The U-Md. the debacle is what happens when a university is concerned primarily with sport

Before the Regency Council of the University of Maryland pushed him essentially for daring to challenge the football coach, Wallace D. Loh, president of the school, liked to talk about the sports department as from the "school porch". In recent years, it has become a sort of trope of American universities, and I have heard about the "porch" countless times in releasing a new book about the University of Louisville. This means that their football and basketball teams will spark interest and engage people from across the country who otherwise might simply miss out on the place. They will stop, take a closer look and see all the other great things inside: the first-clbad chemistry labs, the award-winning nursing school, everything that happens in the English department. You know, academics.

The theory is that attention-grabbing teams can attract more first-year applicants, thereby increasing average test scores; help trap more donations from alumni; and improve life on campus by giving everyone something to gather.

But cause-and-effect is not always easy to discern. Duke University was an excellent school before famed coach Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K) built his basketball team into a powerhouse. The University of California at Berkeley hired a new sports director this summer, who praised the "porch" and said he hoped to use the football team as a "platform for our university to celebrate which makes it exceptional. Berkeley has not played in a major bowl game since 1959, but it's been a great school for a long time; the failures of the network did not prevent it.

Eventually, the sports marketing talk began to remind me of the Las Vegas casino hotels. To get to your room, you must make your way around the blackjack tables, in front of the noisy crowd playing roulette and through the rows of slot machines. This lets you know what is important. Except that, if the money games are the goal of a casino, the sports are not at a university – although inadvertently, and often catastrophically, they become so.

The University of Maryland has 39,000 students (from 50 states and 118 countries) and 4,400 faculty members (including four Nobel laureates). Most of what happens at the university has absolutely nothing to do with the sport. And yet, the events of recent months – starting with the tragic death of a football player – show the unique ability of the sport to throw a campus into chaos.

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On May 29th, Jordan McNair, 19-year-old offensive lineman on the Maryland football team, was hit by heat stroke during an intense training session on a hot late spring day. . He died two weeks later. It was a preventable death: more than an hour elapsed between the moment he presented the first symptoms and the moment when the medical staff of the team finally called an ambulance. They never gave him the standard cold water immersion treatment; this only happened after he arrived at the hospital.

Two months later, an ESPN investigation report described what was called a "toxic" crop under Maryland head coach DJ Durkin, in which coaches disparaged players who could not complete conditioning exercises and expose them to homophobic insults. "If a child stopped or went to the ground," said former player JT Ventura, he was sometimes dragged on himself and forced to continue. A strength and conditioning trainer hired by Durkin would have been particularly brutal – with particular incidents occurring in. According to a report published at the conclusion of an external investigation, he would have been thrown out "of food, weights and, on one occasion, a trash can full of vomit. "

Durkin, 40, was in his second year as head coach. His record was not good – his Maryland teams had won only 10 of the 25 games he coached – but he had worked under two revered coaches, Urban Meyer, in Bowling Green and Florida, and Jim Harbaugh, Stanford and Michigan. for his pedigree and his potential. After the ESPN report, the school first put Durkin on leave during his investigation. He continued to receive his annual salary of $ 2.5 million.

At 73, Maryland's president, Loh, was an older generation than his football coach. He had a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan and a law degree from Yale University. His salary was $ 675,000, about a quarter of what Durkin had been paid. Since Loh was hired at the University of Iowa in 2010, he has raised $ 1.2 billion in private donations, including a record $ 219 million last year. About 41,200 potential students applied for admission in 2017, an 18% increase in six years.

It is impossible to say how much it has to do with sport. Maybe not a lot. It is true that the great sports powers of the NCAA generate enormous revenues; The University of Texas tops the list with $ 214 million. But almost all spend as much (or more) than they receive, mainly in multi-million dollar coaching salaries and gold facilities. A study by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that less than $ 1 per $ 100 of revenue generated by sports departments at major colleges is allocated to university programs. In Maryland, the football team has experienced mostly losing seasons and low participation. The former national power basketball team qualified for the NCAA post-season tournament in only three of the eight seasons Loh led.

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Loh has been an enthusiastic supporter of sports in Maryland. He helped the University move from the Atlantic Coast Conference to the most lucrative Big Ten conference in 2014. But he also told the University Senate last year that he had presided over the campus at a number of "dormant volcanoes" that could wreak havoc and threaten his own mandate. "One of them is a sports scandal," he said. "It explodes, it explodes the university, its reputation, it explodes the president."

On Tuesday, the University of Maryland's Board of Regents announced the end of its own investigation into the death of Jordan McNair and the culture of the football program. He challenged ESPN's description of the program as "toxic" and, even citing leadership issues with the team, reinstated Durkin as the lead coach. Loh, it seemed, had lost a fight for his power. Instead of getting rid of an abusive coach, he announced that he would retire in June. A day later, after student protests, objections from some team members and questions from politicians, the university overturned his decision and Durkin was fired. But Loh's prediction that sport could upset a campus had been prophetic.

After the tragedy of McNair's death, Loh declared that the university must badume its "legal and moral responsibility". It is unclear whether the University of Maryland has done it – or whether it has reluctantly dismissed his football coach to avoid further embarrbadment. And Loh, it seems, always leaves his job. In the end, he took personal responsibility – and he took the fall.