Outfoxed

Why does Fox hate America?

Tonight, the dear leader of our great nation delivered an important State of the Union address. Many television networks saw fit to preempt regular programming in order to broadcast this critical speech live. These included NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS.

And yet, Fox saw fit to carry a repeat of the Simpsons. For shame!

I suppose Fox doesn't think it important to support our president at a time when national unity is crucial. This leads me to think they're just part of the liberal, America-hating, terrorist-supporting, scum media, attempting to offer comfort to America's enemies.

We should hardly be surprised. After all, the head of Fox, Rupert Murdoch, is a foreigner. And he wasn't even born here [sic]. It's just the sort of thing we should expect from his kind of people.

I expect Bill O'Reilly to place this at the head of his "Talking Points" on the next Factor. And Sean Hannity will probably do the patriotic thing and call for Murdoch's head, and for all other Australian-Americans to be detained and tortured without due process.

(See, not so much fun when it gets thrown back in your face. At least they didn't preempt the Simpsons, which would've required me to make a rant about why the CBC is so great, since it doesn't preempt its Simpsons repeats so the asstastic president can stumble through a major speech saying idiotic things.)

Oh, the ignorance

Take a look at this chart. Pay attention to the third name on the list, Peter Stastny, and make a note of his country.

Now take a look at this page.

Just for the sake of clarity, the Peter Stastny listed as the third-highest European scorer in NHL history (and a native of the Czech Republic) on the chart is the same Peter Stastny listed on the second page as a member of the European Parliament from Slovakia.

No, Stastny didn't move from the Czech lands to Slovakia after the Velvet Divorce. He was and remains a Slovak (though he also holds Canadian citizenship, obtained during his tenure as a member of the Quebec Nordiques). He also played for Slovakia at the 1994 Olympics and is general manager of the Slovak national team. Obviously he's a proud Slovak.

Of course, it's silly for me to expect people to get this right. Or to comprehend that, just because there once was a country called Czechoslovakia that has the Czech Republic as a successor, that means everything from Czechoslovakia was Czech.

It's interesting, though, how the Czech Republic seems to have inherited all the legacies, good and bad, of Czechoslovakia, while the Slovaks somehow have been cut off from that period of their history. The same thing occurred last fall, when the Czech Republic qualified for the World Cup for the first time, only the stories (including those from the Czech media), touted it as the Czechs' return to the World Cup after a 16-year absence. Sure, the last time Czechs played in the World Cup was 1990. But they also played on a team with Slovaks, and for a country called -- you guessed it -- Czechoslovakia.

Really, even though this example doesn't pertain directly, I'm just more convinced that when I teach classes on East Central Europe I should have on the final exam a map of Europe asking students to identify Slovakia and Slovenia, and they have to get it right to pass the class (or at least to avoid a severe blow to their course grade). I think that's fair. It's not like I'm throwing Slavonia into the mix as well.

Idiots

I looked forward to reading Bill Simmons' first book, Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank, and the 2004 Red Sox. His columns for ESPN.com's Page 2 are consistently its best material, especially since the death of Ralph Wiley (though Scoop Jackson has tried to fill the void left by Wiley to a certain extent). His column is written from the perspective of a regular fan from Boston, and I'm not sure anyone else could pull that shtick off. Certainly not as well. Simmons writes well and is funny, which is a nice change of pace from a lot of the drivel that passes for sports journalism.

So, needless to say, I was eager to see what he had to say in his first book, a look back on the events that defined him as a tortured fan of the Boston Red Sox and led to their World Series title in 2004.

Of course, before I got a copy, I wish I had done some investigating and discovered that the book is just a compendium of columns from the past seven years or so, with little new material. There are some brief introductions to each section, and an endless stream of witty or illuminating footnotes, plus he includes the bits censored from the original. So, if you really like profanity, I guess that's new.

I find myself fundamentally conflicted about my assessment of the book. The writing is good. And Simmons chose columns he thought withstood the test of time, which is generally true, even if some of the cultural references are dated, as Simmons delights in noting with several footnotes. Not to mention, the columns date back well before Simmons' ESPN days, when he was writing for his Boston Sports Guy web site, so there's a lot of material that's new to me, and to most of his readers.

But on the other hand, I can't escape the feeling of being cheated. Probably a lot of this is just my own failure to have learned going in that I was getting a book of old columns. It's just difficult to get past that. Maybe I'd feel differently if I found this in a bargain bin for four bucks in a year or two. Then it might seem like a surprising gem. But I don't know that it merits the hype surrounding it. (Then again, I should always know better than to get sucked in by the ESPN publicity machine.) It just seems like if one of your favorite bands hadn't released anything in a couple of years, then you found out there was a new album and ordered an advance copy, only to have it show up and discover that it's just a greatest hits album, with maybe one new track. You'd feel shorted, too.

So maybe other people will have different experiences, especially if they know in advance what they're getting. The writing is still good, and there were plenty of moments where I laughed out loud. I just hope the next book from Bill Simmons is actually a book.

How the mighty have fallen

There's a joke in here somewhere.

I think it's comical, the Mighty [sic] Schmucks of Anaheim have decided to improve their image by dropping the "Mighty" from their name for next season, when they'll be just the Anaheim Schmucks. Like people will forget that they're still named after the crappiest hockey movie franchise ever, just because the modifying adjective is gone.

It's also amusing that this comes on the same day as a story that perennial doormat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are mulling dropping "Devil" from the team's name. Because the Tampa Bay Rays sounds so much better.

It's times like these I yearn for the alma mater to ditch the Wildcat nickname and return to our roots by calling ourselves the Fighting Methodists. Or for Stanford to accept one of the proposals from when the school dropped the "Indian" nickname and someone with a sense of humor and history proposed they be called the Robber Barons.

Photos Schmotos

I can't see why people are making a stink over photos featuring Bush and Jack Abramoff, who probably plundered more from Native Americans than anyone since Andrew Jackson.

Quoth the president: "I mean, there's thousands of people that come through and get their pictures taken. I'm also mindful that we live in a world in which those pictures will be used for pure political purposes, and they're not relevant to the investigation."

Well put, Mr. President. I mean, it's just preposterous to suggest that if you posed willingly and gleefully with an admitted felon (oops, that should be felon-in-waiting), then there must be some reason for associating you with his treachery.

You know, sort of like all those namby-pamby folks who insisted that the war against Iraq was duplicitous, all because of some irrelevant photo from 20 years ago.

Way to not let them drag you down, sir.

This is supposed to impress me?

The lead from a short story on Bush's efforts to appear less scripted:

President Bush is in the midst of a campaign-style effort to show that he has broken out of his White House bubble, and three times this month he has taken unscreened questions from audiences that appear to have been chosen largely at random, rather than for their qualities as cheerleaders.

Three whole times. From audiences "that appear to have been chosen largely at random." Wow. This sounds like the hallmark of a president concerned with trifles like accountability.

So, what sorts of bold, "unscreened questions" is Dubya courageously feeling from possibly non-sycophanic interrogators?

"You're a rancher. A lot of us here in Kansas are ranchers. I was just wanting to get your opinion on 'Brokeback Mountain,' if you've seen it yet."

Great. That's really hard hitting there, fellas. Worse still, he managed to dodge the pink elephant in the question, not even acknowledging the whole gay cowboy plot, just tiptoeing around it by talking about how he's a rancher. And a really good one, as we'll recall, since he spent lots of time clearing brush from his Texas ranch instead of talking with a mother whose son was killed fighting in Iraq. Terrific.

Hating Microsoft Redux

Today IE crashed when I tried to use its "find word" function. Either Microsoft has a deep-seated prejudice against Puerto Ricans and the Catching Molina Bros. (I was trying to find the reference to "Molina" on a page I had Googled), or more likely it simply can't perform the most mundane tasks without fouling them up. At least it'd didn't crash the whole system when I launched IE. Though we'll have to see what's in store for me tomorrow.

Version 2.0

For quite a while I've been mulling creating a new site, probably something centered on a blog, but ideally with other content as well.

The problem with this is that I haven't been able to come up with a theme. I've been kicking around some ideas, but I don't know if I'm sold on any of them.

One difficulty I keep encountering is trying to decide what I want my blog to be. I could try to do some sort of running social and political commentary, but that would require me to be more up on current events and to scour a much wider array of news sources than I'm currently doing. Not to mention, there are other blogs probably doing a better job filling this niche.

So that's probably out.

Other obvious ideas that come to mind include something to do with my current Czech and Slovak history (this probably wouldn't be a very successful idea since there just aren't that many people literate in English likely to take an intense interest). Or I could write mainly about being a graduate student, which certainly lends itself to a wider audience, but not that wide. Or, maybe I should just more or less keep the stream-of-consciousness format I currently have, though that seems unsatisfying to me somehow. I'm not really sure. Maybe there's a great idea floating out there that just hasn't crossed my mind yet.

Then there's the matter of a format. Ideally this would follow from the theme. But maybe it will work the other way round. I don't know.

So far I've come up with only a couple of half-baked notions. One is to title it something like "The Ivory Tower," which would be appropriate since I'm a graduate student with intellectual pretensions. Then again, "The Ivory Tower" just seems kind of lame. The other one is probably even less conceived, little more than a title, "My Empire of Dirt." I keep contriving rationales for it, like that it corresponds to being apropos of a graduate student living at or below the poverty line, so I don't really have much. But really it's just homage to Trent Reznor, and I feel like I'm a bit old to be doing that, even though I know I'll never fully outgrow my fascination with Nine Inch Nails.

Anyway, I invite feedback on this, though I wouldn't necessarily expect any major developments on the new site front for a few months.

Hating Microsoft

As most of you know, I use a Mac. I (or my family) have owned an Apple computer since I was three. So, in a certain sense it's never been a choice so much as it's a function of socialization. My dad has always been a big Machead, and I'm marrying another Mac devoteé. Needless to say, Macs will probably be in my home till death do I (de-)part.

Of course, I like Macs. I like their simplicity. I like their elegance. And since Apple moved the platform onto Unix with OS X, they've shown the most amazing stability. Normally I have to remember to reboot my machine every few weeks just to get a clean slate, since it has never crashed on me. Truly beautiful.

The other side of the coin is that I dislike PCs. In fact, I'm growing to loathe them. Invariably, the computers I've had at the various jobs I've worked have been Windows machines. And not in a good way.

Sure, it wasn't bad in my old jobs, where at least I had enough user privileges to be able to download and install applications, meaning I could ditch Internet Explorer in favor of Mozilla. (Honestly, I don't know how Windows users live without tabbed browsing.) The machines still sucked, but a little less.

Now, however, I don't even have that relative luxury. The network in our department is set up so that no one can install anything without admin privileges, a policy that evidently extends to tenured faculty as well. This is justifiable, and probably prudent on the part of the IT administrators, since it means no one's downloading malware and viruses. But by the same token, it makes things a good bit less tolerable for us users.

For instance, all the computers on the network have ZoneAlarm, which I assume serves the purpose of updating virus protection. Probably a good thing, especially with Windows. But it becomes an issue when ZoneAlarm pops up after each log-in notifying us that a new version is now available. Only we can't install it, since we lack admin privileges. And it's utterly futile to select the "Remind me again in X days" option, since it doesn't remember that between log-ins. So every damn time we log in, this stupid little alert pops up. And since our machines all predate the Bush administration, this slows down the machine's performance considerably. I'd like to argue that it's a quality-of-life issue, which it is, but that probably get us anywhere. Especially since the department's dedicated computer support person seems to change every three months.

Or then there's the issue that keeps cropping up on my machine. When I get a Word document via e-mail, it seems incapable of opening it without going through a complicated process of first saving it to the desktop, then opening Word, and finally opening the document from within Word. Even then, it's an iffy proposition. A one-click task takes way more steps than it should. I find this particularly galling since it's not like these are third-party apps. I'm trying to open a Microsoft Word document from Microsoft Internet Explorer on a machine running Microsoft Windows. And it doesn't work. Can you imagine this happening with Apple? Me neither. Apple manages to integrate its software rather seamlessly, and it usually works fairly well with third-party apps. There are various idiosyncracies of the Mac OS, but they're little more than minor nuisances. Not something as fundamental as an issue with Word. (Incidentally, I don't have any of these issues using Word on my Mac.)

But hey, I'm sure Microsoft is hard at work on this issue, which is probably why its much-ballyhooed new OS is several years overdue.

Well, at least George W. Bush's happy, eh?

Woe, Canada! Canadian Voters Oust Incumbent for Conservative

Frontrunning

Never let it be said that Alex Rodriguez wasn't loyal to the frontrunner.

He jumped ship from the Mariners when they wouldn't make him quite as stinking rich as he hoped to be, then passed on other offers of less money from potential contenders to take a quarter-billion-dollar contract from the doormat in Texas.

Only, after three years of toiling for a cellar dweller, despite padding his individual numbers and winning an MVP on a last-place team (quite the individual achievement in a perverse way), he decided that something was missing. Namely the chance to play to be the poster boy of the Evil Empire. Or to land more opportunities to whore himself for corporations. So he joined forces with George Steinbrenner, a class act whose legacy includes funneling illegal campaign contributions to Dick Nixon and hiring a low-life gambler to dig up dirt on true good guy Dave Winfield after Winnie sued the Boss for failing to pay the $300,000 to his foundation as stipulated in his contract. (Sadly, George also served as an assistant coach at Northwestern in 1955, and though he only lasted one season, the Wildcats never won another bowl game -- karma's a bitch.)

Mercifully (and I'm willing to admit this as evidence in support of the case for the existence of a merciful God), A-Rod has done bupkes in the postseason, helping to extend the Yankees World Series title drought to a whopping 1910 days. (I tried to figure out how many days have elapsed since the Chicago Cubs won a World Series, but blew a microchip in my calculator.)

Anyway, not content to take the easiest and most lucrative path, A-Rod has been at the center of a minor controversy this offseason, unwilling to make a decision on whether he should play for the U.S. or the Dominican Republic in March's inaugural World Baseball Classic. A-Rod was born in the U.S., but his parents immigrated here from the Dominican, making him eligible to play for either country.

At first A-Rod vacillated. His parents and family were lobbying hard for him to respect his roots and play for the Dominican, but A-Rod felt conflicted about not playing for the country where he holds citizenship -- and perhaps more important, made approximately a zillion dollars. Rather than choose between the countries, he said he wouldn't play at all, a cop out that dissatisfied all but the Yankees, who preferred not to have A-Rod play in the hopes that it might help the club prevent its title-less string from topping the 2 million-second mark.

But while such a decision -- or non-decision, as it were -- may have been justifiable, even if it showed no backbone, A-Rod has reversed himself once more in splendid fashion, announcing, contrary to all previous announcements, that he will, in fact, play in the WBC ... for the United States. Instead of showing some respect for his heritage and giving his parents and their homeland a measure of pride (with the possibility of great national pride if the Dominicans win the WBC title), A-Rod has opted to suit up for the one team in no need of help, and the one country that certainly could do without the ego boost.

A classy move by a real class act. Who, fittingly, made a max donation to George W. Bush's re-election campaign.

Eh?

One of the nice things about watching hockey broadcast on Canadian networks is the chance to view Canadian campaign ads for the upcoming parliamentary election.

A particular favorite is one from the governing Liberal Party that repeats the Washington TImes' editorial assessment of Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party, which tells of how Harper could be the most pro-American foreign leader in the Western world. Harper's election, says the Times, would bring a smile to the face of George W. Bush.

And to underscore the point that this is bad, especially if you're Canadian, the ad closes with a small editorial comment in response to this possibility: "Well, at least someone will be happy, eh?"

My name is (not) Joe, and I am (not) Canadian!

Death to the death penalty

Many folks, including those in his hometown of Graz, Austria, found it unprudent and harsh when California executed Stan "Tookie" Williams, a founder of the Crips, after Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to grant clemency. Even if Tookie had committed the murders for which he had been convicted, most folks thought his outreach from behind bars as an anti-violence activist warranted a commutation of his sentence to life in prison where he could have continued to do good. Tookie's execution seemed tragic and Schwarzenegger's inaction hardhearted.

But now my home state has taken judicial murder to new levels of barbarism. Shortly after midnight this morning, it executed Clarence Ray Allen, a 76-year-old blind, mostly deaf, wheelchair-bound inmate on Death Row.

Now, Allen's crimes strike me as horrific and worthy of punishment. Also, I don't know that he made any acts of redemption like Tookie had. But I'm pretty sure that reviving a man after a nearly fatal heart attack only to execute him four months later violates that little constitutional principle outlawing cruel and unusual punishment. (Then again, I also happen to think torturing detainees flies in the face of that protection, but the current administration obviously disagrees.) I find it appallingly twisted to put to death a man already knocking at death's door and liable to die without state intervention. All, evidently, to provide some convoluted notion of "justice."

It's high time Americans had a serious discussion about capital punishment and considered joining the overwhelming majority of the rest of the world in outlawing it. Unless we think we should remain in the company of Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, et al.

Truthiness

In case you didn't pick up on it from his early books (Rush Limbaugh Is A Big, Fat Idiot and Other Observations and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced View of the Right), Al Franken really doesn't like the modern conservative movement. Who can blame him?

His latest, The Truth (with Jokes), aims to debunk the wisdom circulating in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, namely that America had turned sharply to the right and embraced the extreme right-wing view touted by Bush, Limbaugh, et al.

And, he does a reasonable job with this mission, pointing out the many blunders, deceptions and outright lies used to spin the election results in such a way. There is a good bit of empirical weight behind most of Franken's assertions (except for the jokes - but at least they're funny), so while it's certainly not a scholarly tome (again, the jokes are important), it feels less like a soapbox rant.

Still, nothing Franken wrote struck me as terribly earth shattering. Then again, I'm probably better informed than the average American, even though I feel underinformed on much of what's happening in the world. (To wit: I only discovered that postage rates had risen over the weekend thanks to an oblique reference to it in an NHL column Monday.) Thus, even though I found Franken's book highly entertaining (the lies Franken makes up about Sean Hannity are hilarious, such as his bogus claim that Hannity doesn't find anything wrong with getting drunk and urinating in mailboxes), it didn't strike me as some great exposé. (Of course, the chapter exposing what sleazeballs Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay are seemed especially salient, though maybe this is because I didn't really follow that story until DeLay got sacked as majority leader late last year.)

And one current that bothered me a bit was the unmitigated love Franken has for the Clinton administration. Clinton looms large as Bush's foil, and the Clinton presidency as a whole stands as the model of progress in Franken's view.

I'd have preferred a more critical, or at least slightly less fawning assessment of the Clinton years. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike Clinton (doing nothing during the Rwanda genocide and slashing welfare come to mind), but you wouldn't know that Clinton was fallible from reading Franken.

And then there's also his wholly sympathetic portrait of John Kerry. Let's not delude ourselves into thinking a Kerry victory would've changed things radically. Not unless Kerry, deep down, really is the sort of pinko-liberal the right-wing mudslingers claimed he was. But somehow I doubt that.

Then again, maybe this is just symptomatic of a greater flaw with the mainstream liberal movement. Namely that it's too, well, mainstream. There's not a lot in the Democratic platform, at least not in the ones hyped in the last two presidential elections, to excite the troops. Clinton could compensate for that with his legendarily electric personality, but Gore and Kerry affected all the verve of lox.

So while Franken's read might make you chuckle aloud on the bus, it probably won't fundamentally shift anyone's worldview.

Tooling around

University of Oregon prez Dave Frohnmayer takes issue with a recent ESPN.com story examining the powerful pull Nike founder Phil Knight wields over his alma mater. The UO prez says he was "offended by implications" made in the article.

His rebuttal, however, took the form of a rather semantic non-denial, with apparent emphasis on the concept of whether big donors like Knight merited such sway:

Your article implied that donors, especially generous donors such as Phil Knight, exercise undue influence over the governance of this university's operations. That is simply not the case. Ascribing importance to the ideas and thoughts of involved supporters deserved better than cynical stick figure caricatures.

In other words, Frohnmayer doesn't deny "involved supporters" (hereafter: Phil Knight) get a hearing for their "ideas and thoughts" (say, whether a track coach should be retained who doesn't run his program according to the individual whim of our involved supporter).

What Frohnmayer appears to really say here is that he resents the charge that Knight's influence is undue -- have you noticed the size of the wad of cash he's dropped on UO?

This isn't really the place to argue about whether rich donors should get such power in how universities and their athletic programs are run. (Answer: No)

But you can see how much Frohnmayer squirms when someone happens to make informed observations about the fact that he is, in many instances, a tool.

It'd be even funnier if it turned out Frohnmayer drafted and submitted his response at the urging of Phil Knight.

Shame

Some billionaire alum donated $165 million to the athletic program at Oklahoma State. That's terrific.

I'm sure there aren't departments and units on campus reeling from rounds of budget cuts, struggling to attract and retain faculty and students, units for which a much smaller chunk of change would probably make a world of difference.

That's not important. But football and ego are.

"What I keep coming back to is we're in the Big 12 and it's a tough conference. I want us to be competitive," [Boone] Pickens said. "How it impacts me? My name's on the stadium. I don't know what else they could do. I guess they could put it on each one of the seats."

OK, so there's a significant Freudian quotient of vanity at play on the part of the donor. But that doesn't excuse the OSU president from acting like this is just as good as if that much money had gone, oh, I don't know, into some of the academic programs instead.

"It'll impact the whole university," Oklahoma State president David Schmidly said. "It'll make it easier for us to recruit students, it'll help us recruit faculty. Every aspect of the university is going to benefit from this."

Sure, this will probably help recruit prospective student-athletes. And faculty (especially if "faculty" is understood as anyone who answers to "Coach" instead of "Doctor" or "Professor").

After all, there's nothing like privileging the small minority of athletes among the student body and giving them all sorts of perks and breaks that wouldn't be tendered to any normal, non-athlete.

I have to say, this is really doing a lot to make me more convinced that athletic programs (at least above the recreational, intramural level) are just a bad idea in general at the university level. I know that it's fun to root for the alma mater, even if they haven't won a bowl game since the Truman Administration. And it can be exciting to be on campus when the basketball team has a realistic shot at winning a national title. And athletic programs do generate a lot of revenue.

But I have to question how much of that revenue is actually get distributed throughout the university (say, to academics), and how much just gets pumped right back into the athletic department's coffers. My guess is that the athletic program isn't subsidizing academics as much as it's the other way around. Especially if you consider non-monetary forms of support provided to student-athletes (like writing make-up exams and assignments, for example).

Yes, I'm speaking out of a little bitterness here. I have at least one student in my section who's a student-athlete and will have missed at least the first two sections, and probably more this quarter. In this case there isn't a lot of extra work required on my behalf, since I'm just making the student produce a lengthier version of the weekly assignment.

But still, I feel like there are fundamental questions of fairness. Is a student entitled to makeup work if s/he misses class due to athletic commitments? Functionally, I can't see what difference there is between someone who misses class for a game or meet, and someone who misses for a job interview, work on a school project or paper, a long weekend or the opportunity to sleep in. There's some relativization there, I'm sure, but the main difference is that faculty are in effect expected to provide opportunities to make up work missed by the student-athlete, whereas the non-student athlete is at the mercy of the individual faculty member. I never agreed to such a condition when I accepted my appointment, but it's basically presented as a fait accompli. It's easy to see how student-athletes appear to constitute a privileged caste on campus. And a particularly privileged one when you consider that tuition, room and board, etc. are often provided free to scholarship athletes.

Now, I might feel differently if universities were doling out at least as many scholarships for meritorious students. Particularly when tuition at many a private institution can run close to $30,000 a year these days, not that it's really "cheap" anywhere.

Perhaps the greatest shame in all this, though, is that it doesn't really do justice to the athletes themselves. Unless I missed some part of the university charter, the mission of the university is fundamentally to provide an education and to promote learning and personal development (or some similar combination of buzzwords). The emphasis, of course, is on education.

That's not the case, though, with student athletes. No one taking classes during their athletic season is able to give anywhere near the appropriate amount of time and effort to their coursework. I have no doubt that student-athletes need tutoring and other academic aids because independent learning can be pretty difficult, especially if you haven't already developed strong skills in the discipline. But student-athletes are subjected to such conditions so they can help the athletic department rake in millions of dollars. If that's not exploitation, I don't know what is.

Unfortunately, I don't have any concrete answers for how to resolve this situation. One might be to release student-athletes from coursework during their season, so they don't have to try to balance sports with schoolwork. Of course, that doesn't work so well for sports with a long season that can span multiple terms, and especially since most sports hold practices and workouts year round. Maybe the answer is to allow students to defer their academics altogether until they've exhausted their academic eligibility, though taking four or more years off between school is not much more conducive to learning. Or maybe we should simply make athletics less important. Keep them if you must, but make it something on the level of club sports, where there aren't scholarships involved, or the same monetary and time commitments.

But throwing more money -- $165 million -- at college athletics isn't going to improve matters.