Whether it’s rape, dirty recruitment, or assault, Boulder has long been front and center — and they’re keeping the beating-the-shit-out-of-everyone thing going with hotly recruited hometown hero Carson Lee, who titles his Twitter page with Isaiah 41:10, which in his case would seem to go something like yea, I will repeatedly pummel thee with the immense right hand of mine immense arm.

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According to the affidavit, the man said Lee punched him about 30 times. Doctors later said the man suffered a fractured skull and internal brain bleeding.

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Only nineteen and blessed with spectacular tackling skills – thirty blows resulting in the sort of brain injury you only see inflicted at the very highest levels of university football. Thirty shows commitment. It shows follow-through. It shows star quality.

UD fully expects Colorado to hold tight to Mad Dog Lee even if he’s found guilty; but on the off chance the school decides to let him go, we can all sit back and enjoy the spectacle of increasingly mindless, vicious university football factories taking their chance, one after another, on the guy. Eventually maybe he’ll hit the jackpot and turn into Richie Incognito.

Ringside fun for everyone, just a few miles from UD‘s house!

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They’re dropping like flies! Get to a ring while they’re hot. I mean cold.

[H]is verbal SAT score of 420 was below the minimum required at Florida, where the majority of freshmen scored 600 or above…

[There was] destructive impunity, drugs, and the company of bad actors he met through Florida football. This was the time when he snapped a selfie that later went viral — posing in front a mirror, a raised Glock handgun in his left hand…

[T]he Gators had so much contact with the Gainesville police that [Urban] Meyer once addressed officers at roll call. A running tally of arrests compiled by the Orlando Sentinel during Meyer’s six-year tenure reached at least 31, for offenses ranging from firing an AK-47 in public to throwing food at an employee at a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop.

The Boston Globe revisits the University of Florida’s contribution to the tragedy of Aaron Hernandez.

The hits just keep coming.

The guy the University of Illinois chose for – among other things – outreach to high school student prospects “was convicted of battery in 2004 and served a year of probation.” It was a drunken brawl, and Matthew Sinclair apparently beat a fellow brawler very severely. More recently – couple of days ago, in fact – a witness watched him stick a gun out of his car window and aim it at another car. “Officers found an unloaded firearm, a loaded magazine with 16 rounds of ammunition and a set of brass knuckles in the vehicle Sinclair was driving.” Brass knuckles! That’ll keep the lads in line!

But if you really want to discipline the young, there’s nothing like pointing weapons at them.

“[A]lthough [Matthew Sinclair’s] gun was uncased and unloaded, ammunition was accessible, and Sinclair didn’t have a concealed carry permit.”

Pish posh. A mere “lapse in judgment,” says UI’s head coach. So the guy likes to beat the shit out of people. So he likes to point guns out of cars. So he doesn’t give a crap about concealed carry laws or ammunition storage. So he’ll probably do jail time and not just probation on this go-’round. So what. Lapse.

If a local judge or jury jails Sinclair, UD has just the replacement for him.

Richie Incognito ain’t doing nothing these days. Sittin’ on his hands filing grievances is all. Richie knows how to do Sinclair’s job real good.

It is – and always has been – curious to UD, as an observer of universities, that the most violent and mindless game out there totally dominates America’s universities. Universities, where the main thing, you figure, is the mind, get positively orgasmic about, and spend themselves into bankruptcy over, a game which we now know pummels the mind to mush.

Forget the body. Of course we know – quoting John Kass again here –

The game is not just a contact sport — it’s a high-impact collision sport. It is about exploding into your opponent, refusing to break, while breaking others to your will and knocking them senseless.

But Kass also notes that “football scrambles the human brain.” He notes the massive and growing numbers of lawsuits coming from high school, college, and professional teams, as players literally lose their minds. Kass predicts football itself will die in the next few decades.

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UD, however, doubts it. Why? Here’s Kass again:

Make no mistake. I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…

Universities, at least according to this guy, can’t survive without a foundation of violent tribal ritual:

It is irrational and tribal love. It is intense emotion, not a vague sense of obligation or philanthropy. [Students and alumni] want to beat State.

Read his heavy-breathing about “shirtless boys” and ask yourself whether passions like these can ever be tamed. Whether the American university can survive without them. Already – in coach buyouts alone – university football is destroying the financial foundation of many schools. Those same schools will not hesitate to pay out hundreds of millions more in personal injury claims.

The model here will be big pharma. As a corporate endeavor, pharma cheats and injures, but as long as it can afford to pay out billions every year in legal settlements and still make a big profit, it will continue to do so. Universities will hit up students for higher and higher athletic fees, and students – even more subject to these passions than alumni, it seems – will willingly give.

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UD thanks mwm.

No kidding.

… and that’s saying a lot – has yet another nationally broadcast meltdown. Drink and violence and litigiousness have long been Steve Sarkisian’s (scroll down) game plan, and the resulting embarrassing spectacles in front of trustees, obscene actings-out in the larger community, and, in this latest instance, psychotic attacks on team staff, have totally endeared him to the nation’s premier football programs. He pulls in a huge salary and is massively lionized at one dominant program after another.

He hasn’t yet started pulling out a gun during his special moments (This is How We Do It), but once he does that, he’ll be guaranteed the head coaching spot at the school of his choice.

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The world of university football/basketball coaches is mainly a variant of Trumpworld. Everyone loves the athletic Trumplets’ sick dirty twisted lying ways, and when the sickest and dirtiest die, the, uh, what’s the word, encomia are enmazing! You’d never know from American sports journalism that Bobby Knight or Mike Leach (one of America’s most fanatic Trumpers) was anything other than a fine inspirational example to us all when his sadistic treatment of players comes to a permanent end. And so it is with another manifestly insane person, Steve S.

Of course a few sissy nay-sayers are calling for him to be fired. They seem worried that the school he rules – Texas, Austin – may suffer reputational damage through having made a gibbering lunatic the highest-profile, highest-compensated person on campus.

To which UD says: Fiddle dee dee! It’s Texas, sweetie!

Years of the most gruesome violence, game after game, have reduced increasing numbers of matches to quickly suspended exercises in riot control. The visiting morons who continue to march into Greece to play – who even allow their children to march into Greece to play – are “shocked” when eighty thugs blast into a stadium and beat up their kids in the stands because… because… because the Greeks never do this sort of thing!

You might have thought a team owner ambling onto the field during a big televised match and waving his loaded pistol at an official who displeased him might have signaled to the Greek state that the game … needed a pause. You might have thought the fact that no one is able to police the event at all would instigate a moment or two of withdrawal and contemplation.

UD‘s suspicion is that the Greek government is working on a plan whereby that country’s substantial violent minority is at it were herded into stadiums and allowed to torch property and bloody people to its heart’s content, thereby keeping the streets reasonably safe.

Soccer reduced to repressive desublimation is an intriguing short-term approach to a homicidal population; but

1. it won’t work for long; and
2. death rates inside the stadiums are going to go wild.

I mean, in its outlines it’s a reasonable plan, but it needs tweaking. UD‘s suggestion to the Greek government: Build hundreds more stadiums and turn them into fun concentration camps where disarmed fascist gangs are held in comfortable cells during the night and then let loose during the day to storm the fields and rip each other to shreds. Light meals will be provided.

From a link to an article a reader, John, sent me about how fatal violence outside and racist violence inside Italian soccer stadiums mirrors “darker developments in a broader segment of the Italian and indeed the European body politic,” UD was easily able to jump to other similarly appalled analyses of the increasingly unworkable business of putting on a football match in many of the world’s countries (scroll down). Africa, North Africa, South America, the Middle East — ain’t only Europe where the world’s most corruptly run game is also the most violent.  Football, “a sport with a deeply tribal nature and a large captive audience full of disenfranchised working-class males, and thus in many ways the perfect arena for the unscrupulous populist and his macho, nativist fantasies,” has an important “function in the rise of global far-right populism.”

Global football thugs are in some intriguing ways the haredim of Europe:

Their potential for violence is … so strong that pacifying them has been a matter of public order. 

Punishment is as half-hearted as Israel’s efforts to deal with its mobs of violent tribal male ultras – the ultra orthodox – and for the same reason. Violent-Corrupt-People-Is-Us. Absurd moves like making players compete in empty stadiums (there are more and more of these Beckettian theatrics across the globe), allowing only one team’s fans to attend (The Sound of One Side Clapping), or identifying ringleaders and denying them admission to games (guaranteeing violence on the streets — exactly where a nation’s women and children are cowering in an effort to get out of range of fascist gangs) accomplish nothing. Leaders like Viktor Urban want it that way. Even as tribes become smaller and smaller (“[S]tadium attendances [in Italy] plummet every year as people decide it’s better to watch games on TV rather than amid the violence and hatred of the terraces. In Serie A, stadiums are less than 60% full…”) their political and social violence, often stoked by governments, intensifies.

They seem to take things like this more seriously in Canada.

From the same article:

“There’s this really odd dynamic of ‘I really want to belong, I really want to be part of this team… and at the same time, you have to put up with this assault about something very personal, very private, and very scarring in order to prove your worthiness to be a member.”

Liberals, argue Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty, are people who believe that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” UD agrees; she has always found the very deep, very twisted, very sexual masochism/sadism of this apparently common child’s play baffling and frightening. But UD has to deal with the fact that all over the globe the human race is cutting off clitorises with dirty knives and lacerating anuses with broken broom handles because …

What’s the cliche? Love is stronger than hate?

Nope. Hate – abundantly obviously – is stronger than love.

And not only stronger. Socially acceptable. If Argentine fans hate opposing teams and try to kill them, fine. If Reuben Foster hates his girlfriend and tries to kill her, fine. My beloved country elected a cruel paranoid as its leader; maybe, to reward him for killing our decency along with our institutions, it will reelect him. We like violence, we like hatred, we like cruelty. Liberal is a dirty word.

Headline, New York Magazine.

Point One: Some of us have been talking about it forever.

Point Two: People love violence, hon. NASCAR, NFL, WWE, stop me if you’ve heard this before.

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I like this dude who wears a MAKE FOOTBALL VIOLENT AGAIN hat.

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[W]hat (Maryland football coach D.J.) Durkin did? That’s college football. That’s sports… [T]o pretend that Maryland’s football culture is a unique football culture is to kid one’s self. The relative silence of college football coaches reeks of nervousness and self-preservation. They know it could happen to them too.

Remember UD‘s take on the matter. She giveth not much of a fuck what the NFL does. She expects it to be our most popular sports organization because it’s our most violent, and most everyone loves violence.

So what.

So we now know it turns many men into mental wrecks, some of whom kill themselves at rather early ages. It’s a commercial enterprise and that’s what it’s about and we know precisely now, with the science available, that that’s what it’s about, and a few players (chronicled on this blog) have looked at this fact and left the profession. The profession itself won’t do much of anything. It can’t. Nature of the beast.

This blog is about colleges full of nineteen year olds. Nineteen year olds just dying to get in the game.

But it didn’t. It doesn’t. All over the world, the highest-level soccer matches – remarkable numbers of them – are big blood baths.

Isn’t it strange? Don’t you find it strange? I mean, that the whole affair – overseen by one of the world’s most corrupt governing bodies – just grinds on? How much slaughter will international football tolerate before it decides the body count’s too high?

Here’s what old UD thinks.

Murder and mayhem pay. Extremely well. Many fans attend games in order to enjoy these things. War by other means; and I reckon Hobbes is right.

Since everyone knows how significant numbers of international soccer gatherings are likely to turn out, audiences for them are increasingly composed of people already inclined toward mass violence. But given the sport’s popularity, and the money it generates, the situation will be allowed to deteriorate infinitely.

Tunisia’s sports minister coins the term “stadium terrorism.” The FIFA representative reviewing the situation in Greece (he’ll be lucky to get out of Athens alive) calls it “unbearable that people are scared to go to a stadium.”

You never see women or children at many world soccer games. Before (on transportation to the games), during (at the games), and after (on the streets; in the pubs), the host city is on fire with drunk, rioting, gun-bearing men. Despite the measures governments have introduced (games played in empty stadia; tv blackouts; massive police presence and massive arrests; physical separation of opposing fans; targeting of known thugs and gangs) everything’s getting worse and worse and unbearably worse.

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Only it isn’t unbearable. Scores die after games, and cities are torched; armed black-shirted gangs rush the pitch during the game and go after referees. So what. FIFA – a virtually all-male, ridiculously corrupt organization – will do nothing about the latest atrocity in Greece. It’s bearable. It’s all bearable. It’s all boys incorrigibly and escalatingly being boys.

And when it gets even worse – when players and referees are beaten to death during games televised all over the world – FIFA will still do nothing. Unfathomable amounts of money are being made, a lot of it by that organization’s corrupt officials. No one’s going to mess with a good thing.

Arizona Football: Scottie Young Jr. Participating in All Team Activities Following Arrest for Domestic Violence

He can really beat the shit out of people!

The University of Arizona: Beautiful coach Rich Rodriguez. Beautiful team. A university sports legend in the making.