‘“Your school, this university, announced that it was going to examine its governance structure and that it was going to reform its governance structure in the embarrassment that happened over a period of time. And now you’re not willing to say that you would support … the release of a structure. If it was developed by the university by the person that you selected to chair this committee, then why wouldn’t you adopt these recommendations if it’s been done within?” Cantor corrected Sweeney’s statement that the task force was commissioned in response to the string of athletics scandals stemming from the men’s basketball player abuse controversy. “It wasn’t in response to any particular scandal, as you suggest, but rather because we thought that it would be an indication of good governance,” Cantor said. After he flippantly labeled it “just a coincidence” that the task force was commissioned “during the scandal,” Sweeney rebuked the Rutgers administration for its lack of transparency.’

So… there’s always a a little bit of hell to pay when the legislature has a chance to chat one on one with the people who run perennial scandal magnets like Rutgers University.

Of course, like most seriously fucked up schools, Rutgers reflects a seriously fucked up state. This is the state that gave us the gone but not forgotten University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. As one local columnist puts it:

[Stephen] Sweeney argues that scandals, including men’s former basketball coach Mike Rice penchant for hurling basketballs and epithets at players, have damaged the school’s reputation and “its ability to purse academic excellence.”

So [putting more political appointees on its board of trustees] would make sense.

Because nothing enhances a university’s academic reputation like a collection of Jersey pols.

You got your basic Scylla and Piscataway dilemma here… Jersey legislators… Jersey trustees…

SUPER Coacha Inconsolata at Rutgers

Like Yeshiva University’s Richard Joel, Robert Barchi of mega-scandal school Rutgers is essentially a rich guy who wants to be left alone to attend corporate board meetings with people like himself. He doesn’t wanna know from his school’s massively catastrophic overspending on athletics, and he certainly doesn’t wanna threaten his classiness (doctor, university president, corporate seat holder) by grubbing around with lowlifes like sadist coach Mike Rice and recruiter-of-criminals coach Kyle Flood. (The governor of the state has expressed a close variant of this approach: “I certainly have a lot more important things than worry about what wide receiver is suspend[ed] for a few games recently. Being governor of New Jersey and running for president is a little more important than that.”)

So as per usual, as the fact of his football coach having recruited a bevy of armed home invaders becomes national news, Barchi’s remaining above the fray.

In this he represents – as you know if you read this blog – one of the, er, dominant typologies among jock school presidents.

Some JSP‘s are totally happily down and dirty with their having to devote their entire tenure to football and basketball scandals (these include not only … problematic players and coaches, but also regular gigantic buyout payments and litigation costs when coaches are fired or leave or whatever, plus other pesky matters like the new stadium that fucked the institution’s budget but good and sits empty because no one attends games, post-game student riots, drunk and disorderly tailgates, that teensy academic scandal over in communication studies, etc., etc.). But some JSP‘s, like Barchi, come to the job with a sense of themselves incompatible with, say, spending days desperately lobbying the state legislature for alcohol sales in the stadium. They just don’t see themselves as liquor shills, and you’re not going to get them to do this sort of thing, however much money the empty stadium is hemorrhaging. He’s a high-ranking academic officer, dammit, and there are certain duties he will not perform.

But if, on your presidential daily rounds, you refuse to visit your school’s field of dreams, its denizens are going to feel offended. Like this guy. He’s really pissed with the president, and he’ll tell you why.

First, though, he wants to share a photograph with you. Granddad Flood cradles an awed baby in his arms right after a win on the field!

Okay, now that we’re in the Coacha Inconsolata mood, let’s roll.

The writer begins by quoting another local scribe shocked at Barchi’s refusal to help Coach Flood out of this latest mess:

Ask President Robert Barchi to step in and help? He can’t even pretend he likes the big-time athletics part of his job…

How can he not like the big-time athletics part of his job? What’s not to like?

And now the writer, noting the fact of Barchi having left Flood to twist slowly slowly in the wind, expresses his incredulity:

The president of the university – the president of a school embroiled in all sorts of negative publicity, with a coach who is the most visible face of said university – hasn’t spoken with the coach about the latest issue? Really?

Football’s the front porch, which means coach is the front face, and if you’d just rather not deal with that, if you prefer a sense of yourself as resident in a cloister rather than a flophouse with a wraparound porch, you’re going to avoid the coach.

Now the writer quotes another outraged Rutgers fan.

[T]o leave Coach Flood facing the media alone for the crimes by students and student athletes announced this week just isn’t right… Rutgers is the size of a small city and will have its bad elements who should be disciplined and prosecuted as appropriate.

The pertinent crime committed was the recruitment of criminals. That crime was committed by Flood alone – he being the ultimate decision-maker (you don’t actually think there are admissions committees that look at these guys, do you?). As for the bad elements, when these turn out to be not just players but coaches like (base salary close to $700,000) Mike Rice, you’re not just talking elements. You’re talking about entire enchiladas (which is why no one’s surprised that Flood also turns out to be fucking with the academic staff).

Okay, so get out your hankies – time for the Coacha Inconsolata final appeal:

Flood has been standing alone. Facing the media….alone. And representing himself, his team, his university – and mine – with dignity and forthrightness. Alone. And that is shameful and wrong.

BWAH!

Things just get prettier and prettier at Rutgers.

But hey. It’s Jersey.

Five current Rutgers football players, including the cornerback at the center of a university-led investigation into coach Kyle Flood, were charged Thursday with assaulting a group of individuals, including one student whose jaw was broken during the unprovoked attack.

… [Nadir Barnwell, one of the men charged,] is at the center of the investigation of [Rutgers football coach Kyle] Flood, with the university looking into whether the Rutgers football coach broke school policy by contacting a professor regarding Barnwell’s grades. The junior cornerback was declared academically ineligible in the spring, according to two school officials.

Flood defied academic support staff when he contacted the professor, two sources told NJ Advance Media.

And then there’s the Rutgers basketball program.

Lordy lordy. I have seen me some scuzzy programs, but Rutgers athletics lately takes the cake.

**************************

“Coach Flood exemplifies our university’s standards and values both on and off the field,” Rutgers president Robert Barchi said in a statement.

That wasn’t long ago, right after he gave him a contract extension and a big raise. And, you know, what Barchi said is absolutely true. Putting its students in harm’s way via sadistic coaches and criminal players, and not giving a shit about academic integrity, is the Rutgers standard.

PS: They’re gonna have to pay over a million dollars to buy Flood out of his contract.

******************

I knew this was going to get funny.

Hands-on research in Criminal Justice majors.

*****************

From a comment thread:

[H]alf our secondary just got arrested.

******************

Coach Flood Sings to His Favorite Player

I know I stand in line until you think you have the time
To talk some football with me
And if we find someplace to meet, I know that there’s a chance
You’ll end up beating on me

And afterwards you’ll drop into a quiet little place and break a jaw or two
And then I’ll go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “I love you”

I can see it in your eyes
That you despise the same old lies you heard the night before
And though it’s just a line to you, for me it’s true
And never seemed so right before

I practice every day to find some clever lines to say
To make the meaning come through
But then I think I’ll wait until the evening gets late and I’m alone with you
The time is right, your perfume fills my head, the stars get red and, oh, the night’s so blue
And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “I love you”

It’s not the latest particular Rutgers thing; it’s the general sense its athletic program gives the university of being a perpetual-farce-machine-on-wheels…

… that’s doing the place in. So what if their athletic director (who came in to fix what their sadist-on-wheels basketball coach did to the school’s rep – it became, among other things, a notorious Saturday Night Live joke – and then turned out to have her own apparently sadistic past), so what if she told her staff to reach out and touch people in the community, but “not in a Jerry Sandusky-type way.”

In itself, this remark is nothing. But in context, it’s just this week’s shabby Rutgers Thing, part of a narrative involving a school giving all of its money to athletics, run by a ridiculously greedy new president, fronted by hilariously obscene fans, coached by cretins…

Update, Rutgers’ Front Porch

Here at University Diaries, we never tire of quoting that thing beloved of university football boosters: Give the sport more money because it’s the university’s front porch.

Too true. Every outlet from the New York Times on down today features astoundingly violent (coaches and players) Rutgers University, and you obviously can’t put a price on publicity like this. It’s one thing to become a national laughingstock because of your mad sadistic basketball coach (who can forget the SNL sketch?). You’re moving to a whole other level when you recruit a quarterback who a few nights ago allegedly inflicted permanent brain damage on someone. Someone he seems to have left to die on the streets. Someone currently fighting for his life.

The quarterback, who’s from Minnesota, was named “Minnesota’s Mr Football in 2011.” Too right.

With Brand New Rutgers University President Robert Barchi on the Edge of his Seats…

UD rides into town to save his ass.

Barchi wants to hold on to two corporate money-for-nothing seats. Who wouldn’t? But as the leader of the state senate points out, they are both grotesquely obvious conflicts of interest. The corporations in question even do business with Rutgers.

Barchi would be an idiot to turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars of free money, yes. But his job, and whatever reputation Rutgers has left after its zillions of other scandals, are in peril. What to do? Hm, hm, hm…

So far, Rutgers hasn’t done much of anything. Barchi seems to think he can wait this one out, stonewall until everyone loses interest. UD isn’t sure this is a good move. UD can think of a better move.

Barchi can take for his model here the NCAA’s chief legal counsel, who warns that Ed O’Bannon’s class action lawsuit (details here) “threatens college sports as we know it.”

Take the high road, in other words. Go the dignity route. University presidents on corporate boards, university football and basketball – these are beautiful things, with venerable traditions… things we threaten at our peril… things that are simply the heart and soul of the great American university. When you threaten a president’s ability to double her compensation by attending biannual meetings with a biotech at the Regis Bora Bora, you threaten university life as we know it.

He should be grateful the basketball coach isn’t a sadist.

The frustration is all too evident in this editorial, written by the head of Youngstown State’s student government. Recent statements by the associate director of athletics about where and how athletic money is spent anger him. Scholarship money doesn’t come out of ticket sales, as the associate director implies; it comes from students:

All of the scholarship money is paid for out of the $810 per student (roughly 10 percent of overall tuition) that goes from our tuition through the general fund to athletics.

The associate director also talks as if the budget is in good enough shape to fund capital projects, etc. The SGA president notes:

Athletics brings in $2.9 million in revenue and spends $11.96 million, resulting in a deficit of more than $9 million.

Youngstown State athletics boasts a 300 percent deficit.

No, YSU athletics isn’t dramatically awful, like Rutgers. It’s just typically cheesy.

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY GOES TABLOID!!!!

Yes, Mike Rice U is now into bold type, garishly warring and litigating personalities, and the baying press in pursuit of the next hilarious unguarded statement. Penn State is still there, a tabloid whose faculty and administration desperately insist it’s back to being a … you know … quiet legitimate scholarly sort of thing (even though, as you read this, the only Penn-State-related word blasting through your brain is SANDUSKY SANDUSKY SANDUSKY). Penn State can give Rutgers pointers… As can the perennial yellow journalism schools, like Auburn, which is in the news for (get ready for it) absolutely total corruption.

We all know big-time sports is the front porch of the university. We’ve been told that by boosters again and again. And it’s true. Eventually, you can see everything. In big, bold type.

“‘First offense?’ That’s Rutgers’ excuse for not firing Rice? These tapes were from two years of practices.”

Well, you’d expect a column called OutSports to get a bit miffed at Rutgers University’s psycho homophobe coach (watch this for scenes from the groves of contemporary academe). No one else seems to mind: The guy was suspended for three games and is now firmly back in his role as coach/mentor to teenagers.

A student of sadistic university coaches, UD finds Mike Rice’s technique intriguing, if a bit retrogressive. Unlike trailblazing Bobby Knight, he doesn’t throw chairs at his players; nor does he seem drawn to locking concussed students in sheds… Like Tommy Tuberville, Rice is a traditionalist, employing a mix of direct physical violence and verbal savagery.

Rice replace[d] Fred Hill, Jr. who resigned … following a lengthy separation process in the wake of a profanity-laced tirade at a university baseball game on April 1.

Hill had to resign, I guess, because he forgot to throw punches while calling his players cunts. Technique is everything.

Even so, Rice had better watch it. Somewhere out there is an ambitious basketball coach able to call his players cunts, punch their faces, and throw furniture.

******************************

A basketball coach named Mike Rice
Treats his players not terribly nice.
“When their feet start to drag
They get punched and called fag.
Assault in defense of the game is no vice.”

******************************

Update:

The airing of a videotape of Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice using gay slurs, shoving and grabbing his players and throwing balls at them in practice over the past three seasons has the university’s athletic director reconsidering his decision not to fire the coach.

Oh, come on! It was only his first two-year-long offense!

Sayreville Speaks.

Playing big-time, winning football is hard enough when you’re a high school team. There may be excesses. Occasionally some of the guys are maybe gonna get excited and start forcing digital anal penetration on the new recruits. The way they did in Sayreville, New Jersey.

Playing big-time, winning football is even harder when you’re a university, which Richard Mendoza, who lives in Sayreville, is in a privileged position to understand. Mendoza goes from a setting of local games where teenagers lucky enough to make the cut are anally raped, to state-wide games where players form packs and just for the hell of it break students’ jaws. Talk about a font of wisdom. Mendoza’s been there. What does he have to share with us about football, high school, university, etc.?

We … have to understand that [Rutgers is] trying to play and move up to big-time athletics … There are going to be missteps. There are going to be kids you bring into the program who are of questionable nature. But you’re trying to win games. You can’t tell the coach, ‘Win, win, win — but never have a problem.’

Now, I’m not condoning this at all. Coach (Kyle) Flood has to deal with the repercussion of this. … He needs to answer why he’s not bringing people into the program who are great. But at the same time it’s an interesting dynamic. They want him to win but they also want him to be a great citizen; sometimes that’s a difficult road to walk.

Mendoza and his buddies, interviewed at a Rutgers game

believe that Flood’s career 24-16 record is the key reason that the arrests and Flood’s alleged meddling in a player’s academic issues are national headlines. They point to recent arrests and accusations that other programs’ players have faced, like at Alabama. “It just seems to be glorified because he’s not winning as much as these other coaches,” Mendoza said. He suggested that if the program were 8-0 at the moment, these off-field issues would not be as big a deal. His buddies nodded in agreement.

“The difference between Bobby Knight and Mike Rice? 790 wins and three national championships,” said Michael Porcaro of Scott Plains, N.J. “All the things Mike Rice did, Bobby Knight did. Bobby Knight does it, he’s the leader of men. Mike Rice is a monster.”

Rice was fired as Rutgers basketball coach in 2013 after ESPN aired video showing him mistreating players in practice.

“Not that what Mike Rice did was right,” Porcaro said. “If he worked any job, what he did would get him fired. But you know, when you’re mediocre they’re less likely to look over (something).”

It’s an interesting philosophy. You’d think it would be just the opposite – that the high-profile big winners would get noticed by everybody, rather than the under the radar losers. But Rich and the guys are saying that winning solves everything; that when you win all is forgiven.

I mean, they certainly seem to be saying that about themselves, Jersey guys, Jersey football fans. Win and who cares too much about the sort of people you recruited to do the winning. After all, as one of the guys notes, a grand transition is taking place right before their eyes:

“I think we’re going through the growing pains, going from being just an academic university to a big-time sports university. There are going to be growing pains.”

If we’re going to move Rutgers from being just an academic university to where it deserves to be, in the firmament of universities, there are going to be growing pains.

Or, as Coach Ulyanov was famous for saying: “If you want to make an omelet, you must be willing to break a few eggs.”

Mr UD, a professor at the University of Maryland, once watched the university’s president blow off a student who asked a challenging question about the school’s athletic program.

This was a couple of years ago. The student’s question went to the immense disparity in the president’s salary and various coaches’ salaries. Annoyed that the president blew off the student, Mr UD pressed the president on problems in the athletics program.

The president of the University of Maryland responded to Mr UD along these lines: There’s little I can do about the program, and the program can blow up at any time.

UD has always been rather astonished by the president’s honesty; because this of course is the fundamental truth of all big-time university sports programs. The jock school president – in the favorite words of the second-highest paid employee in the entire state of Maryland – is a pussy bitch and a bitch pussy and a pussy pussy and a bitch bitch pussy pussy pussy.

And the jock school’s big-time sports program can indeed blow up at any time. If you know even a little about how they’re run – and the people who run them – you know why these programs keep blowing up.

***************

Real men die for the University of Maryland football team, like 19-year-old Jordan McNair, who didn’t get much of a life, but at least lived it taunted as a pussy and tortured to death by a first-rate football power.

[S]ome number of Maryland football staff members probably belong in prison.

Which is to say that just as the university’s president anticipated, the program, having killed a player, has now blown up.

You need to go back to Rutgers’ celebrated basketball coach Mike Rice to get a sense of the sick sadism characteristic of the man we Maryland taxpayers each year pay $2.5 million. I mean, try reading through all of this without puking (puking by the way is something the UMD coach makes his players do … part of the school’s force-feed ’em til they’re monsters regime… ).

***************

A Deadspin report concludes:

One perfectly reasonable question is why Durkin, Court, and Robinson, at the very least, haven’t already been fired. Former Maryland football staff members say the current coaching environment of the program is intimidation-based; current and former players say these men routinely use intimidation and humiliation as motivational tactics; current and former players say they have a pattern of pushing teenagers past the point of complete physical exhaustion, in some cases to weed out and punish players they’ve targeted as unwanted. A pattern has been described that makes what happened to Jordan McNair a likelihood, if not an inevitability, but it says deeply troubling things about what Maryland’s athletic department deems as acceptable coaching behavior that Durkin’s tactics weren’t rejected long before now.

But we know why they weren’t rejected. It’s really not about “what Maryland’s athletic department deems as acceptable coaching behavior,” because Durkin and Court were after all hired at great expense to torture teenagers to the point where they can win football games. It’s about Maryland’s administration.

So look at what the president of the university said to Mr UD. He has no control over the program. His job is to resolutely look the other way, and to irritably say nothing to people who insist on questioning him about a program over which, officially at least, he has authority.

*****************

It’s a mad mad mad mad world. Over in the shabby humanities buildings they’re committing seppuku if they fail even for a moment to use scrupulously sensitive, politically correct, language; in the sports palaces, they’re getting in front of 19-year-olds’ faces and spitting pussy and faggot and fucker and shit and bitch at them while making them run on a hot field until one of them actually dies from the abuse.

Far out.

But routine reality at many of America’s big-time sports universities.

*******************

UPDATE: In response to another coach (Will Muschamp, South Carolina) passionately defending Durkin, since much of the reporting about his program is based on anonymous sources:

A player is dead, but Muschamp is more worried about attacking ESPN’s article and the staffer giving them information.

Glorious University of South Carolina.

******************

As usual, Deadspin has the most trenchant response to Muschamp.

Something about Bjork on Mars, and Some Guy’s Frozen Nuts…?

UD‘s having trouble making sense of this story. Give her a moment.

*****************

And here’s the obligatory I AM STUNNED TO DISCOVER THAT A (choose one from Column A)

FOOTBALL COACH

BASKETBALL COACH

ATHLETIC DIRECTOR

is a super-sanctimonious-Christian fraud! You never see that combination at our universities! You never see a noisy pious moral scold who turns out to be a greedy horny cheating little shit!

******************

Hearken, ye sinners! O list, ye lost ones!

The Hugh Freeze saga at Ole Miss haveth everything. It haveth the alleged recruiting violations, the former player on the holy draft night of 2016 who telleth of the cash payments, the aggrieved former coach (Houston Nutt), the disciples from the NCAA Committee on Infractions, the lawyers, the escort service, the “misdial” to the escort service, the suggestion from the athletic director that perhaps the “misdial” was part of a “pattern.”

It haveth the mingling of the gods on the fields and the gods in the sky.

“I don’t stand over them, make them do it,” coach Freeze sayeth of his players and his religion to Kent Babb of The Washington Post in 2014. “Certainly they hopefully see that it’s important to me and maybe the way I live and the way these other coaches live. Maybe it attracts them to it.”

The Twitter feed of the man from Independence, Miss., doth lineth with his Bible.

Here we seeeth the juxtaposition that will never stop astounding, the one that has breathed through the whole story of this most American of games since Rutgers playeth Princeton in 1869 and the legend goes that a witnessing professor hollereth: “You men will come to no Christian end!”

Here, a grubby game (and deliciously so) intersects with a peacocky purity.

Hey, at least my university has WITTY abusive coaches!

He told [one player], in front of the team, he should transfer to a “transgender league,” multiple players said.

At some universities, basketball coaches just go ahead and call players cunts or fags. At UD‘s GW, the coach allegedly goes that extra mile, lifts his comment above cliche, looks for a fresh way to say it…

Speaking of saying, though… Faced with some pretty persuasive evidence that GW’s got a real angry paranoid at the helm (don’t make his daughter cry), pulling down one of the highest salaries on campus (Don’t know how much. Will guess. Around $500,000? With this and that, could be a lot more.), UD‘s institution is abundantly not talking.

[GW’s Title IX coordinator] did not return an email, and a school spokesman said he was not available to comment. Interim Provost Forrest Maltzman declined to comment through a spokesman. Despite repeated requests, the school made no officials available for interviews. The school declined to answer questions about its inquiry into [Mike] Lonergan, or even acknowledge it, saying it does not comment on personnel issues as a matter of policy.

——

Brian Sereno, the executive director of athletics communications, did not immediately return the [GW] Hatchet’s request for comment.

——

Hokay! Get the message!

*******************

Gets a bit colorful now, and UD knows that her readers are sensitive souls. So – SELF-ABUSE WARNING.

Five current and former players said Lonergan told players [GW Athletic Director Patrick] Nero requested the practice tapes so he could masturbate while viewing them in his office. The players said Lonergan also told them Nero had engaged in a sexual relationship with a member of the team. Players said they found those comments to be shocking and offensive, with no grounding in reality.

********************

You’re expecting some concluding words of wisdom?

Oh, go ask Bobby Knight and Mike Rice and the rest of them. They’ll tell you what it takes to win.

*******************

Actually, UD does have some words of comfort for GW, as this story rapidly goes viral.

You know you’re one of the big boys when a whacked out scandal about your allegedly whacked out coach hits the mainstream media. You cannot buy the sort of publicity the school is about to get. Think of what that Saturday Night Live thing about Mike Rice did for Rutgers (start at 1:00)

(Lonergan recently turned down a job offer from the selfsame Rutgers. People there seem to think they, uh, dodged a bullet. A second bullet.)

But okay look let’s take that last bit out of its parenthesis so that UD can share with you the following thought. This country is close to hiring as head coach a man just like Rice and Knight (Knight was in fact invited to speak at the Republican convention) and (allegedly) Lonergan and the scads of other abusive and twisted university coaches UD has followed over the years of this blog.

Every time Donald Trump steps on the brutality gas he wins more votes. Every time coaches step on the brutality gas they win more games.

It is quite obviously the way you win.

Because for every one sadist, there’s apparently one million masochists.

I have no idea what to do about it. Just noting it.

*********************

Here’s a tweet:

Don’t know why coaches and schools refuse comments in these situations.

So yeah it’s odd and dumb to say nothing even as the story goes really really big. UD will tell you, if, like this guy, you don’t know why there’s this initial silence, what’s going on.

Think lots of moving parts. As we speak, an extremely large and complex institution is gathering and consulting with amazing numbers and types of people. Lawyers. Public relations experts. Players. University spokespeople. Administrators. Coaches. Trustees. Boosters. Atlantic 10 people. NCAA people.

You better believe that Lonergan is also lawyering up like mad. People like Lonergan are not in the business of losing. Lonergan is just like the Ur-Lonergan, who says

“We’re going to win so much. You’re going to get tired of winning. you’re going to say, ‘Please Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don’t win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I’m going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again.’ You’re gonna say, ‘Please.’ I said, ‘Nope, nope. We’re gonna keep winning.’

********************

And all of this is taking place in the typical university context of interim provosts and ever-rotating deans and presidents who have just announced they’re leaving. Yet you need one strong singular voice in crises like these. It’s gonna take a bit of work.

********************

But wait, UD! Wait!

How did it happen?

Okay, so here’s the drill. Ambitious university is all agog because it’s got a respectable basketball team that brings in fans and revenue and attracts media attention. Sure, they’ve heard reports that suggest the coach may be el mayorly crazed motherfucker, but what coach isn’t? Bobby Knight threw chairs at people and today he’s an elder statesman. Florid complaints start to come in from the players, but it’s just a few malcontents and anyway when they get truly pissed they leave the program. Problem solved.

And now the new amazing contract with all that money, and the wins, and the adulation, have, let’s speculate, made the coach feel his methods are brilliant and he can get away with anything (see Coach Trump). His behavior maybe becomes so bizarre that a critical mass of players finally goes public with the problem.

The university now desperately needs a run and gun game, but because they’ve been in denial all they can do is dribble while Rome burns.

“You don’t compete with the biggest and baddest football programs in America without recruiting big and bad people.”

They’re not just big and bad.

If coaches, they may be the highest paid people in the state.

If players, they’re sports heroes. They get huge scholarships plus under the table payments. Bogus professors and bogus disciplines are invented just for them. All of the best buildings on campus are off limits to everyone but these students, with some interesting results.

The big and bad people – and of course not everyone on your big-time college team is a bad person – may bring a new kind of violence to campus, often working as the team that they are to beat the shit out of male students and sexually assault/film themselves sexually assaulting female.

The president and trustees of places like the University of Nebraska seem to consider what people like Richie Incognito do to their students acceptable collateral damage, and students seem to agree it’s worth it because you need people big and bad enough to beat the shit out of opposing players, and you might not be able to confine to the field or the court the generally violent disposition of big and bad people. Here’s a Rutgers scholar (Rutgers has distinguished itself for coach and player violence) showing his stuff.

I mean, lots of people drink and carouse and get into trouble in college. C’est entendu. But these guys are built like brick shithouses and they work as a team. You do the math.

Getting between a boy and his toys is always risky…

… as the women on Seattle’s city council have discovered. They voted against a proposal to build a new basketball arena in the city, and the reaction to that decision helps you understand why so many once-respectable American universities (Rutgers, Chapel Hill, Penn State, Minnesota, Louisville) have allowed the culture of professional sports to turn them into national jokes.

You need to drill down to the trustees (feast your eyes on this photo), to people like the King of Oklahoma State University, to understand how it’s gotten so bad on so many American campuses that a few people are beginning to notice. You have to focus in on people like Jason Feldman, a Seattle attorney who, along with quite a few other men in Seattle, uncorked his rage against – let’s see – what did he call them – the whoring pieces of trash on the council who blocked his basketball fun.

How did it come to this? I mean how did the American university come to this? How do you get to a university that for more than thirty years harbored and adulated a child rapist? A university that for twenty years implemented an elaborate, completely bogus curriculum? A university that was running a whorehouse? You get there by putting in charge people who share the enthusiasms of Jason Feldman Esq.

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