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.

Maybe they’re waiting for a less corrupt, violent, and generally disgusting program with which to affiliate themselves. UD finds it strange that local booster-journalists think everyone will come out to celebrate morally despicable teams. Because, you know, often they won’t.

[Time] to grab hold of the third rail of Arkansas politics — athletic spending at the [University of Arkansas]. It’s a good time to do it. When the Hog football team is winning, no one dare utter a word about the sloppy, secretive and sometimes shady practices in the athletic kingdom… A big chunk of its money is laundered through the secretive Razorback Foundation… The money wouldn’t exist but for the university and its athletic department. But it is often spent in ways out of reach of public inspection. And sometimes, the numbers don’t match up.

By the way: The Razorback Foundation rarely responds at all to questions about its business…

American university football: The most perverted product of Western culture since The Story of O.

As college football stadiums around America get emptier by the minute, we need writers like Dave Bratcher to remind us why we so love those Saturdays in the fall.

As we made our way into the stadium, a few things struck me. These things are applicable to life and need to be mentioned. Across the United States, Saturdays in the fall remind us of what true equality looks like, teach us why keeping score is important, and loyalty is not to be taken lightly.

When fans show up to cheer on their respective teams, discussions about race, religion, wealth, or family lineage do not factor into the discussion. The things which sometimes divide us, even on Sunday morning, are completely irrelevant on Saturday. Nobody cares what color, what church, how much money, or who their parents are. The identifying factors and circumstances of our lives are completely forgotten about when the teams take the field. This is to be praised.

Guess ol’ Dave missed the $100,000 per box luxury seating! Look up, Dave! See the rich people up there, divided behind glass enclosures from the yahoos? Only the rich people in the stadium get to drink alcohol, Dave! These things are applicable to life and need to be mentioned.

What you gonna do when she is gone?

If you’re the University of Alabama, famed for your rabid fans and regally compensated coach, you’re going to “review photos and video of the [student] section during games to determine which organizations are leaving early and violators could have block seating privileges taken away.”

So, uh, let’s step back and review.

Although we are assured that fan rabidity is positively mythic at Alabama (you can’t walk for all the statues of coaches all over campus; watch for Penn State’s toppled Paterno statue to be re-erected with full honors at UA), everybody walks out once it’s clear the team has won the game. In the most recent case, victory was obvious well before half-time, see, and the stands emptied…

But get a load of those stands! Part of the wild carefree business of being a Bama fan is constant electronic surveillance. Whee! And just so you know, kiddo — Your school is watching your every move, and if you leave your fucking seat your name is entered on UA’s Enemies of the Tide list and you will be punished. Okay? ‘Kay?

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UD has written a good deal – and she will write more as the problem intensifies – about what she calls fantasms: the vanishing fans of university football. She has suggested some remedies for the situation short of UA’s (and other schools’) petty and doomed-to-fail procedures. (What do all the cameras pick up when they’re filming – for a national audience – students who don’t want to be there? Students who are drunk and displeased? Expect an uptick in mooning.)

Short of the placement in the stands of animatronic fans (not all universities will want to go this route), UD sees no alternative to the use of drones. The Phantom (Fantom?) Drone is available at Amazon for under five hundred dollars and can, with, say, five or so others, continually buzz the student section in such a way as to make use of any mounted weaponry unnecessary.

… can be found here, at Inside Higher Ed.

Body of article:

[One LSU student and] many of her friends skipped the game to study for midterms that started Monday.

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Well, now at least we know what the problem is.

Solution: Stop giving midterms.

And this was Florida-LSU! This is a huge rivalry game that holds major SEC implications each season.

I guess HDTV and air conditioning wins out but that just makes me sad.

Words of wisdom from a colleague of UD‘s.