… where Richie Incognito spent two years as a university student.

Every powerhouse recruited him. His old man wanted him to go to Miami, but Junior felt at home during his visit to Nebraska. “I don’t want to go anyplace else,” he told his father. “There is nothing to do there. It’s just football.“

LOL.

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‘Course, they’re way past Incognito problems now.

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Oh, why be coy:

Incognito was suspended (twice) at Nebraska, and you know it’s not easy to get suspended at Nebraska, where character-building coach Tom Osborne let a cornerback play while awaiting trial for second-degree murder. Osborne also retained a defensive lineman who was arrested eight times, convicted four times, and left the heartland accused of multiple sexual assaults, before his induction into Nebraska’s Hall of Fame in 2006. Not to mention Nebraska’s current leader of young men, Bo Pelini, who is still apologizing for an epic carpet-bombing of F-words, an attempt to say exactly what he thought of Nebraska’s fans.

… The Incognito rap sheet includes a note that his peers voted him the NFL’s second-dirtiest player. No. 1 in a Sporting News poll last year was another Nebraska worthy, Ndamukong Suh.

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All of which confirms for the millionth time that if you want true surreality, the really actually deeply bizarre, you don’t go to America’s big cities. As David Lynch knows so well, if you seek America at its most scarily twisted, head for the rural heartland.

[Incognito’s drunken] assault [on a woman] at an annual team event happened in view of sponsors. [Head coach Joe] Philbin knew it happened yet continued to preach about the quality of the men in his locker room. He got rid of Chad Johnson after a domestic violence incident but kept Incognito after a sexual abuse incident.

The National Football Post on Friday reported Incognito called offensive line meetings at a strip club and fined players if they didn’t show up…

But the Dolphins allowed Incognito to be a member of the leadership council, which empowered him as a leader.

A coach, aware of the sexual assault and Incognito’s penchant for drinking and past drug use, overrides the player vote for leadership council. Philbin this week instead hid behind that vote, saying it was players, not him who made Incognito a team leader.

Look, the people within the Dolphins’ organization claiming complete ignorance of the apparent tension in Martin’s mind over Incognito and others are either lying – which makes them complicit – or out of touch, which makes them incompetent.

Either way, it is grounds for dismissal.

Some fans see what’s going on. And they’ve had enough. Fans have been writing to me and telling me they’re through with the franchise. Others say they’ll never buy a ticket again until major changes in leadership are enacted.

Consider that the Dolphins had 70,660 people at Sun Life Stadium for the season home opener. Then 68,342 for the second home game. Then 60,592 for the third home game. And 52,388 for the fourth home game.

Notice the trend?

Fans were abandoning this team in droves before the current scandal. You think any part of the last week is going to convince them to return?

The Dolphins failed to get public funding for upgrades to their stadium before this happened. Who’s going to vote to give them public money now, and what brilliant politician is going to champion the cause?

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Though college and professional football detests – to the point of seeking and destroying it – any form of thinking, it might be time for the sport to do some reading in the extensive literature on disgust. (The New York Times provides a reading list of some recent works here.) If American football fails to understand the nature and effects of the stupendous revulsion it generates even in its fan base, it might not be able to save itself.

America’s wholesome, family-friendly tailgate culture claims another victim.

This blog regularly features tales from the tailgates. Just type tailgating in my search engine and scroll down.

My, my. The University of Nebraska. Don’t let your kid go to school there. Dangerous. Nebraska’s very keen on violent people. Will keep them on until they charge the school’s football coach.

When he wasn’t suited up, he was still getting into brawls — found guilty of misdemeanor assault in after “one of those parties in a Van Wilder movie” in February 2004, a former [Nebraska] student told The Post.

“I had to use the bathroom, and I knocked, and heard there were two people in there — and they weren’t happy I was knocking,” recalled the former student.

“I waited, and then suddenly, out comes Richie and his girlfriend. He was irate.”

Eventually, Incognito, like an uncaged beast, “tried to pin me on the bed,” as Cornhusker pals joined in, he continued. “I felt something hit me on the side of my face and my head went into a wall — it was Richie taking a cheap shot. “At that point he was threatening to kill me.”

The 6-foot-3, 320-pound lineman — who was punching holes in the walls when he couldn’t find a chin — finally left the party, but not before cold-cocking a poor sap who happened to be standing by the door. “He took his cell phone, threw it, and then punched him on his way out,” the former student said.

Incognito was set to play his junior year for new coach Bill Callahan, but was unceremoniously suspended from the nationally ranked squad, a move thought to be precipitated by the February brawl.

The Daily Nebraskan, the school newspaper, applauded the news…

“He was one of the worst people I ever interacted with,” [a student] told The Post. “It was just so extreme and unrelenting. There was no sense that he learned from anything when he got in trouble.”

[The student] said he nearly came to blows with Incognito …

“We were both in line at Wendy’s and he was standing over me . . . staring at me, ” he recalled. “He eventually just grunted and walked away.”

Officially, Callahan said at the time, “We have team rules. They’re very simple to follow. If they’re not followed, and they’re not complied to, then (you) suffer the consequences, unfortunately.”

But a former student told The Post the reason he heard from “inside the locker room” was that Incognito “tried to charge Bill Callahan.”

Callahan could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, the Incognito family made excuses for their son.

“Richie won’t take crap from anyone. He’s a hard-nosed kid, and Nebraska doesn’t want hard-nosed kids anymore,” his father told the Lincoln Journal Star.

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The article ends with an extremely weird statement from one of Incognito’s friends.

“He got kicked out of two universities. Guys like that don’t make it in the NFL. They usually float off to oblivion.”

Uh, getting kicked out of a university – or, more typically, flunking out – is the royal road to the NFL. Don’t know what this guy is thinking.

How important is this sport — about whose head-shattering vileness everyone, post-Incognito, is talking — to our universities?

The New York Times reviews the Incognito years – the glory years – at the University of Nebraska and the University of Oregon.

After a whistle at one [Nebraska] practice … he was accused of hitting a backup lineman, Jack Limbaugh. “He did that kind of thing to a lot of his teammates,” Limbaugh said. “I just walked off the field. A fight is what he wanted, but I wasn’t going there.”

Incognito was suspended for fighting in practice during 2003, and Nebraska sent him to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., which treats psychiatric and behavioral problems. He was reinstated and was named an All-Big 12 Conference All-Star. But before the 2004 season, Incognito was found guilty of a misdemeanor assault charge. He was still on the roster until he fought a teammate in the locker room that summer. The new Nebraska coach, Bill Callahan, dismissed him.

He was quickly accepted into Oregon as long as he sought anger management therapy.

Incognito’s stay was less than two weeks, not long enough to even participate in a full practice. He never registered for any courses, according to the registrar’s office.

From an article written during his time at Nebraska:

“I don’t ever want to reduce anybody’s aggressiveness, ” [said] Barney Cotton, Nebraska’s new offensive line coach…

… Incognito is considered the brightest young star on the offensive line and has been mentioned in the same breath as former All-Americans such as Dominic Raiola…

Oh yeah RAIOLA!

Remember the Lions’ Dominic Raiola, another Nebraska offensive lineman by the way, verbally attacking the University of Wisconsin marching band before Detroit’s game in Green Bay earlier this season?

Ohio University currently enjoys the coach responsible for Raiola and Incognito – Frank Solich – and does it ever enjoy him!

Nothing sends a message of discipline to a college football team quite like its coach being passed out, drunk, at the wheel of a car pointed the wrong way on a one-way street.

Yes, that was ol’ Frank just a few years ago…

Incognito, Raiola, Solich…

Cornhuskers must be mighty proud! We need more of their All-American heartland values out here in cynical Washington DC.

[Football has] become the major theater of American masculine crackup…

[It] would be really good, it would be a really good thing, if the NFL moved its boundaries in such a way as to show some minimal respect for mental health.

… [W]hen a player says he needs time off for mental reasons — … in a sport with a suicide problem — it shouldn’t spark a national conversation on whether he’s soft.

You don’t think it’s true of college too? Read this post, and click on all the links.

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UD thanks Timothy.

It’s truly fascinating to UD that the psychosis at the heart of university and professional football is now, thanks to Richie Incognito, openly discussed.

“Three teams [and two universities, Nebraska and Oregon] employed Richie Incognito… His ability to play to the edge of lawlessness is valued… He is a valued commodity in the NFL…”

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The NFL generates billions of revenue dollars selling violence. Players are hired to perform acts of mayhem on the field. Such a profession attracts some menacing individuals with checkered citizenship records.

Former NFL coach Jerry Glanville talked about needing “borderline trained killers” on his team. In other words, he needed some Richie Incognitos to compete.

Commissioner Roger Goodell spends a lot of his time suspending players for various misdeeds, but that is just the PR side of the industry. He keeps the corporate sponsors happy by pretending to keep his work force wholesome.

His people will work overtime sanitizing the Miami situation. Look for the league to roll out extensive anti-hazing guidelines.

But the NFL will never change the essence of the sport and endanger the bottom line.

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[The] NFL was fine with Richie Incognito’s insanity as long as he didn’t cross [the] PR line. …

[W]e don’t really care as long as our own needs are filled. Neither did three NFL teams. Neither did two college football programs.

And when one had finally had enough of his crap, somebody else was always willing to step up and take a shot on Incognito. Because he helped fill up the seats and turn on the TVs.

… If you can play, any antisocial behavior will be overlooked or at least rationalized, even if it’s borderline psychotic.

Football at the highest level welcomes sociopaths. As long as they don’t cross certain public relations boundaries that threaten the game’s or a team’s bottom line. Then, and only then, does football have a problem with people like Richie Incognito.

The fact is, we like our violence and we like it with an edge. And if once in a while, some crazy outlier takes his helmet off and swings it at another player or stomps on somebody after the whistle, hey, it’s great cooler talk after that dreary Monday morning status meeting, right? And all of us writers and bloggers have something to tee up and get page hits (with an accompanying video), right? I’m doing it now.

And so, we will wring our hands on the panel shows and act as if people like this are somehow out of the ordinary and not part of our slice of humanity while the game we love keeps rewarding them.

Who’s twisted? The outlaw player? Or all of us who help enable him?

OOOOHHH… Le Fooootball… C’EST MOI….

I mean, c’est the University of Miami, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Penn State University, Rutgers University, all them big-time universities out in front with academic fraud, sadistic coaches, child-predator coaches, booster-money-under-the-table players, professional agents drooling over the team… All of these schools have been grooming the next Richie Incognito…

And think about it. What’s the great crisis in university football today? Empty stadiums, that’s what. Why aren’t people coming to the games? Why, why, why?

Well, one possibility is that they’re disgusted by the comprehensive scumminess, the super-insulting farce, of big-time university football. They’ve got this vague feeling there’s something of a disconnect between what you just read up there in this post and the university.

But another possibility, if the guy I just quoted is right, goes in the opposite direction: The sport isn’t violent and twisted enough.

If he’s right, Richie can turn challenge into opportunity and open Incognito Consulting, a boutique firm specializing in turning sadists who get lost in the crowd into psychopaths who make entire stadiums stand up and cheer. Coming soon to a university near you.

That’s the part that interests us, here, at University Diaries.

Read the rest only if you’ve just gargled with an anti-emetic.

We start to see how little Richie Incognito went wrong. His father, Richard Senior, seems to have plastered the house with Rockwell reproductions, which would generate rage in anyone.

At least Thomas Kinkade wasn’t famous yet when Richie grew up. He’d be in jail by now.

This one’s a beaut. I can’t quote it in full, but I’ll quote a little and you have to promise to go here and read the whole thing.

NFL BULLYING SEES INTELLECTUALS
AS PREY, EX-PATRIOTS TACKLE SAYS

Brian Holloway said he was one week into his National Football League career when he learned that his Stanford University education and academic interests would make him a target.

… Holloway said he was fined about $1,500 during his rookie season with the Patriots for reading a legal textbook that the team said was a distraction. He was also ridiculed by teammates for typing LSAT notes during plane rides.

The offensive tackle, who listened to opera for pregame inspiration, said there is an alliance that forms in locker rooms to ostracize players with elite academic backgrounds or eccentric interests.

“When they sense an intellectual is present, they will see that as prey,” Holloway said…

UD is laughing out loud, and she shouldn’t be, because she’s watching her modernism/postmodernism students do some in-class writing as she types this. But she SO loves this article! She demands more shocking exposés along these lines!!

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UPDATE: An intellectual defends football:

Football tells us that violence can be beautiful when performed for the sake of a greater good. As American society has become more genteel, that premise has become a cultural fault line — the assumption from which all other assumptions flow. You either believe violence can, in fact, be beautiful, or you don’t. More specifically, you either think that football is a relatively harmless, darned entertaining outlet for the human need to compete, or, frankly, you just haven’t been paying attention.

Violence, for good and ill, is the beauty of it.

I thought I was paying attention…

Passed from hand to loving hand because he’s a violent psycho built like a brick shithouse … Passed from the University of Nebraska to the University of Oregon and then to the Rams and the Dolphins, the rich and celebrated football player Richie Incognito will be back on the field in a flash on some other team, as soon as he works his way through his latest dust-up; and the only reason the Dolphins are a mite nervous about this latest incident is that along the way it reveals that a lot of the other guys on the Dolphins team are … well… not certifiable, but in every other way strikingly similar to Richie.

Here’s how a Miami sports writer puts it:

This puts bullying on the NFL radar, at least. It forces the league to understand that it must be worried about more than just the concussion-related safety of its players or their arrests for stuff like DUIs or domestic abuse.

Yes, UD likes the way this guy puts it. Looks as though the NFL is going to have to start worrying about “not just” the concussion, DUI, and domestic abuse thing (yawn). Because le sujet du jour is bullying – regular old garden variety locker room bullying, as well as the incredibly well-compensated bats-in-the-belfry brutality of Incognito.

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“Richie is … this seems to be a person with a tortured soul.”

Brace yourself for the Offensive-Linesman-as-Dostoevsky defense.

Brace yourself for the televangelist who will train Incognito to look like this on camera.

Brace yourself.

Male Empty Stadium Hysteria (MESH) rages on, this time in response to student indifference at Mr UD‘s University of Maryland. UM’s got a great winning record, and still students aren’t showing up for football games! Or they’re clearing out at half-time!

A local commentator (quoted in my headline) exhibits a classic MESH symptom:

Saturday, I wanted to puke. As the Terps were fighting desperately to hang on to beat Virginia – a rival they were playing for the last time – the Cavaliers were driving into the teeth of a student section that was, I don’t know, three-quarters empty.

UD doesn’t want to nauseate this man yet more, but she would note that his point about only six Saturdays a year cuts both ways. As in – yeah, only a very few days out of the year, but every UM student has to dish out tons of money for the program and spend hugely on game day and sacrifice lots of other varsity sports for the sake of the football program etc. etc. etc. Really, quite an immense burden for six Saturdays a year.

Of course, all this means is that you’re going to have to pay new presidents of jock-schlock schools even more. Sports whores don’t come cheap.

… or are leaving en masse after the first half, this one would have to be ranked very high indeed. It’s written by a local booster/newspaper columnist about Florida A&M, whose marching band two years ago hazed one of its musicians to death. Multiple manslaughter trials are ongoing. Why aren’t students going to the games? Hm. Hm.

The columnist’s one oblique reference to the pesky group manslaughter problem is this:

Last season, … the Marching 100 was idled and Future and other rappers were brought in for halftime performances …

Idled? Why?

And given the program’s violent propensities, does the choice of Future as their half-time stand-in seem to the writer a good one (sample lyrics here)?

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The writer approvingly quotes one of his readers on the lack of fan support:

“If we treat our loved ones, friends and co-workers, wives and husbands the way we treat our beloved FAMU, with all its faults, and rebuilding seasons, no wonder marriages fail, friendships don’t last and we can’t even sell tickets to the game.”

Sweet phrases like rebuilding seasons are, uh, sweet, but, you know, until we learn how many dozens of FAMU band members are going to jail for how long I’m not sure we can start talking about this being the rebuilding season … To everything there is a season lalala, but group killing’s post-season seems to last a little longer than a few months. Ongoing disgust and embarrassment may account for a significant number of empty seats. People may remember, for instance, that FAMU blamed the murdered student for his own death.

As the University of Miami is also discovering, you don’t send your school barreling down shit’s creek for years and then, once you’ve paid your fines and sent people to jail and accepted – in the case of FAMU – the resignation of your president, turn around and welcome those tens of thousands of happy fans who’ve just been panting in the background, waiting to watch you play football again.

Having so many games available on television makes it tough to attract big crowds to the stadium.

That’s why North Carolina senior associate athletic director Rick Steinbacher says the challenge is to “try to make that in-stadium experience as unique and as special and as exciting as it can possibly be so it’s harder to choose to stay home than come to the game.

“Give the fans something unique and make them feel part of something when they’re in the stadium in a way that you don’t when you’re at home,” he said.