Attention-grabbing teams, the theory holds, can attract more freshman applicants, lifting 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. Duke University was a great school before fabled coach Mike Krzyzewski built its basketball team into a perennial powerhouse. The University of California at Berkeley hired a new athletic director this summer who touted the “front porch” and said he hoped to use the football team as a “platform for our university to celebrate what makes it exceptional.” Berkeley has not played in a major bowl game since 1959, but it has long been a great school; failures on the gridiron have hardly held it back.

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Eventually, the sports sales pitch began to remind me of the Las Vegas casino-hotels. To get to your room, you have to wind your way around the blackjack tables, past the noisy 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, sports are not the point of a university — although inadvertently, perhaps, and often catastrophically, they become the point.

The University of Maryland has 39,000 students (from all 50 states and 118 countries) 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.

On May 29, Jordan McNair, a 19-year-old offensive lineman 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 he first showed symptoms to when the team’s medical staff finally called an ambulance. They never gave him the standard treatment of cold-water immersion; that occurred only after he reached the hospital.

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Two months later, an ESPN investigative report described what it called a “toxic” culture under Maryland’s head coach, DJ Durkin, in which coaches belittled players who couldn’t complete conditioning drills and subjected them to homophobic slurs. "If a kid would stop or go on the ground,” former player J.T. Ventura said, they were sometimes dragged to their feet and made to continue. A strength and conditioning coach hired by Durkin was alleged to have been particularly brutal — including incidents in which he was said to have thrown “food, weights and on one occasion a trash can full of vomit” at players, according to a report released after an external investigation.

Durkin, 40, was in just 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 his $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 a quarter of what Durkin was paid. In the years since Loh was hired away from the University of Iowa in 2010, he 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.

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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 revenue; the University of Texas tops the list at $214 million. But almost all of them spend as much as they take in (or more), mostly on multimillion-dollar coaches' salaries and gilded facilities. A study by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that less than $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 national power, has qualified for the NCAA postseason tournament in only three of the eight seasons Loh has led the school.

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 presided over a number of “dormant volcanoes” on campus with the potential to wreak havoc and threaten 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 System of Maryland’s Board of Regents announced that its own investigation into 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, the university reversed its decision, and Durkin was fired. But Loh’s prediction that sports could turn a campus upside down had been prophetic.