Trial coming up for one of the University of Alabama’s many gun-mad basketball players. Couple years ago a whole bunch of players went out for some fun and ended up shooting a woman to death. I mean, one of them, a friend of the players’, actually shot her, but one of the players provided the gun blahblah.

So the guy who actually shot her just got sentenced to life without parole, and things don’t look too good for the player who handed him the gun. Trial coming up.

Another player out with his teammates that night had already established a “pat-down” entrance whenever introduced before a game (this was a precursor to the much higher profile Ja Morant bit), and he kept it going even after he began to be investigated in connection with the murder. Straightlaced Deadspin considered the fact that the pat-down guy was allowed to play at all “quite shocking,” but c’mon. It’s ALABAMA.

Anyway, here’s a local opinion writer gettin all boohoo bout bloody Bama but really baby nobody gives a shit.

Just as much fun as the monkey chants and banana tosses whenever a black player enters the field!

It’s true that we’ve had a field day with lacrosse and sadism on this blog. Far as I can figure, the deep alcoholism endemic to the sport, its privileged-folk provenance, and the near-universal tendency toward hazing in high school and college athletics, produces extreme specimens like George Huguely, and less extreme but still very dangerous people like the guys on the Syracuse high school team.

Huguely, currently rotting in jail, was a U Va lacrosse player who got drunk and beat his girlfriend to death:

In truth, there are many places in [lacrosse’s] culture where nights like the one Huguely had at Washington and Lee University in November 2008 – when he was Tasered after resisting arrest and shouting slurs at a black, female officer who had found him stumbling into oncoming traffic – garner acceptance and credibility. As with other sports teams and fraternities, stories like these are traded like war stories among lacrosse players; they’re the battle ribbons of a culture that enjoys hard-drinking and recklessness. They’re a kind of proof of one’s weekend warrior bona fides.

One thing to remember, as we talk a bit more about the latest degeneracy, is that the lads have guns now. When you add guns to alcoholism, entitlement, and sadism, you get what people refer to as extreme hazing, which is simply extreme sadism. Among the very young. Sixteen. Fifteen.

Aggression and alcohol abuse, of course, are hardly the province of lacrosse alone when it comes to men’s [high school and] college athletics. But, when it comes alongside lacrosse, there’s an implied element of absolute indifference and arrogance as well.

We’re into group psychopathy at this point, an unbounded Lord of the Flies viciousness. As a team you derive splendid new forms of human abuse and let their effects amuse you as you film your victims in order to share their agony with other sadists. (Sadism, you know, is very common.) Or just to watch your weeping pleading shrieking victims over and over in your bedroom. Lots of hazing – fraternity as well as sports – now involves threats with guns; but we can certainly anticipate actual killing with guns in the hazing setting quite soon.

You recall sports-only Marshall’s criminalized football team that we met back in 2015, right? Remember its way-impressive ranking on the Grid of Shame? Its contempt for its entire non-football playing faculty? Did I mention its criminalized football team?

Well, reverence for the Marshall Way of Recruitment survives all these years later, with one of their recent additions all drugged up and shot up on the streets of Huntington — and Marshall has even been quick to 404 the dude from its heroes page and good job on that Marshall though when you do it as often as this school does I guess you get it down to a science.

[O]ne [new high school lacrosse player] was taken [by older teammates] to a remote area in the county when people appeared from the woods, dressed in black and armed with what appeared to be at least one handgun and at least one knife…

[They] put a pillowcase over that student’s head, then tied him up and threw him in the trunk of a car before he was left in a wooded area in the southern part of the county…

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

At least five new recruits were tortured.

Not only did the high school cancel this season’s lacrosse; the district attorney insists on prosecuting! Boooooooooo

Again the city has had to call off a match in progress because home fans were burning down the stadium.

For background, go here.

“I think it’s an issue of fairness. It’s … deeply unfair. … [At the same time, trans] people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression, and the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with, as well. So, both things I can hold in my hand. How can we address this issue with … decency, … and at the same time deal with the unfairness [in athletics].”

Well, pickles are new ones on me. Perverted locker room attacks on rookies usually feature brooms.

The Post’s coverage of the big game reminds me why I don’t subscribe.

… now that the new regime has barred transgender athletes from women’s sports.

Ol’ UD thinks Lia Thomas, who “won the Ivy League championship her senior year in the 500 freestyle, 100 freestyle, and 200 freestyle individually, as well as the 400 freestyle relay,” did the cause no favors by graphically demonstrating unfairness — in her particular case. (Thomas recently lost a legal effort to qualify for the Olympics.)

UD thinks that ongoing definitional and fairness issues (degrees of testosterone suppression, etc.) warranted waiting on trans participation until greater clarity/consensus emerged. “There are good, non-transphobic arguments for fairness in sports… ” But that’s all behind us now; going full-throttle trans deeply upset many people and no doubt contributed to Trump’s victory (“The Trump campaign spent nearly 20 percent of its overall ad budget on transgender attack ads.”).

Angry fellow athletes have sued Harvard (which hosted the Lia Thomas blowout) and others, and the language of their suit is fierce. “[T]he Ivy League and its leadership ‘labored for months behind the scenes to engineer a public shock and awe display of monolithic support for biological unreality and radical gender ideology by America’s oldest and most storied educational institutions.’”

Bill Bock, the plaintiffs’ attorney, wrote in a statement that “the Ivy League believed that if America’s oldest and most storied educational institutions led the way, Americans would suppress common sense and submit to radical policies that steal young women’s cherished sports opportunities and obliterate biological reality.”

“This lawsuit exposes the behind the scenes scheming that led to the attempt by Harvard University, UPenn, the Ivy League and the NCAA, to impose radical gender ideology on the American college sports landscape,” he added.

The plaintiffs seek “damages for pain and suffering, mental and emotional distress, suffering and anxiety, expenses costs and other damages against the NCAA, Ivy League, Harvard, and UPenn due to their wrongful conduct.”

Harvard has ended its transgender inclusion policy.

News from Turkmenistan.

UDs’s old friend Rita Koganzon argues, in the New York Times, that colleges should stop coddling and controlling students, and instead start offering them an environment in which they need to be autonomous adults. Her colleague at UNC Chapel Hill, Jay Smith, launches an ad feminam attack in response, advising her in his last sentence to “look in the mirror.”

After all, Smith argues, Rita has herself been coddled by a conservative establishment (in the NC legislature and on the Chapel Hill board of trustees) which arranged a nice faculty position for her in a newly established conservative thought program on campus to which many faculty objected.

Though they would never admit it, the faculty of [this new program] benefited from affirmative action, but of the unjustifiable kind that works in reverse. Their candidacies for positions at UNC were made possible not by pure merit, which they may or may not possess, but by their membership in or adjacency to a well-funded conservative ecosystem saturated by euphemisms like “viewpoint diversity,” “civility” and “balance.” That ecosystem thrives on other built-in advantages. [The program’s] mission, like that of other similarly inspired centers across the country, is supported by the generosity of rich donors working to defend and disguise capitalism’s worst excesses, a gerrymandered GOP supermajority in our state and a university administration willing to accommodate the political goals of legislators and their minions on governing boards. [These] professors may well be the most protected people on our campus.

A far more intellectually honest direction of attack on autonomy at universities offered itself to Smith, and UD is surprised he didn’t take it. The university Rita is about to join permanently and luridly besmirched itself not thirteen years ago when a twenty year long fake courses/fake department/fake professors/dirty administrators scandal finally broke – hundreds of no-show student athletes were handed out As in non-existent courses engineered by corrupt professors and deans who were highly compensated by the university president and trustees, who themselves certainly knew all about the scheme, as did – one with equal certainty assumes – plenty of professors and – duh – students. “Investigators concluded that university employees were aware of the fraud and actively steered athletes and other struggling students to those courses.” It was “a clear and atrocious example of academic fraud.”

 [T]he university’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, … placed the university on a yearlong probation in 2015, ending in 2016, for violating seven accreditation standards, one of them being academic integrity. It was the strongest punishment the accreditor could deliver besides revoking accreditation entirely.

Because Smith’s university spectacularly betrayed the moral trust upon which the free and legitimate university rests, it lost its autonomy. In response to the scandal, the university initiated a policy whereby school officials will drop in unannounced at any time in any course to make sure professors are meeting their courses. Pretty humiliating, huh? Pretty nanny state, right? But Jay Smith’s school demonstrated its inability to be autonomous, and therefore all must be monitored.

And by the way – if Jay is worried about “capitalism’s worst excesses,” he can find those very close to home, in a university which continues to hand over huge amounts of its money to sports over academics, even though it’s easy to argue that if it had any integrity it would have shut down its athletics programs for a decent interval.

No one seems to be able to keep it down in Lansing, starting with the super-rapey football team in 2016 (Rape Captain here), moving on to gymnastics in 2018, in which the school’s president came very close to going to prison (if an actually jailed university leader is your cup of tea, try Penn St former prez Graham Spanier), and settling most recently on ex-football coach, highest paid person at the university, and phone sex enthusiast/accused sexual abuser Mel Tucker.

Now I want you to realize that with a heap of sex shit like this comes unbelievably expensive, endlessly filed and refiled, litigation. Never one of the world’s great public universities – mainly because — notice? — nothing really matters to it except athletics, for which it is happy to humiliate/sacrifice itself – MSU now spends most of its time dispensing hundreds of millions of dollars to claimants and batting down not very nice remarks about itself from the governor. Bedlamite trustees and massively projected images of Hitler during football games round out the bad joke that is MSU. I’d say there’s a lesson about big university sports in all of this, but that would never be true. With guns as with football, Americans are always eager to destroy themselves.

UD enjoys reading articles featuring sentences that might as well be in Swahili.

If you’re going to be daft enough to stage one of these riots, you should at least warn non-combatants to stay away.