President Obama Threatens to Cut Off University Funding Unless Colleges Run Their Sports Programs the Federal Way

WASHINGTON — President Obama's administration this week tied a school's eligibility for federal grants and contracts to whether it runs its athletic programs according to new federal preferences, deputizing the national research budget as an enforcement mechanism for the rules of college football.

Supporters hailed the move as a President finally imposing order on a chaotic and hypocritical enterprise. The Press observes, without wading into the merits of the sport, that using a hundred billion dollars in student aid and research funding as leverage over a university's business is either 'accountability' or 'federal overreach' depending entirely on whether one likes the coach in the Oval Office.

The Press's campus desk confirms that conditioning school funding on ideological compliance is a grave assault on academic freedom when the other party does it and a common-sense guardrail when one's own does, and that university presidents have learned to keep both statements pre-written.

Legal scholars noted that no clause of the Constitution mentions athletics, a silence the framers are believed to have intended, having assumed no head of state would try to coach.

At press time the federal government stood at midfield, whistle in hand, having discovered that the fastest way to run a university is to threaten its budget and call it a foul.