in classrooms, just the way people get themselves home from the football game by staring at screens in the stadium.

Really dum-dum states, like Nevada, our very dumbest state, are planning more and bigger Adzillatrons at stadiums. A proposed $800 million new facility for UNLV features an Adzillatron that spans the entire stadium. Imagine sitting in your seat and being forced to watch the world’s biggest moving image of a three-tier McDonald’s burger oozing white sauce! Slurp!

Sometimes a simple little sentence says it all.

As the corrupt people who brought you the situation this sentence describes go on their summer retreat and do some really intense reposeful thinking about how they can unfuck their entirely fucked system — a system that directly benefits every one of the retreatants — they might give a thought to this sentence.

It appears in an article about one of the more notorious forms of money whoring sports universities do – selling beer to students at games.

Doesn’t always seem to work very well. One of the commenters reports from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:

UNLV sells beer at basketball and football games. It’s generally not a problem at the basketball games from what I can tell (I go to nearly every home game), but the football games are completely different. There are numerous incidents at each game because of the alcohol being sold inside the stadium. Students/young-adults are binge drinking in the parking lot at tail-gate parties and then coming in and getting more drunk. It requires a very strong police/security presence in the stands just to keep order in Sam Boyd Stadium.

And this is a UNLV game, so we’re talking only 10,000 people at most at a game (unless it’s Wisconsin and the Badger fans sell it out). Usually it’s less than that, maybe 6,000 to 8,000 people. Imagine a stadium packed with 80,000, it would be nuts. Actually just last season the university made the paid tail-gate lot go dry because of the incidents that occurred during the UNLV/UNR game. I think the universities considering selling beer just to make a few extra bucks are greatly underestimating the problems that accompany it.

Great synergy. Your team sucks, so no one comes to the games. You figure plying students with drink might bring them in, but it doesn’t because your team sucks. Meanwhile your school (and it’s not a very good school to start with – UNLV I mean) has no budget because the state (Nevada I mean) doesn’t care about education, and because you’re in hock for all the big-time athletics stuff you thought was such a great idea.

So sucky team plus you don’t even make the money on booze you thought you’d make because … what did the commenter say? Six thousand a game? Six thousand pissed losers? Watched over by a “very strong police/security presence”? (That costs money too.)

I’m not sure even Samuel Beckett could sketch so arid a scenario.