The State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany) abruptly eliminated the women’s tennis program in March, stranding players—all but one of whom are from other countries and are on student visas—and violating Title IX regulations, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Northern…
The NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Committee just announced that it’s changing the format for the national championships to make it more hospitable for TV broadcast. Who knew that NCAA sports had anything to do with money?
Actually, multiple versions of Zippy the kangaroo are missing.
John “Papa John” Schnatter is a major booster to Louisville athletics. The school’s football stadium is named after his pizza company, which is headquartered in town, and he’s on the university’s board of trustees. Until this morning, he was also on the school’s Athletics Association board, but he resigned from his…
Ohio State University president Michael Drake and Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne have joined that dipshit from Notre Dame and that dipshit from Texas as the latest university presidents to say that college athletes should not be paid. Young people should not be paid for their revenue-generating…
Drake University’s head athletic trainer says he was fired in September after he peed into a tub, cleaned it, and told the athletic director.
Washington State’s football team is 1-2 this season, including a loss to FCS team Eastern Washington. Head coach Mike Leach is still pulling a $3 million salary, though, and that’s contributed to an athletics department budget deficit—one the university plans to force students to bail out.
Pat Haden will step down from his role as Trojans athletic director on June 30, according to a USC alumni email sent by school president C.L. Max Nikias.
The University of Iowa fight song has some rousing horns, gets the alumni on their feet and chanting, and is a perfectly acceptable—even good—fight song. But how much would you like it if you were forced to listen to it 500 times in a row, every single night, for the past six months?
New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who has been humping the increasingly ridiculous argument that college athletes should not be paid for years, is running out of ideas.
Those in charge of college athletics attempting to exert incomparable levels of control over the athletes they barely pay is nothing new. But even by the very low standards by which athletics directors should be held, Alabama’s Bill Battle and North Carolina State’s Debbie Yow said some some dumb shit today.
UNLV recently launched a study into the history of its mascot, Hey Reb!, in order to determine if the mustachioed gentleman is racist or not. The resulting report, which makes for an oddly compelling 60 pages, concludes that no, Hey Reb! is not racist, despite many signs suggesting he is.
The Washington Post has a deep-dive on the finances of college athletics, and why despite booming revenues just about as many universities are losing money today as were 10 years ago. [Washington Post]
Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we’re covering drones, urinals, daily fantasy, and more.
The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s decision in Ed O’Bannon v. NCAA, which ruled that the NCAA’s larger amateurism rules are in violation of anti-trust laws. The appeals court also, though, vacated a key portion of the lower court’s ruling, and that makes it hard to count this as a victory…
Rude opinion: there are too many bulldog mascots.
Morgantown, West Virginia is synonymous with couch burning. It’s the home of West Virginia University, and when they win an important sports contest, lose an important sports contest, or if the U.S. military kills Osama Bin Laden, people take to the streets to burn couches. Targeting what they called a “typical…
John Oliver dedicated a huge chunk of last night's episode of Last Week Tonight to battering the NCAA. The fact that he was able to go in on the NCAA's exploitative, hypocritical existence for over 20 minutes should tell you all you need to know about the lie that is college sports. You certainly don't have time to…
The millionaire administrators who prop up the NCAA often say deeply, deeply stupid things when defending their right to make millions of dollars off of the unpaid labor of athletes, but what University of Texas athletic director Steve Patterson said in this month's issue of Texas Monthly deserves special…
With a constant stream of bad press and lawsuits chopping away at its integrity, the NCAA has decided to do what every corrupt institution that has no real reason for existing does when times get tough: throw shitloads of money at lobbyists.
