BOHN GETS THE SHAFT
The forced resignation of University of Colorado Athletic Director Mike Bohn is about money. And that’s sad.
Granted, Bohn didn’t do enough to turn around the sorry financial state of the athletics department, but he inherited a football program that was reeling from a nationally publicized sex scandal and a coach who thought girls couldn’t kick because they were, well, girls.
And granted, he didn’t do enough to turn around a program that foolishly invested $42 million into a 2003 expansion of the football stadium that it could never quite recover from financially, but that decision was made on his predecessor’s watch.
In 2006, after one faculty leader referred to the project as a “stadium monstrosity,” and after CU Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman ripped the campus publicly for being more beholden to athletics issues than its academic mission, the university agreed to provide the athletics department an additional $3.5 million to balance its budget.
The amount the campus ultimately loaned the department in 2006 was $8 million, reflecting the amount it had to pay to former coach Gary Barnett in the financial settlement related to his departure following the scandal.
In addition, the president’s office reportedly loaned the athletics department a total of $10 million in spring 2012 to help cover expenses associated with moving to the Pac-12 Conference in 2011, not including a related $6 million from those two entities that doesn’t need to be repaid.
It’s apparent that the university’s leaders could no longer tolerate the bleeding.
Regardless of the fact that Mike Bohn is a really good guy, he was dealt a bum hand and could never recover from it. Football, er, we mean, the athletics department, has not been about the student-athlete for a long, long time, and that’s too bad.
It’s about money, and as long as that’s the case, having a Division I football team will always be antithetical to the university’s academic mission.
Maybe CU will prove us wrong and keep interim AD Ceal Barry on permanently, demonstrating that they won’t play along with this good ol’ boys’ poker game any longer and they have their priorities in the right place.
EMAIL HELL
As you can imagine, we get a considerable amount of email at Boulder Weekly, and most of what pours into our main accounts for letters to the editor and press releases is, well, junk.
But we’ve gotten pretty adept at deleting vast swaths of spam swiftly and decisively. At the risk of tipping off the people who want us to vacation in Malaysia to what our methods are, here is usually how it works.
Subject lines, not the senders’ names, are usually the best indicator of whether something might be newsworthy for us to print. If a subject line says something like “Hello Friend,” “Please Acknowledge Receipt,” “I Need Your Assistance,” or “Urgent Request,” chances are it’s crap. Especially when there is unnecessary capitalization.
Broken English and foreign languages are often dead giveaways, as are senders’ names that have formal, unnecessary titles, like “Mr. Angwar Chin.”
Obviously, messages with topics such as burning belly fat, removing moles, new and improved garden hoses and metabolism boosters are usually not worth opening.
But recently we saw a subject line we just couldn’t resist. Our finger hovered over the “delete” key for a good three seconds, which is an eternity in the process of excising the massive fat from our bloated inboxes. In the end, though, we couldn’t bring ourselves to send it to its demise in the ether.
It said “Toxic Belly Bugs.” Yikes! We opened it, justifying the foolish move by thinking there might be a legitimate, highly contagious ailment threatening the good people of Boulder County.
Um, no. All it contained was a bunch of computer code gibberish. Sigh.
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