The U-Md. Debacle is what happens when a university cares about sports above all else

Before the University of Maryland's Board of Regents, Wallace D. Loh, the school's president, in the face of the athletic department in front of the school. American Studies and the History of American Universities. It is meant to signify that their football and basketball teams will be attracted to the world. They'll stop, take a closer look and see the other things inside: the first-class chemistry labs, the award-winning nursing school, whatever it is that goes on inside the English department. You know, the academics.

Attention-grabbing teams, the theory holds, the average test scores; help snare more donations from alumni; and improve campus life by giving everyone something to rally around.

But cause and effect is not always easy to discern. Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K) built his basketball team into a perennial powerhouse. The University of California at Berkeley is one of the leaders of the United States of America. major bowl game since 1959, but it has been a great school; failures on the gridiron have hardly held it back.

Eventually, the sports sales pitch has been invited to the Las Vegas casino-hotels. To get to your room, you've got your way around the blackjack tables, past the crowds playing roulette and through the rows of slot machines. It lets you know what's important. Except, while gambling is the point of a casino, it is inadvertently, maybe, and often catastrophically, they become the point.

The University of Maryland has 39,000 students and 4,400 faculty members (including four Nobel laureates). Most of what goes on at the university has absolutely nothing to do with sports. And yet the events of the past several months – starting with the tragic death of a football player – show the unique ability of sports to throw a campus into chaos.

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On May 29, Jordan McNair, has a 19-year-old lineman offensive on Maryland's football team, suffered heatstroke during a strenuous practice on a hot late-spring day. He died two weeks later. It was a preventable death: More than an hour elapsed from the time of the first team when the team was finally called an ambulance. They never gave up the standard treatment of cold-water immersion; that occurred only after he reached the hospital.

Two months later, an investigative psychologist who was called a "toxic" culture under Maryland's head coach, Durkin DJ, in which coaches belittled players who could not complete their drills and submitted them to homophobic slurs. JT Ventura said, "They have been forced to be brutal, but they have been forced to be brutal." which he was said to have thrown "food, weights and on one occasion to trash can full of vomit" at players, according to a report released after an external investigation.

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

At 73, Loh, the Maryland president, was a generation older than his football coach. He held a doctorate in psychology from the University of Michigan and a law degree from Yale University. His salary was $ 675,000, about Durkin was paid. In 2010, he was raised $ 1.2 billion in private donations, including a record $ 219 million gift last year. About 41,200 prospective students applied for admission in 2017, up 18 percent in six years.

How much of this has to do with sports is impossible to say. Maybe not much. It's true that the big NCAA sports powers generate huge revenues; the University of Texas tops the list at $ 214 million. But most of the time, they spend most of their time (or more), mostly on multimillion-dollar coaches' salaries and gilded facilities. A study by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that $ 1 of every $ 100 in revenue generated by athletic departments at major colleges goes to academic programs. At Maryland, the football team has experienced mostly losing seasons and poor attendance. The basketball team, once a year, has qualified for the NCAA postseason tournament in only one of the eight seasons.

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Loh has been an enthusiastic advocate for sports at Maryland. He helped navigate the university's 2014 move from the Atlantic Coast Conference to the more lucrative Big Ten Conference. But he also told the University Senate last year that he was "dormant volcanoes" on campus with the potential to wreak havoc and threatening his own tenure. "One of them is an athletic scandal," he said. "It blows up, it blows up the university, its reputation, it blows up the president."

On Tuesday, the University of Maryland's Board of Regents announced that it was investigating Jordan McNair's death and the culture of the football program had ended. It took issue with ESPN's description of the program as "toxic" and, even while citing leadership issues with the team, restored Durkin as head coach. Loh, it appeared, had lost a power struggle. Instead of getting rid of an abusive coach, he announced he would retire in June. A day later, after protests by students, objections by some members of the team and questions by state politicians, Durkin was fired. But Loh's prediction that sports could turn to a campus upside down had been prophetic.

"It has not cleared the University of Maryland that it has not just been cleared that the University of Maryland has done so – or has just begrudgingly fired its football coach to stave off further embarrassments. And Loh, it appears, is still leaving his job. In the end, he took personal responsibility – and he took the fall.