Words of wisdom from a colleague of UD‘s.

… League of Denial.

… It’s easy to sit back and pontificate about why so many players are violent, both on and off the field, or how they ended up with ruined lives. We often blamed the players themselves. “They were irresponsible men, or had bad agents, girlfriends, wives who took advantage of them,” we explained. We blamed everything but the game itself for so many ruined lives and serious psychological problems.

… We have all made a very comfortable living off the game and the backs of men like Harry Carson, Tony Dorsett and Junior Seau.

Whoa, look out. The budgets of many universities rest on the recruitment and use of young men as football players.

American university sports events get more and more violent, so much so that it wasn’t much of a story when, last year at this time, Syracuse University was host to multiple fights and one stabbing at their “Orange Madness” opening basketball event of the season. Police swarmed the building and everyone was ushered out before the event was scheduled to end because security couldn’t control all the fights.

Big deal. The life of the mind.

But yeah sure, as the chancellor said up there in my headline, we promise to do better next year.

So here we are and “how could this happen?” asks the local paper. How could it happen that Syracuse University, in designing this “family friendly” event to prevent last year’s violence, hired Ace Hood? Ace Hood…

After a night rocking to songs about fucking bitch pussies and shooting the fuck out of everyone with your arsenal, Syracuse will be ready for the football and basketball season!

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UPDATE: Now that we’ve gotten a glimpse into the culture of the Syracuse athletics department and many of its fans (why not hire Ace Hood?), it’s time to cancel his act because a few malcontents object to his brilliant subversive lyrics.

Wonder how much his cancellation fee is. Yet another excellent use of university funds.

Everyone’s wondering who his replacement will be.

How about something for the girls? Rihanna!

Many “students” are little more than cogs in the great NCAA money machine. Sure, they receive their scholarships, and some are serious about their studies, but how much time can they put it on classwork when they are expected to practice, travel across time zones and play at a quasi professional level in order to keep those scholarships?

And what happens to them when they get hurt? Or more often, flunk out? The answers often aren’t pretty.

College sports and the big-time dollars they produce have effects on the core educational mission. When Nike founder Phil Knight builds his alma mater, the University of Oregon, a $68-million “football performance facility,” it is money not spent on a new science or performing arts building. D-III athletes don’t “inadvertently” sell their autographs, like Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel, to memorabilia collectors, nor do our alumni have reason to take the NCAA to court for compensation for use of their likenesses in sanctioned video games.

Attendance is tanking at lots of Division I football games, and UD wonders whether some part of that isn’t simply disgust, scandal fatigue. Americans expect the professional leagues to be disgusting, but there’s a vestigial sense that universities should be better. Amid all the theorizing about why people aren’t going to university football games, there’s maybe this, as the authors of the opinion piece suggest: Our tolerance for the Div I Big Lie is finally starting to weaken.

Empty expensive stadiums and sadistic highly compensated coaches and teams on a permanent crime spree are all well and good; but now Moody’s is warning about Division I schools becoming credit risks, so say goodbye – maybe – to all that fun.

In laying out risk factors to Division I programs, Moody’s cited the increasing use of public subsidies to fund sports, exposure to litigation over head injuries, and the possible movement away from the NCAA amateurism model. Moody’s views future costs as uncertain.

I love that possible movement away…

The amateur tv networks that have taken over amateur Division I sports at our universities will have to bail out these schools when no one will lend any more money to them… At which point tv will call all the shots – not just most of the shots, which they do now. That means they will demand butts in all seats. Viewers hate to see empty stadiums. But how will we do that, the universities will ask their tv guys. Not our problem, the tv guys will say. Meanwhile, each year attendance is effing hemorrhaging .

The university goes to robotics and it goes to engineering and it says to the professors there solve this for us. And they do solve it, they make animatronic students but it’s not cheap, so the university’s athletic division continues to lose zillions every year meaning that they’ve been able to please the tv overlords but they’re still in very bad shape credit-wise…

If they were just sports programs – and not also universities – there wouldn’t be any problem here. You’ve got a certain sort of conduct – verbally violent… sometimes physically violent… – but that’s the norm, that’s how you motivate the little buggers. That’s how you make them angry motherfuckers like you so they want to kill the opposing team. But there’s this teeny vestigial sense at some American universities that qua university they shouldn’t be seen countenancing this sort of thing – that the ethos of a university…

I mean… not that the university itself will ever interfere with its coaches! Noho. But when coaches get so vile that large numbers of players leave the school rather than endure them… Or – God forbid – when players or coaching assistants go public with their complaints… Well then! Ahem! Yes! We’re a university, not a BDSM club (in all of these cases, including the latest one at in-some-obscure-and-actually-no-longer-discernable-way-Jesuit Georgetown University, there are multiple masochists on the team ready to defend their sadist)… We’ve got standards of behavior here…

Oh Giunchigliani really. Go back to Italy or get with the program. You live in Las Vegas, not Parma, man. When your local university has a football program this successful, you spend hundreds of millions on a new stadium. Get it?

Of the panel’s 11 members, only Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani addressed whether there was a need for the stadium. Nearly everyone else in the room — from UNLV President Neal Smatresk to the stadium board chairman Don Snyder — appeared to be poised to build some type of venue… Stadium board member Cedric Crear, a Board of Regents appointee, even went as far to say that a new stadium would “revolutionize our football program. This city wants a winning, big-time football team. I don’t want to be shy about saying that.”

Don’t be shy, Cedric. Say it loud and say it proud.

Even though some Strip casino companies such as MGM Resorts International said the previous stadium proposal of $900 million was too much, Snyder told the Review-Journal after the two-hour meeting that there is no price ceiling.

“Why not?” Snyder said when asked if the new stadium proposal could match the price of the old one.

… “The temptation is to cut out the bells and whistles. When you start cutting costs, there’s a tendency to look like all the other stadiums across the country. Then you get mediocrity and I don’t think mediocrity is acceptable in Las Vegas,” [another booster] said.

The last thing I’d associate with the Las Vegas public education system is mediocrity. The Las Vegas public education system is way, way, below mediocre.

The Lions’ big center Raiola
Went off to collect his payola.
His manner was blunt
He called everyone cunt
And signed his own name with Crayola.

… Dominic Raiola embodies college and professional football.

Of course Raiola never bothered graduating, leaving as soon as the professional leagues beckoned, but he’s still a legend at Nebraska because… uh… because not graduating… probably not even taking any real classes… is legendary!

With all the academic value he’d derived from his attendance at the University of Nebraska, Raiola hit the Detroit Lions, where his non-stop viciousness has earned him millions.

But UD can’t help thinking there’s something tragic about this seeming winner – a man who’s made it to the big leagues and the big money and big acclaim. Because although football is a spectacular outlet for murderous hostility against the world, games are brief, and vicious plays even briefer. There are practices, to be sure, but these too are fleeting. Football is no match for Raiola’s rage, and he’s always getting in trouble as a result.

Take his latest thing – Screaming at the University of Wisconsin marching band that they’re all fat fucks and cunts and faggots. No one knows why Raiola did this. The band did nothing to provoke him.

But we know. Raiola is exactly the sort of disturbed person universities like Nebraska make legends out of and professional football makes millionaires. For them, he’s a hero, and he’s a skill set. For everyone else, he’s a deeply troubled human being.

Once he gets his head sufficiently concussed, Raiola’s problem will become even more acute. Not that anyone gives a shit as long he gives Americans some really terrific hits to look at.

You wonder sometimes what it really comes down to, the sort of people and customs it creates. You wonder about the actual daily nitty gritty of university life at schools where nothing matters but sports.

I’m not talking about the big public stuff, the big five-part Sports Illustrated feature on T. Boone Pickens’ Oklahoma State University and its multidimensional pigswill. I mean the microculture – the way people talk to each other; the way they dress; the way they interact, one on one.

For that, you need two types of stories that routinely hit the news:

1. the sadistic coach; and

2. the sadistic hazer.

These two highly placed boosters carry the microculture in a way we can see, a way chronicled – since it maims people and generates trials and lawsuits – by the local and national press. Oklahoma State’s macroculture is the five-part series; OSU’s microculture is the secretary of the Interfraternity Council who pulled a loaded gun on pledges when they said they wouldn’t take a bullet for their brothers. He didn’t shoot them, but in his rage he shot out the window of the pick-up in which they were sitting. Because they obviously had no idea how serious the brotherhood of boosters was at OSU.

My post’s headline comes from a voice mail the women’s lacrosse coach at the University of Louisville sent to one of her players. The university’s system of spies had spotted a player wearing a shirt with the name of a competing university on it.

Darby, change your clothes, don’t bother coming to practice today. Do you know that I just got a phone call about you wearing a Michigan State shirt? You obviously have no idea how serious athletics is at the University of Louisville. I do not want to see your face today until after practice, but your butt better be up in my office with a Louisville shirt on your chest when practice ends.

Winston Smith would have no trouble recognizing this message. It is the functional equivalent of mandating burqas for university women.

The University of Louisville – read about its vile, all-enveloping sports culture here (scroll down) – is now enjoying national coverage of this coach and her alleged abuse of the students on her team.

Are you beginning to see how twisted these all-American settings are? Looked at from both macro and micro perspectives, the nation’s sports sluts get sicker by the day.

Dream on.

… you have to ask yourself: How does OSU top that?

Well, ask no more:

A 22-year-old Oklahoma State University student faces two felony charges for allegedly using a loaded gun during fraternity hazing.

Owen Hossack, a now former Alpha Gamma Rho member, faces two counts of pointing a firearm at an individual with the intent to harm, KFOR reports.

Hossack is accused of holding a loaded gun to a pledge’s head on Aug. 16 in an extended cab pickup truck and asking the student if he would take a bullet for his frat brothers. When the pledge said no, Hossack allegedly became angry and yelled before placing the gun up to another pledge and asking the same question, according to an affidavit. Shortly after the second pledge’s response, a flash of light was seen and the passenger window exploded.

No one was hit by the bullet.

OOOOOOOOOOklahoma!! Where the guns come sweepin’ down the plains!

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Here’s some real tasty details I bet even Aunt Eller couldna whipped up.

During an interview with OSU police Sept. 11, Hossack said he fired the weapon at the window, which he believed to be open, to frighten the pledges.

Hossack, who was secretary of the Interfraternity Council in 2013…

Number One: Nuthin wrong with firin a gun out a open window. Everybody on the street oughta be armed to defend themselves.

Number Two: They voted me fuckin secretary of the whole Interfraternity Council.

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UPDATE: Says here the shooter had passed anti-hazing training. Hm. Was the course explicit about not putting guns in people’s faces and threatening to shoot them? Sounds as though we need a little tweaking.

Listen to your AD, kiddies! He knows what’s best. What your school needs is a vast new expensive football stadium. Everything will be much better then.

Pay no attention to your university’s most recent football game! That tells you nothing. Nothing, do you hear me? Not a goddamn thing! Don’t quote from the article about it, UD! Don’t do it!

How does it feel to play a game in front of a half-empty stadium?

Heartbreaking.

CSU has won both of its home games at Hughes Stadium this season, but fans haven’t shown up to watch. The Rams are averaging 16,832 fans at home, ranking second-to-last in the Mountain West.

While area flooding had an affect [Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Make that effect] on Colorado State University distributing 14,146 tickets to the game against Cal Poly on Sept. 14 — the schools’ least attended home opener since 1968 — Saturday’s match-up with UTEP wasn’t much better.

It was 57 degrees, sunny and Ag Day — annually one of the most popular games of the season. But only 19,517 fans showed up to watch the Rams win their fifth consecutive home game. All five games played in front of less than 20,000 fans.

It fuckin breaks their fuckin hearts, man! Please give all you can to the new stadium fund!

Yet another article worrying about students not going to football and basketball games even as universities build more and bigger stadiums, etc.

UD has suggested armed intervention.

… and off.

Ole Miss: A refuge for bigots of all kinds.