Life of the mind, USA.

On the college level, football players were not exempt from sexual assault allegations. Just look at what women suffered at Baylor University as a result of the “institutional failures at every level” under the leadership of Art Briles and then-school president Ken Starr (yeah, that Ken Starr.) One lawsuit alleged that 31 Baylor football players had committed 52 “acts of rape” between 2011 and 2014.

The university has settled several Title IX lawsuits with sexual assault survivors who accused officials of allowing a “rape culture” and failing to properly act against incidents of sexual assault. That included a Baylor volleyball player who alleged she was drugged and raped by at least four football players in 2012.

We’ve been talking about that forever on this blog; but while everyone else sees it as a problem, we see it as intellectual progress.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when Eastern Michigan University was arguably the most pathetic of America’s many pathetic football schools. But now. Now! Not only does their quarterback hit out so wildly at opposing players that he clocks the referee; another player gets ejected for spitting on an opponent.

Life of the mind, my beloved country. Life of the mind.

Color UD ambivalent about Christianity Today having spilled the beans.

Dramatically, as in O’Neill’s great play and a zillion others like it, it’s only fun to watch until someone… you know… coughs it up. Until that moment at the very end (“I… am… George… I am…”) when the obvious truth everyone’s been lying about gets very flatly stated, we sit and watch in delighted suspense, in excited anxious awareness, in a tense condition of enlightenment, astonishment, pity, euphoria, dread, amusement, fear…

When Mitt Romney wrote his beautiful editorial spilling the beans, UD felt a dramatic let-down. When Christianity Today did the same thing, she felt the same onrush of flaccidity. You know how everyone loves to quote Have you no sense of decency? Blah. Play up! Play up! And play the game!

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UPDATE: Trubu Roi’s Run Far From Over!

The long-running American version of Jarry’s Ubu the King (UD‘s posts about The Trubu Show go way back: put Trubu in my search engine) runs on. As UD suggests above, the citizen in her desperately wants the show to end, while the aesthete can’t help lovin this seniors gone wild caper, this Hangover franchise for mature audiences. Every time hoary Rudy Giuliani loses his shit and slobbers that “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is,” every time naughty octogenarian Alan Dershowitz describes the New Yorker’s editor as a neo-Nazi-friendly fraud, the girl can’t help it: She’s giggling in the wings, she’s having a grand time, she doesn’t want it to end. She doesn’t want Trubu psychiatrist Keith Ablow to lose his license; she floods with excitement when she sees the names Mike Huckabee, Michelle Bachman, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Ralph Reed lined up together in a cast list. She’s watching her very own, her native, La Grande Bouffe, where eventually one of Trubu’s Grand Old Men will sit at a piano, play a few chords, and fart himself to death.

… having finally written a letter to that school’s president about their dirty sports programs (tennis, basketball, and particularly basketball), they would have done better to band together a few years ago and try everything to keep basketball player recruiter Kevin Broadus from being hired.

The New York Times refers to his time at SUNY Binghamton as the “scandal-ridden Kevin Broadus era.” Dude gets his own era and ever so serious Georgetown University not only scoops him up, but does a whole 1984 on his corrupt record and simply expunges it from his university About page!

Where do you think the sort of players who land your school in the scandal sheets come from? They come from recruiters like Broadus, whose apparent indifference to the danger some recruits might pose to the campus community was fully known to Georgetown when they hired him.

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PS: Don’t forget that Georgetown’s scandal plate runneth over: They are revoking Varsity Blues student degrees as well.

… is one of UD‘s favorite (translated) literary titles; despite its sad content, the words themselves have a lilting poetic something (say them out loud a few times), with their thrice-invoked or…er…or…

And everyone knows that sorrow is a beautiful word, sounding the dignity of its emotion in its soft open letters. Give a title sorrow and watch it soar: I Am a Maid of Constant Sorrow. The Sorrow and the Pity. The Sorrows of Young Werther. The Sorrow of Love. Infant Sorrow.

Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart.

Every bond is a bond to sorrow.

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UD often thinks of Disorder and Early Sorrow as she follows our collegiate football players into the big leagues. Plenty of them escape disorder and early sorrow, but some do not, as the media’s current disordered darling, Antonio Brown, abundantly demonstrates. A non-graduate of appalling (feast your eyes) Central Michigan University, the man is an absolutely brilliant athlete. Tens of millions of dollars in professional contracts have been thrown at him, and he’s pissed virtually every cent of it away. These two commentators may disagree about whether he should be allowed to keep playing football, but they seem to agree that something’s wrong with the guy’s brain.

And yet, and yet. This writer notes that in one of Brown’s many rageful Trumplike tweets he makes “an interesting point.” Brown bitches that our old friend Richie Incognito remains in the game even though he appears to be violently demented; why shouldn’t Brown, who rolls the same way, continue to play? “AB is not wrong, is something I never thought I’d say. It was absolutely confounding when the Raiders signed Richie Incognito…”

It admits virtually everyone who applies; it has a 20% four-year graduation rate. Solution? Spend huge amounts on athletics.

First in thy wisdom you granted our Georgetown University Jesuit community a tennis coach who bribedeth rich parents over lo! many years for many millions of dollars and draggedeth our name into the mud. Then you sent us Kevin Broadus, a basketball coach, who had fully demonstratedeth his – O Lord – troubling recruiting policy at SUNY Binghamton but thou sentest him to us anyway. It was thy will, and thy will be done.

And now as we enter the Christmas season, amid annual singalong Messiahs and other forms of fervent prayer, we can only watch in despair – but undaunted faith – as three more hotly recruited basketball players rob and threaten students who perhaps came to our school because they are actually serious Catholics.

But what can we do, O Lord? “Despite being served … restraining orders last month, the three men played in Georgetown’s Saturday game against the University of North Carolina.” We can only follow thy will, which is that these three men continue to play basketball for us. Surely in the fullness of time your… sporting… intentions for us will be revealed.

Observations about journalism from WSU’s highest paid, highest profile, most respected figure.

You know, you run your mouth in your little old column and stuff like some sanctimonious troll. You’ve never been fair and even-handed with us, so I really don’t care what you think. OK, go ahead, because you’re going to write something nasty stuff anyway like you always do. I don’t know which Coug way back when did something that offended you and I really don’t care about that either. But you can live your little meager life in your little hole and write nasty things and if that makes you feel even, you go right ahead. OK, next.

And then Mike Leach got down on all fours and pretended to be a dog pissing.

Oh wait. That was Life of the Mind, University of Mississippi.

Rutgers University, Vision 2020: Be the Walmart of Universities.

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OTOH: Does this sound like Walmart to you?

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UPDATE: Walmarts here we come! A reader reminds me to note that Rutgers has indeed convinced Schiano to take all of the school’s money.

Football coach Greg Schiano is well on his way to being hired again at Rutgers. Feast your eyes on his past there, and look forward to the fun Rutgers will have defending Penn State’s most blind, deaf, and dumb employee.

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His old buddy Jerry’s in the news again.

[H]alf the stadium empty and half of the rest rooting for the enemy? A nightmare beyond comprehension.

… Mike Bianchi.

[Florida State University] decided to fire Willie Taggart after a year-and-a-half and pay him nearly $20 million NOT to coach for the four years remaining on his contract. That was followed up by the Arkansas Razorbacks firing Chad Morris in less than two years and having to pay him more than $10 million NOT to coach. This is on top of the $12 million in buyout money the Hogs are still paying their previously fired coach, Bret Bielema…

[W]hen did it become OK for public educational institutions to simply fritter away millions of dollars like this? Think about it: In what other profession could you cost your company $17 million over two years — which is essentially what Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek did by hiring and firing Morris — and keep your job? Can you believe Arkansas will actually end up paying $17 million for a coach who never won a conference game?…

Why, for example, did Tennessee feel the need to hire Jeremy Pruitt and give him a six-year contract worth nearly $4 million a year. Couldn’t the Vols have signed him Pruitt to, say, a four-year contract worth $2 million a year? …

Before hiring Pruitt, Tennessee fired its former coach Butch Jones and had to pay him an $8 million buyout. Why? Because Tennessee extended Jones’ contract after he went — wait for it! — 6-6 in his second season…

Why did the Florida Gators extend Jim McElwain’s contract in June 2017 and fire him four months later? When McElwain was hired away from Colorado State, the Gators had to pay most of McElwain’s $7.5 million contract buyout with his former team. When McElwain was fired, he negotiated another $7.5 million buyout settlement from the Gators. In other words, the Gators paid millions for McElwain both coming and going.

… you’re a better man than I am. The writer struggles to give a complete account of all the multimillionaire assholes on NFL teams, but like everyone else who tries this trick, he seems overcome, toward the middle of the piece, by his own incredulity at the numbers.

UD wonders if it will ever occur to this guy that the reason violent, amoral, and on occasion overtly demento, shitskies are all over our best teams is that the game targets them. Still unclear? RECRUITS them. SCOUTS for them. COMPETES for them. LAVISHLY REWARDS them. The worst of the worst, most recently, were both team captains. Beau idéal: Richie Incognito. Tell me if this is still over your head.