It's over - Max Lennon has won.

Last rumors we've all heard on the possible departure of Clemson athletic director Terry Don Phillips don't offer any resounding hope for athletics, particularly football.

After the past few weeks of hearing of TDP being on a hot seat, that the university board of trustees have taken keen interest in Phillips' leadership for the past year or two, Phillips is out by year's end, and all that, we're now hearing that university president James Barker is not only not going to force Phillips out but that Phillips left the meeting with Barker encouraged?

It's almost a law of physics at this point: whatever encourages Barker and Phillips should be discouraging to fans.

At this point, as fans you have to be solidly in the fifth stage of grief: acceptance. How anyone can still get pissed over the endless stream of poor decisions made by athletic department officials and university brass? This has been 25 years in the making when then-president Max Lennon launched a war against Clemson's nationally-vaunted football program with his “academics will never be subordinate to athletics” manifesto.

But that was then, and this is now. And the mediocrity will....check that, let's not call this phenomenon at Clemson “mediocrity” anymore. This is failure.

Sure, Clemson posts non-losing seasons in football, as the administration is clearly not playing to win as much as they're playing not to lose. But when you have the facilities Clemson has, the fan support, the money (it's there, y'all, Clemson is solidly in the black), the recruits, the tradition and so on and you continue to fall short every single time, that's failure. Because failure is determined by what resources you have available to you and what success is defined as being (ACC title), and when you can't be successful in a terrible football conference with SEC-level resources, you're a failure. Plain and simple.

Laziness, frugality, unjustified arrogance, complacency, visionless, just-another-day-at-the-office – this is the energy at Clemson right now. Abject carelessness and resentment toward anything football by university leadership has been so strong for decades that it's spilled over into all other sports. Clemson athletics has had a significant overall drop in ACC championships, swimming and diving programs have been dropped, and an all-time low morale lives inside Jervey walls as verbal abuse by one or more athletic officials has been widely reported.

How Death Valley still stuffs 70,000+ most autumn Saturdays amazes me. If this were any other school whose fans cared about athletics more than the administration, you wouldn't have near that number.

But at Clemson, you do. And it's because fans have long had this religious loyalty to football, and religion can be a very blinding entity. I direct you to the followers of Muslim extremism and wacko Christian evangelism for evidence. But I do know one thing - you don't make some earthly entity or person (like a coach) into a god, and then follow him into hell. Nor do you don't allow yourself to be put into a position to where if you are considering not giving to Clemson anymore that the university or its henchmen guilt you out of it by convincing you that if you stop giving then you'll be taking food out of some “poor” player's mouth. That just makes you a dumbass and you deserve to get taken for a ride by the carnies at Clemson University if you're this stupid.

How else do you explain why 70,000+ show up every autumn Saturday after spending thousands of hard-earned dollars (in this economy no less) on IPTAY dues, season tickets and tailgating paraphernaila to watch a chronically-failed football program at work? It's religion and that's what the university is counting on. For you to be so blindly loyal that you continue to giving these carnies dollar on top of dollar and they continue to do the same failed things they've always done. They're taking you for a ride – you just haven't realized it yet.

Perhaps it's time for you to wake up a bit out of your drunken stupor from that orange kool-aid bender you've been on for 20 years. Perhaps you should consider other outlets for your entertainment, or pursue some other life path that won't lead you into failure for once. Cut bait and move on from fishing in the same spot that hasn't given you a bite in years.

In other words, if the university doesn't care about athletic success and ACC championships in football, why should you? As a fan you can't do anything to overcome poor leadership. The boosters can't even do that. Clemson's proved it for years.

If you're still worried that if you stop giving then you're turning your back on “your kids”? Don't worry, Clemson graduates numerous people every year, they'll be more than happy to take your spot and loyally feed those starving players in your absence.

Because after all, there's a sucker born every minute.

Clemson officials resent football? Not impossible.

A noted Clemson fan on a Tiger message board out there on the interweb had his opinion of the state of the football program posted (with his permission of course). Basically he argued that the university administration is willfully killing the football program so it won’t prostrate the academic side of the school as it is perceived to have done during football’s glory years of the 1980s.

It wasn’t a surprise to see a few dismiss this argument as being ridiculous.

Perhaps, because if Clemson University did indeed kill the football program, then the enormous revenue football brings the university would dry up. Given university officials are more corporate whores than true academians, I can see this also.

In reality, I think it’s both. Officials would love for football to go away but they’re not about to sacrifice the revenue that comes with it.

Because they suffer through something they resent in exchange for money, they epitomize the classic definition of whore.

As intelligent Clemson fans know, this all started in 1985 when Max Lennon was named University President after serving as an administrator at Ohio State. I’m not getting into details but I will say than when Lennon declared athletics would be subordinate to athletics, you have to remember the context of the time.

Clemson was a rising football power when Lennon took over. So much so that it is my belief that had Danny Ford been given two more years the Tigers would have been playing for a second national title. So when a university president says something like this during an era like that, the only way for that to happen with any expediency is to systematically dismantle football.

You can’t bring academics up quickly at all but what you can do quickly is bring football down.

It’s funny really. For all the academic bluster by Lennon and his cronies I don’t remember Clemson’s academics improving significantly under his watch. If true, all he did was destroy football and did nothing academically. The only thing I remember him doing was spend spend spend and build buildings. And it didn’t stop at Clemson; when he went to Mars Hill College the professors there hated him because of his fascist, corporate ways.

Nonetheless, the intentional destruction of football, no academic improvement and a deluge of cosmetic improvements to the university campus marked Lennon’s Clemson.

Is the same philosophy still present at Clemson?

I’m not certain that Clemson’s current leadership is as fascist as Lennon (maybe it is, I don’t know), but I do think it’s very probable that current officials are still intentionally reigning football in as a pre-emptive measure to keep it from being "too big".

I do know that it is highly prevalent among academians to resent sports in general. While I respect and agree with most of his philosophies, I do think prominent linguist and anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky’s view of sports is a bit over the top. A couple of quotes:

“Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.”

“...it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter.”

When considering Clemson’s pitifully average to below-average state over the past two decades and the more global view of sports’ perception among academic purists, yes I do think it’s very possible that Clemson still has forces within it whose goal is to keep football down. Very.

But again, these same forces are not about to do what they really want because of one reason only - money. Clemson prefers to dupe its gullible fanbase into believing it is football friendly and there is absolutely no hostility towards it at all in hopes of keeping revenues maxed out.

For all who may disagree with him, at least Dr. Chomsky isn’t a hypocrite when it comes to sports. Clemson officials are.

* * *

What Clemson officials don’t realize, or more likely don’t want to face, is that schools can have strong academics and strong football programs as well. Here is a list of schools that are actually capable of doing both.

• Georgia Tech (2009 ACC champion)
• Texas (2005 & 2009 Big XII champions)
• Ohio State (BigTen champion each year since 2005)
• Harvard (four Ivy League titles since 2001)
• Penn (four Ivy League titles since 2000)
• USC (six straight Pac-10 titles from 2003-2008)
• Oregon (2009 Pac-10 champion and current leader in 2010)
• Florida (three SEC titles from 2000-2008, 2006 & 2008 BCS champion)

What do all these schools have in common? They’re all members of the esteemed 63-member Association of American Universities, America’s version of the UK’s Russell Group (Oxford, Cambridge, etc). Magazine rankings are a beauty pageant, but to be an AAU member is where the real prestige is. All Clemson has is a magazine ranking, something you can manipulate your way up. You can’t manipulate your way into AAU membership. That requires real work.

This is clear, undeniable proof that schools can have top-notch academics and a championship football program simultaneously. But will Clemson fact this indisputable fact? Not a chance.

Considering its long-time goal to make athletics subordinate to academics, in the end Clemson has neither.