Showing posts with label Nick Saban. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nick Saban. Show all posts

Sunday, November 4, 2018

Alabama trashes the LSU Tigers and tailgaters trash the LSU campus: How about bloody marys for brunch?

Number 1 ranked University of Alabama trashed Number 3 ranked LSU on LSU's home field last night.  About 200,000 people were on hand for the debacle: 102,000 in the stadium and another 100,000 tailgaters. The score was 29 to 0. LSU's star field-goal kicker made one attempt for 3 points, but he missed.

In the hours leading up to the game, tailgaters were packed shoulder to shoulder around the stadium, making the campus look something like a Civil War army camp. Portapotties and trash cans were overwhelmed, and picnickers squatted on the sidewalks because there was no room for them on the lawns.

On the morning after game day, the crowds were gone, save for a few dozen recreational vehicles (each costing about a quarter of million). Shades were drawn in the RVs, but the generators were running, so the owners must have been inside, sleeping off their hangovers.

And shortly after dawn, the cleanup crews were out early picking up thousands of discarded beer cans, plastic cups, and styrofoam fast-food containers. LSU used to hire prison trustees to do this work, but the optics were bad. This morning, young people are picking up the trash, perhaps LSU student volunteers.

Big disappointment. If only LSU could have knocked off Alabama and its satanic football coach, Nick Saban. If LSU coach Ed Ogeron had pulled it off, the fans would certainly have erected a statue in his honor, a statue even larger and gaudier than the one Alabama installed for Saban. But it was not to be.

No matter. Lots of Baton Rouge restaurants offer Bloody Mary brunches on Sunday, and it least one restaurant includes all-you-can drink mimosas for folks nursing hangovers.  And then the Saints play the Rams on Sunday afternoon--an opportunity to drink Bud Lites and eat chicken fingers--chicken fingers that Coach Ogeron personally endorses.

Fall is the season of bacchanal in South Louisiana. Let's get drunk for every LSU game, every Saints game, and every playoff game.  Let's get drunk at the fraternity hazing exercises. After all, hardly anyone dies from alcohol poisoning.

And then spring comes--another season of bacchanal. Mardis Gras parades start at least two weeks before Fat Tuesday, and the St. Patrick's Day parade is another occasion for a huge town drunk. The garbage trucks follow closely behind the St. Patrick's Day floats, sweeping up the discarded beads and beer bottles.

A friend told me he attended a Mardis Gras parade in New Orleans a few years ago. A drunk driver, driving a beer truck as it happened, plowed into a crowd of spectators, killing a woman who was pinned under the vehicle. My friend said he saw revelers crawl under the truck and loot the woman's Mardis Gras beads. The corpse was still warm.

Fox Business Report assures us daily that the economy is booming with record-low unemployment and a robust growth in wages. In Baton Rouge, people drive around in late-model luxury cars and pack the restaurants every night.

Cheaply built apartment complexes are being thrown up willy nilly for LSU students in the flood plain next to the Mississippi River levees. They feature swimming pools, and enormous television screens in the common areas. Meanwhile LSU passed a rule requiring most first-year students to live on campus, and it built its own faux-luxury residence halls to accommodate them.

But in North Baton Rouge, weekend killings are routine. A six-year-old was shot dead a couple of days ago, and thirteen-year-old was arrested.  Baton Rouge schools are a mess, and almost no one of means will put their children in a public school.

The rich go to private schools, and the less well-to-do buy inexpensive homes in adjoining parishes where the schools are better. They drive to work every morning on Interstate 10, which is a parking lot from 7:30 AM until about 10 AM on workdays.

But the commute is not so bad. You can check your cell phone when the traffic grinds to a halt or listen to Stuart Varney on Fox Business Report tell you how much money we're all making in the stock market.


Nick Saban's statue at University of Alabama
Photo credit: David Mercer, USA Today




Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Our nation's highest paid public employees work for universities and most are coaches

Reporters for 24/7 Wall St. published an informative online article recently that listed the highest paid public employee in all 50 states. In 47 of the 50 states, the highest paid public employee works for a university.  In 26 states, the highest paid public employee is a college football coach. In 11 states, the best paid public employee is a college basketball coach.

King of the heap is Nick Saban, head football coach for the University of Alabama, who makes more than $7 million a year, exponentially more than the UA president makes or Alabama's governor. In fact, several of Saban's assistant coaches make more than the governor of Alabama, including Lane Kiffin, Saban's offensive coordinator, who makes $1.4 million. 

What does this mean? At least three things:

College athletics is entertainment and has nothing to do with higher education. First, college sports has nothing to do with higher education anymore. It is entertainment, and highly paid coaches, assistant coaches, and athletic directors are in the entertainment industry. Football coaches don't make as much money as George Clooney or Madonna--at least not yet. But they live in a completely different world than the professors and instructors who toil away on university campuses for crap wages.  

College football players don't get paid, it is true; but essentially they are interns grooming for careers in  the NFL. A typical football player has only the flimsiest allegiance to the university he attends. Believe me, the 280 pound hunks that entertain us on Saturdays are not thinking about the Homecoming Prom. And at LSU, at least, the football players have a depressing tendency to get arrested on various misdemeanor charges.

More and more cash flows into college athletics while academic programs are starved for money. According to the 24/7 Wall St. story, college coaches' salaries have gone up an average of 90 percent in just 10 years. Meanwhile, state contributions to public university budgets are shrinking.

I'm not saying that coaches' salaries are the whole explanation for rising tuition prices. A few college football programs earn enough money to be self sufficient. And many coaches receive the bulk of their compensation from private foundations, not public funds.

But surely there is something wrong when LSU pays Coach Les Miles around $4.5 million a year while LSU tuition skyrockets upward. LSU would argue that its football program is completely self sustaining, which is true. But the fat cats who donate tax-deductible money to LSU's athletic foundation to pay Miles' salary are basically ripping of the public. They should be paying higher taxes instead of getting tax write-offs to support their hobby.

Sports are the 21st century equivalent of the Roman Empire's bread and circuses. Finally, America's sports craze at every level is a distraction to keep people from thinking about the fact that our middle-class way of life is evaporating before our eyes.  Wages have been stagnant for years; the typical working male actually makes less today in real dollars than he did 20 years ago. Both spouses now have to work just to pay the mortgage; and young people are going into debt to get a college education with no assurance they will find a job that pays well enough to service their monthly student-loan payments.

But let's not think about that. Will Alabama win the national title this year? Which team will win the Sweet 16? Will the Saints ever climb out of the toilet?

Meanwhile, the wealthy sit in their air-conditioned executive sky boxes at our unversities' enormous stadiums, drinking premium whiskey while the rubes sit sweating in the bleachers munching on popcorn at seven  bucks a box.

Image result for gladiators inside the colosseum

References

Evan Comen, Thomas C. Frolich, and Michael B. Sauter. The Highest Paid Public Employees in Every State. 24/7 Wall St., September 20, 2016. Accessible at http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/09/20/the-highest-paid-public-employee-in-every-state/

In the Mix: Ten Candidates Who Could Replace Les Miles (in alphabetical order). The Advocate (Baton Rouge), September 26, 2016, p. 2C.