God that is so true! Why do we waste so much time and money and energy on that Horrible Football Team!! We need to sink more money into {fill in the blank} Studies so we can have more yuppie navel gazers working at a non profit and biking over to the post office to get Mom and Dads check. Sports are a total and absolute travesty and Nike is a Monster for daring to partner with the University to try and bring some relevance to our backwater province. The Good Old days of obsurity were so much better. If we try real hard maybe we can whine and complain away any and all successful businessses and institutions from our state.

Nobody uses yuppie anymore. If you need a meaningless insult, use hipster. Thank you.

A chartered jet complete with lap dancers and vintage Bordeaux make for exotic company...

The UO Senate votes next month on a new policy requiring that every administrator who wants to spend student money on one of these junkets first has to take 10 hits to the head from the Duck defensive line.

I have a bit of a dog in this hunt, mostly because of the insane excesses of Texas football teams at the national, college, and high school level. I honestly don't give a damn about the teams per se. It's just that it would be nice if more of our college teams could be a bit more financially self-contained, and actually taking into account the money received from ticket sales and merchandise concessions instead of taking money from the schools to keep going. Of course, that's just crazy talk down here, where every NCAA edict to prevent another pay-for-play fiasco such as Southern Methodist University's is openly mocked by damn near everyone.

Along that line, my parents are both Michigan State alums. Heck, they met there when they were at MSU in the Sixties, and my mother worked her way through nursing school by caring for the lab animals in one of MSU's research labs. Every year, MSU hits them and every other alumnus up for even more money for essential improvements, and every year, that money gets funnelled into the football team. Likewise, every year, MSU has its big rivalry game with Notre Dame, and right after the Spartans get beaten like red-headed stepchildren, I call my father about the game. "Michigan State is emphasizing academics over athletics again, I see?" He screams at me for ten minutes and hangs up.

C'mon, Jack. Did you expect them to ride The Green Tortoise down there?

From the article:

"The official party consists of athletic department officials, representatives of the University’s third-party rights holder IMG, and 6 students whose names were redacted from the list. It also includes University administrators such as Lorraine Davis, who has a clause in her contract that outlines all-expenses-paid trips to games like these for her and her family."

The fact that Ms. Davis and whoever gave her that contract will not be fired by 5:00 pm today is all you need to know about the state of things in the state of Oregon. These people are not, in the words of NBA coach Gregg Popovich, "playing with the appropriate level of fear," and they won't be until some bodies start being left in the wake.