It was just a matter of time before Time put this in a headline.

If you didn’t click on the link, here ’tis:

FOOTBALL: A WASTE OF TAXPAYERS’ MONEY

Lordy, lordy. When it hits the headlines of Time!

You, dear taxpayer, are footing the bill for football through an outrageous series of giveaways to billionaire team owners and public universities that put pigskin before sheepskin.

Billionaire team owners like Yeshiva University trustee/convicted fraudster Zygi Wilf… What American could object to handing her taxes over to the likes of Zygi??

Okay, so let’s see what the Time guy has to say.

… Rutgers’ athletics programs get a subsidy from the university of about $29 million a year, the lion’s share of which goes to the Scarlet Knights football team. As the flagship state university of New Jersey, that money is not only coming out of tuition and fees paid by students but out of the pockets of Garden State taxpayers.

As with NFL stadium deals, such lavish, publicly financed gifts are the norm for college football. With the exception of a tiny handful of programs – Ohio State, University of Texas, LSU, and perhaps three or four more – virtually every athletic program at every public NCAA Division I school is subsidized even as administrators plead poverty when it comes to resources for faculty and, as you know, education. Especially in an age of busted government budgets, even the most rabid sports fan should agree that it’s an outrage that the highest-paid public employee in a majority of states is a college football coach (in another 13, it’s a basketball coach). It’s far better to be broke and have a cellar-dwelling NFL franchise, right?

If you watch football this weekend, recognize that most of the drama and meaning is taking place off the field. The way the college and pro games are built on subsidies and giveaways neatly encapsulates crony capitalism at its worst – and helps to explain why taxes go up even as it seems there’s never enough money for basic government functions.

Killjoy. Why not pile it on? Why not talk about Temple? Here’s Deadspin on the subject.

Temple University announced today that it will drop seven intercollegiate sports: baseball, softball, men’s crew, women’s rowing, men’s gymnastics, and men’s track and field, both indoor and outdoor. This is a cautionary tale about trying become a football school.

The cuts will save just $3 million of Temple athletics’ $44 million annual budget, or not much more than it costs to run one of the FBS’s worst football teams (and run it at a loss). About 150 athletes students are out of luck, though the school announced it will honor their scholarships until they graduate or transfer. The nine full-time coaches aren’t so lucky… Rather than drop out of Division 1A, as seemed likely and logical, Temple stayed independent and decided to spend. They moved into an NFL stadium, paying more than $265,000 per home game in rent. They clambered into the MAC, but kept their eyes on a bigger prize. Moderate on-field success spurred further budget inflation. Finally, they made the leap back to the Big East—just as the Big East fell apart… The chase for bigtime football is a pyramid scheme, and the Owls remain afloat at the expense of those sports on the bottom. What happens when the con man runs out of suckers?

They needn’t worry. When it comes to the American taxpayer, there’s a sucker born every minute.

Or is it just beginning?

[N]o one could possibly be that good given the volatility of the markets. “As we know, markets go up and down, and his only went up.” … [Harry] Markopolos noted that during his tenure at Rampart, he traded with some of the biggest derivatives companies in the world, and none of them dealt with [Bernard] Madoff because they didn’t think his numbers were real.

Markopolos is talking about the year 1999. It wasn’t until Bernard Madoff was arrested in 2008 that Yeshiva University – under cover of night, without comment – erased his name as chair of its business school. This was farcical enough, but Yeshiva went farther: It invested huge sums with the financial criminal of the twenty-first century. “We thought he was God,” said his fellow trustee, Elie Wiesel.

One appreciates Wiesel’s honesty. He is willing to state openly just how stupid, just how grossly negligent, were the conflict-of-interest crazies running Yeshiva University.

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The excellent Gavriel Brown, who writes for YU’s student newspaper, provides a detailed account of the manifold ways in which the very same fools, who continue to run Yeshiva, have now run it into the ground. The column even provides an edgy graphic (scroll down) complete with smugly grinning President Richard Joel. Brown concludes:

YU can no longer be an empire and President Joel can no longer be an emperor.

Yes, especially since he turns out to be Nero.

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But the farce deepens yet more. The comments on Brown’s column are from outraged Yeshiva insiders who cannot believe that anyone in the Yeshiva family has the shamelessness to air this dirty laundry. How dare he! The next thing you know, someone will point out that the family that endowed an entire Yeshiva campus – the Wilfs – just got convicted of racketeering. That Ezra Merkin held as powerful a position as Yeshiva trustee as his partner in crime, Madoff. That the board of trustees has long been farcically rife with conflict of interest.

Of all the investment managers in New York City and around the world, the board chose one of its own to manage a significant portion of the university’s endowment. Given the conflict of interest, the trustees who approved the decision to invest endowment with Madoff should be held accountable if they failed to perform adequate due diligence.

Do you think anyone has been held accountable? Well, put it this way. Do you think that Zygi Wilf has been removed from Yeshiva University’s board of trustees?

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You want farce? An American university priding itself on its piety as the higher education arm of the orthodox Jewish community resembles a criminal enterprise. It seems to be run by an emperor. It is cheered on to annihilation by idjits. That’s farce.

… Yeshiva could not have done any better. A university whose sexual and financial scandals dwarf the sexual and financial scandals of all other American universities; where the vilest sexual abusers continue to be hired and kept on the faculty until pressure from journalists forces Yeshiva to fire them; where the school’s long history of sexual abusers means that it now faces hundreds of millions of dollars in potential settlement costs from a massive ongoing lawsuit… A school perfectly happy to keep Bernard Madoff on its board of trustees long after suspicions of his massive criminality were rampant but hysterically punitive when a woman student wrote a short story with mild sexual content…

And here it goes again. You simply cannot keep Yeshiva University from being the most obscenely hypocritical university in America.

Within twenty-four hours of [a Yeshiva student] posting [a] survey [about sex], the University Dean of Students contacted [her] via email and phone informing her that her housing scholarship had been revoked.

No whores wanted here! We’re a religious establishment! What would Zygmunt Wilf and Ira Rennert and Julius Berman say! What shamelessness!

Outrage among students at Yeshiva’s disgusting behavior forced the school to back down. Good thing, because FIRE would have had a field day with this.

Yeshiva University: You simply cannot keep a bad school down.

Tis the song, the sigh of the weary, as Stephen Foster put it. The guy in this post’s title wants to know why he can’t just love his Vikings and not have to think about being one of millions of Minnesota taxpayers who’ve given hundreds of millions of dollars to the team’s racketeering owner, Zygi Wilf.

Zygi is one of Yeshiva University’s most honored trustees. He is part of the Yeshiva University tradition of having its trustees called “evil” by judges. First Bernard Madoff and now Zygi have inspired some of America’s finest jurists to rise to this rhetorical occasion…

(Update: Yeshiva’s main campus is named after the Wilf family. Yikes.)

But back to our headline. Like it or not, your sports news – university sports, professional sports – will always be saturated with – imbricated with (to use an English major word) – criminal news. This being the case, UD proposes that MFA programs at sports factories offer not just instruction in Minimalism, but also instruction in Criminalism, a prose style in which you entertainingly interweave afternoons at the arena with evenings in jail.

There is a good deal to study here. UD has been a student of criminalist prose for years and has accumulated a syllabus-full of methods, approaches, points of view. She’s particularly intrigued by the style she calls Coacha Inconsolata, a mournful account of the sufferings of coaches who through no fault of their own recruited drunks and flunkies to the team and of course to the school. Here’s a very recent example. The trick is to focus not on the totally foreseeable stupidity and criminality of the recruit, but rather on the shocked and hurt coach.

Here are some excerpts, with commentary from Scathing Online Schoolmarm.

U Conn [basketball] center Tyler Olander has put Kevin Ollie in a difficult position … [This is the beginning of the first sentence of the article. Start right off not with the player, but with the coach. It’s unseemly to dwell on jailed players — too many of them, doesn’t look good, challenges alumni to keep loving the team — so dwell rather on the sacrificial agonies of the coaches.] Legendary coach Jim Calhoun had already left Ollie with a underwhelming and thinning front line. Now, calling that front line “thinning” is like a bald man using the comb over. It’s approaching nonexistent. [Next move: Recall the impossibly big shoes into which the coach must step. Legendary Jim! You only have to watch this famous clip to understand how beloved, how amazing, Calhoun was… Poor Ollie! Left only with thinning hair.] Olander was UConn’s only big man left on the roster with any sort of real experience. The Huskies had already lost veteran Enosch Wolf, who had his scholarship taken away for his own legal issues… [If you’re not blubbering by this point, you’ve got a heart of stone. What is this good and great man, this Job of the jocks, supposed to do?]

Just continue like that if you want to write Coacha Inconsolata criminalism: The writer here goes on to talk about the coach’s “major headache,” the way he’s “scrambling” to do a good job, and how “This is not what he had to have in mind when he laid out his plan” for greatness. Do not touch on the question of how it is that anyone entering a major university sports coaching position lays out non-criminogenic plans for greatness. Do not ask how anyone could possibly be that stupid. Just go with the Job thing.