… oh okay the quarterback has a drinking problem… But cast your eye back over these posts (scroll down)… TCU’s got an elaborate student drug cartel going, with football players prominent in the game.

You bet your ass.

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

I know it’s not fair to brand them all.

We’re all sinners, of course; but when you put “Christian” right there in your school’s name, as Texas Christian University does, you invite more than ordinary sinescopic scrutiny. A quick review of this blog’s TCU entries over the last five or so years definitely reveals more sinners than saints, especially among the football lads, who seem undecided whether they want to drug themselves to the heavenly gates or pummel other people to the heavenly gates.

UD was reminded of this curiously … heterodox school by their latest big national news: One of their most valuable football players has two arrests for domestic violence in the last seven months plus an outstanding bench warrant, since he didn’t show up to court for Dom. Viol. #1.

Since he’s a great player, and since TCU’s quarterback is out with injuries, and since TCU is desperate to win a game, they’ll just suspend him for a game or two.

Two? They’ll probably just suspend him for one. It’s the Texas Christian way.

Texas Christian University’s most militant Disciples of Christ are to be found on its football team, where select players routinely fan out among the non-football-playing student population on campus and beat the shit out of them.

The bloodied president of the team’s booster club, The Flagellants, recently issued a statement: “For the greater glory of God.”

There is the marauding horde at the city’s Christian university, Baylor:

There have been altercations, sexual assaults, hidden police reports and no discipline. Everybody is in on it, trying to keep the football gravy trainrolling unimpeded by pesky justice for victims of the Bears’ marauding horde.

And there is the marauding horde at the city’s breastaurant:

Sunday’s fight escalated to include knives and firearms as gang members fired at each other in the Twin Peaks parking lot, police said, adding that nine suspected gang members died and 170 were arrested.

If you’re a diner or a shopper or a university student, try to stay out of their way. Now that the state of Texas is open carry, this should become easier. The marauding hordes are now likely to be displaying their weaponry.

If you’re a student and would like to study amid the bike engines, gunshots, police sirens, and screams of the dying, UD recommends earbuds.

Serious, big-time, cartel-type drug business is pretty rare on American campuses, but as San Diego State (a school with many and varied scandals over the years – sports, drugs, presidents with, er, money issues) showed back in 2008, with its guns and brass knuckles and cocaine and all, it does happen.

I suppose it’s marginally more embarrassing when your school has the word Christian, rather than State, in its name, but no matter: Texas Christian University, as its chancellor notes, is, just like SDSU, simply going to have to tough things out until they settle down.

And speaking of tough, the TCU football team is gonna have to be Ram tough. The coach did a surprise drug test “after a prize recruit told him that he would not attend TCU because of drug use by players.”

TCU has not released results of any drug tests, but [one player] told an undercover officer that 82 players failed.

Far out!

… when this hero of a school that features the word Christian in its name beat the shit out of a bunch of people at a bar. No one cared, because he runs real fast, and he went on to be drafted by an NFL team.

And of course his Texas Christian University hero page remains proudly up online cuz you know he’s so great y’all and we’re so proud to be associated with him, especially now with his beat-up girlfriend giving interviews about how much she bled in his latest attack on her.

Yeah okay so it’s all too much for the NFL team and he’s been dropped. But you won’t find TCU taking down his hero page! A player who can really draw blood doesn’t come along every day.

Things are hotting up on and off the field between longtime foes Texas Christian University and Baylor, with TCU’s coach boasting that his assaulting players are making far better moves than Baylor’s raping player.

[The coach’s] reference to Baylor during his press conference [about two players who allegedly beat a group of TCU students] did nothing but stoke the rivalry between the two traditional rivals who are both in the top five of this week’s Associated Press poll and are about 90 miles apart.

“… [W]e’ll find out what the facts are. It’ll all come out. I just hope when they all come out, you report it just as strongly as what you’ve done here because it’s not even close to what happened south of here.”

[The coach] was clearly referring to the Baylor situation where [player] Sam Ukwuachu was convicted of sexually assaulting a former Baylor soccer player.

The Battle of the Coaches is on! What will Baylor’s coach say in response? Stay tuned.

… is one of UD‘s favorite headlines, and the claim had at least a spliff of plausibility: Back in 2012 members of the Texas Christian University football team ran a sufficiently notorious drug market that one recruit “declin[ed] a scholarship offer because of the drug culture.”

UD looks forward to more great TCU headlines in the aftermath of the sort of incident so common on big sports campuses that eventually it won’t even be covered by journalists: A couple of football players got angry and drunk and beat the shit out of some students. Eventually all students who choose to attend big sports schools will understand and accept that getting the shit beaten out of you by football or basketball players is simply a risk you run.

Until that day, we at University Diaries can … I don’t want to say enjoy, but there’s definitely something intriguing in the details of these incidents.

The theme of this one is familiar from the story of the University of Idaho Vandals who were caught shoplifting in the bookstore because players are

1. “visible on [security] video and identifiable” and because

2. at the time “the store was open only to members of the football team.”

Similarly, in the TCU case, not only did security cameras apparently catch every punch, one of the players left his cell phone behind. As the police examined it, it flashed the full name of the player.

… has had major drug issues lately (scroll down for posts about the drug scandal) is bad news indeed. The grandson of T. Boone Pickens, a student at Texas Christian University, has died, reportedly of a heroin/Xanax overdose.

This is not the way to bat cleanup. This Sports Illustrated column on the massive drug bust at Texas Christian University – featuring plenty of football team involvement – is the first of what will be many attempts at damage control.

This writer’s prose is the functional equivalent of someone in a crowded room waving madly away at marijuana smoke because it’s so thick everyone’s choking on it. A polite gesture, but futile.

Let’s take a few tokes of this guy’s prose and see what went wrong.

His basic moves are two:

1. Aw shucks.

2. I’m shocked. Shocked.

To get us to the point where we actually believe that big-time university football is made up of clueless saintly coaches and adorable lunk kids who sometimes do the darnedest things, the writer must throw deep into platitude territory. His prose must evoke an Americana that would embarrass Edgar Guest. Let’s see how he does it!

The coach has created a winning team

the right way by recruiting guys who were a step too slow or an inch too short. Patterson persuades his players to use those slights — real and perceived — as motivation to maximize their ability. [Start with the hard-luck, overcoming obstacles, come from behind, motley crew that shows up the sports machine schools — the whole motivational enchilada. Ignore the fact that the investigation began when a recruit rejected a TCU offer because of notorious drugging on the team. Ignore that. Don’t ask why some random recruit knew about this and the coach didn’t. Just keep reading. And keep your hankie ready.]

That’s been the foundation of Patterson’s success, which has ultimately resulted in TCU achieving its dream of being in the Big 12 and becoming, you know, one of the big boys. [Achieving its dream. Maximize their ability. Keep the cliches coming. They feel so damn good.]

In one day, four knuckleheads — linebacker Tanner Brock, defensive tackle D.J. Yendrey, safety Devin Johnson and offensive tackle Ty Horn — destroyed much of the program Patterson has built. [Knuckleheads! Cue the Three Stooges! Adorable! Clowns!]

Having shooed away the dealers on the team, the writer will concentrate for the rest of his piece on the clueless sainted coach.

[W]e can only imagine the cauldron of emotions that must’ve been bubbling within him.

After all, he must’ve felt dumb that so much illegal activity seemed to be hidden in plain sight. And he probably felt betrayed by the players and disappointed because he let down the parents who trusted him with their kids.

Kids is always a good choice for stories like this one. The basic dynamic the writer’s going for, after all, is familial – the coach is the fond, too fond, dad, incapable of imagining his kid a dealer; the player is… just a kid!

And oh lord the churning, churning cauldron of emotions he must be experiencing as it hits him so hard out of thin air that the kid sells drugs…

Knucklehead v. Dumb: The sad sorry story of our sports family… But the coach and the team “will survive this shameful day.” We will survive!

[TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL]
PLAYER DENIES ENTIRE ROSTER FAILED
DRUG TEST

Get to know the inside of Waco Texas, the reason its rapists and illegal-weapon-brandishing killers get off scot-free, where everyone’s a Baylor University graduate.

Baylor – whose mix of ostentatious Christianity and de Sadeian degeneracy gives the Catholic priesthood a run for its money – generates the judges and DAs who ensure that good ol’ boys don’t get convicted of their crimes, while … uh … others…

Branch Davidians, Breastaurants, Bikers, and a bevy of weapons you will not believe: What better place for your college education?

You have to understand Waco, Texas. You have to understand Baylor University. You have to understand fraternities. You have to understand football.

Once you begin to understand the culture of Waco, you’ll have no trouble understanding the likely legal outcome of the university’s 1,534th rape this week.

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

Begin by understanding context. To start with, this latest campus rape was just a rape: it wasn’t a gang rape, and it wasn’t filmed. At Baylor, this barely rises to the level of an event, let alone a crime.

As for a jury made up of average Waconians: Waco’s famous for breastaurants that host rival biker gangs that slaughter each other in hours-long shootouts right down the street from Baylor.

It’s just that kind of down-home all-American place okay? and no way the good citizens of Waco are going to convict a Baylor frat president of rape. I mean, that’s not what Waconians would call a violent crime. And remember: Baylor’s a Christian school! This boy’s a Christian.

UD could care less about sports of any kind (exception: competitive Scrabble), but she’ll say this: Her need to read about athletics for this blog at least led her to Deadspin. Who knew some of the best writing in America would come out of this funny, subversive, knowledgeable, source? Deadspin has taught UD much of what she’s learned about the lingo and lunacy of the jock shop, and along the way it has delighted her not only with its literacy, but also its amused embrace of the ultra-loucheness of this thing that has taken over – of all places – our universities.

Nobody notices or cares when professional soccer, football, and basketball are disgusting. We only pay attention at the very grossest margins, as when an NFL player tortures his dog to death. Moral monstrosity on the level of mere money registers not at all, as in the failure of the FIFA story, or the related story about the apparently universal tax evasion of international soccer players, to get anywhere at all. Who cares. Put a bunch of guys together with a lot of money and surprise.

But the university. Ah the university. Little streamers of seriousness continue to flutter ‘pon it. Wilted garlands of gravitas shake aloft their dying buds. The Sacred Groves of Academe! When a university reveals its true rot, as in the moral desert of (in effect) all-male Baylor, the extremity of response – A new woman president! Who, asked why she took the job, says “I love Jesus.” – tells you all you need to know about the effort required to keep stray wisps of legitimacy flying.

But I don’t want to overstate the matter…

So people do indeed tend to notice the truly debauched campus. Whorehouse-for-teens-and-their-parents proprietor University of Louisville is the higher ed scuzz-meme of the moment, cited in a kind of shorthand in many articles about other athletic scandals; indeed, it’s mentioned in a wonderful Deadspin piece about Hugh Freeze, a guy who has a lot in common with the miscreants at Baylor, being both a superduper Christian and a (reportedly) twisted piece of shit.

Ole Miss, ex-haunt of football coach Freeze [background here], has many advantages when it comes to ultra-louche supremacy on a university campus, the most important of which is its location in the most corrupt, most benighted, state in America. Nobody much cares what goes on down there, and this includes the people who run the state. So the tired business of boosters giving impermissible benefits to players, and similar venerable forms of corruption, continue to thrive at Ole Miss, which means the NCAA’s always sniffing around. The general air of loucheness in a steamy south that time forgot, plus William Faulkner having lived in Oxford, means that people often reach in the direction of his novels (with special attention to the Snopes family) to, er, contextualize some of the goings on, as Deadspin notes in a wonderful summarizing paragraph:

The revelation of Freeze’s possible sex-having brought its fair share of confused hilarity [to observers], but did little to outline the future of either of Ole Miss’s ongoing, convoluted [legal] cases with [former former Ole Miss coach suing Freeze for defamation Houston] Nutt and the NCAA. There were (are) still a number of questions to be answered — namely, how Nutt and [his lawyer Thomas] Mars knew exactly where to look [for dirt on Freeze]; whether anybody comparing this case to a William Faulkner novel actually read a William Faulkner novel; how long Freeze was possibly using school technology and school funds to maybe fuck; how far back into his career Freeze’s general misbehavior extends; whether Freeze was even the one doing the fucking; whether Ole Miss know about Freeze’s extracurriculars beforehand; and how Nutt’s legal team will use this information moving forward.

That one about whether Freeze was actually doing the fucking: There’s a theory that the calls on his phone to an escort service might have been on behalf of a recruit…

UD does think the Faulkner comparison works, since he wrote convoluted stories like this one, about vague imperishable grudges among unsavory people, like these people.

The phrase about how far back Freeze’s misbehavior extends: The Deadspin piece includes some way-twisted testimony about the way Freeze behaved when he coached a women’s high school basketball team.

One woman [says that] Freeze forced her to change shirts in his office, claiming her Grateful Dead shirt violated the school dress code because it “represented drugs.” At the time, [she] was in eighth grade; according to her, Freeze did not leave the room while she changed.

“Coach Freeze pulled me in his office and told me that my shirt represented drugs. … I said, ‘I’ll go change in the bathroom,’ and when I said that he said, ‘No, you’re going to change in here so I get the (Grateful Dead) shirt and you can’t have it back.’

He didn’t do anything sexual. But I stood in the corner and faced the wall when I did it and I changed out of my shirt. No privacy.”

Another student, remaining anonymous, claimed Freeze was “hyper attentive” when it came to making sure the girls’s skirts adhered to school policy. She also claimed that on one occasion, when she was late getting back to class from her lunch period, Freeze obliged her request to be paddled rather than sit in detention; instead of fetching a female administrator to complete or at least proctor the punishment, Freeze paddled her himself.

“(Freeze) did some bizarre warm-up taunt before actually making contact,” said the woman, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because she said she fears reprisal. “I was humiliated that he didn’t have a female in the room. I don’t know if the acts were intentionally sexual or if he was really that oblivious to the inherently sexual nature of his approach to discipline.”