Why should a Pickens who is healthy and strong,
Blubber like a baby if his team goes astray?
A-weepin’ and a-wailin’ how they done him wrong,
That’s one thing you’ll never hear me say!
Never gonna think that the men who squeal are the only men among men.
I’ll snap my fingers to show I don’t care;
I’ll buy me some brand new boots to wear;
I’ll scrub my neck and I’ll brush my hair,
And start all over again.
Many a new face will please my eye,
Many a new love will find me;
Never’ve I once looked back to sigh over the bromance behind me;
Many a new day will dawn before I do!
Many a light lad may kiss and fly,
A kiss gone by is bygone.
Never’ve I asked an August sky, “Where has last July gone?”
Never’ve I wandered through the rye, wondering where has some guy gone;
Many a new day will dawn before I do!
Rubus Oklahomus speaks. It’s all brands, isn’t it? A sports magazine, a university… Sports Illustrated’s brand is about big tits and OSU’s brand is about big tits — we’re the same! SI has no place coming after Oklahoma State University! That’s hypocrisy.
Just like the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who in his heyday would pick which Moonies would marry which Moonies!
Things are getting weirder and weirder at Oklahoma State University – not just pimping coaches, but matching coaches.
OSU does their schoolwork for them, escorts them to class, lets them have their drugs, and takes care of their sex life. Football players might not have gotten any money (oh wait a minute; they did get money) but when it comes to being radically, totally, amazingly infantilized UD doesn’t think you can do better than being admitted to Oklahoma State University. Did Les Miles change their diapers for them too?
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Oh, and while the OSU admissions office is scrutinizing the academic qualifications of recruits, is it also reviewing the tits of female applicants… I mean, hostesses?
Hostesses: If you want to be admitted to OSU, you know what to do.
Next up, on the Sports Illustrated hit parade:
Around 2007, Joel Tudman, an [OSU] assistant strength-and-conditioning coach who is also the team’s chaplain and carries the title of Life Issue/Social Development Counselor for the football program — a mentoring position that has become more common within athletic departments — was put in charge of the drug counseling program for football. Tudman is also founder of Net Church, which he started in 2006. The congregation has grown quickly, and Sunday-night services were moved from Bennett Chapel to a student union auditorium, where Tudman’s sermons are delivered to an audience that often includes 40 or more football players.
Tudman, however, has no formal training in drug counseling. While Tudman’s bio on the athletic department website indicated that he had received a “double masters in health and counseling” from Texas A&M-Commerce, he in fact has only a single master’s degree, in Health, Kinesiology and Sports Studies. (Tudman’s bio on the Net Church website also erroneously stated that he had master’s degrees in Health Promotions and Counseling. After Tudman was interviewed by SI the bio was corrected.) His Oklahoma State bio said that he was twice honored by the Lone Star Conference as a running back and was a “3 time All-American sprinter.” In fact, that conference recognized him once (honorable mention in 2003) and he was an All-America sprinter only in 2004. (After SI began investigating Tudman’s background, the school pulled his bio from its website.)
Tudman says because he took courses in health and counseling while at Texas A&M-Commerce he “thought it was a double masters.” He produced a transcript that showed he completed five counseling courses, but none of them dealt with substance abuse and he never enrolled in the two courses Texas A&M-Commerce offered in that area. Tudman concedes that his athletic accomplishments were also embellished. “That’s [a mistake] on my part,” he says. “I take full responsibility.”
… (Tudman remains unlicensed to treat drug users.)
When asked about Tudman’s qualifications and background, [OSU] athletic director Holder said, “I didn’t look at Joel’s résumé” …
What Holder looked at was whether Tudman was a sufficiently pathetic blowhard to be controlled by Holder. Answer: Yes.
Classy. The Oklahoma State University librarian who according to tons of former football players wrote all of their papers for them has counterattacked. They’re all demented, see. One too many blows to the helmet.
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OSU pushed “players into easier majors, notably sociology.”
It’ll be interesting to hear what professors in the OSU sociology department – handmaiden of the football flunkies – have to say in their defense.
… “You don’t have to do anything. If you go to class, they’ll give you a C because they care about Oklahoma State football.”
Former wide receiver Artrell Woods told the magazine he didn’t write “a single paper” while at OSU, but rather had completed work dictated to him by a tutor.
Said former defensive tackle Brad Girtman, “Are you kidding me? I didn’t go there to go to school. I went there to play football.”
One of the former players named among those who received improper academic assistance is all-Big 12 wide receiver Dez Bryant, currently with the Dallas Cowboys. Sports Illustrated quotes a former assistant coach, who said of Bryant, “He just wasn’t supposed to be there. There’s no way he could do the college work. Once he got there, he was connected with the people that would help him.”
Maybe they’ll say the same thing the librarian did. The many players making these accusations are hopelessly gaga after years of tackles.
But it would be more seemly for people at this prostituted school to be honest about it. There’s a Jacobean comedy called The Honest Whore, and it would be truly wonderful, a wonderful thing for the American university, if the current madam of OSU – the university’s president, I assume – would honestly admit that OSU has been a sports bordello. Professors and advisors there should emulate Sonia, the redeemed prostitute of Crime and Punishment, and pray for divine release.
… the nation’s number one party school last year (this year it’s number two), the school that has over the decades hired more drunks and debauchees as coaches and athletics directors than any other, the school… oh, read UD’s many posts about WVU if you have a taste for the sordid – put West Virginia University in my search engine… Anyway, it should come as no surprise that the coach at the center of the Oklahoma State allegations has moved on to… West Virginia University! Joe DeForest will be soberly scrutinized by head coach Dana Holgorsen, himself a man of unimpeachable self-control.
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary, as Stephen Foster put it. The guy in this post’s title wants to know why he can’t just love his Vikings and not have to think about being one of millions of Minnesota taxpayers who’ve given hundreds of millions of dollars to the team’s racketeering owner, Zygi Wilf.
Zygi is one of Yeshiva University’s most honored trustees. He is part of the Yeshiva University tradition of having its trustees called “evil” by judges. First Bernard Madoff and now Zygi have inspired some of America’s finest jurists to rise to this rhetorical occasion…
(Update: Yeshiva’s main campus is named after the Wilf family. Yikes.)
But back to our headline. Like it or not, your sports news – university sports, professional sports – will always be saturated with – imbricated with (to use an English major word) – criminal news. This being the case, UD proposes that MFA programs at sports factories offer not just instruction in Minimalism, but also instruction in Criminalism, a prose style in which you entertainingly interweave afternoons at the arena with evenings in jail.
There is a good deal to study here. UD has been a student of criminalist prose for years and has accumulated a syllabus-full of methods, approaches, points of view. She’s particularly intrigued by the style she calls Coacha Inconsolata, a mournful account of the sufferings of coaches who through no fault of their own recruited drunks and flunkies to the team and of course to the school. Here’s a very recent example. The trick is to focus not on the totally foreseeable stupidity and criminality of the recruit, but rather on the shocked and hurt coach.
Here are some excerpts, with commentary from Scathing Online Schoolmarm.
U Conn [basketball] center Tyler Olander has put Kevin Ollie in a difficult position … [This is the beginning of the first sentence of the article. Start right off not with the player, but with the coach. It’s unseemly to dwell on jailed players — too many of them, doesn’t look good, challenges alumni to keep loving the team — so dwell rather on the sacrificial agonies of the coaches.] Legendary coach Jim Calhoun had already left Ollie with a underwhelming and thinning front line. Now, calling that front line “thinning” is like a bald man using the comb over. It’s approaching nonexistent. [Next move: Recall the impossibly big shoes into which the coach must step. Legendary Jim! You only have to watch this famous clip to understand how beloved, how amazing, Calhoun was… Poor Ollie! Left only with thinning hair.] Olander was UConn’s only big man left on the roster with any sort of real experience. The Huskies had already lost veteran Enosch Wolf, who had his scholarship taken away for his own legal issues… [If you’re not blubbering by this point, you’ve got a heart of stone. What is this good and great man, this Job of the jocks, supposed to do?]
Just continue like that if you want to write Coacha Inconsolata criminalism: The writer here goes on to talk about the coach’s “major headache,” the way he’s “scrambling” to do a good job, and how “This is not what he had to have in mind when he laid out his plan” for greatness. Do not touch on the question of how it is that anyone entering a major university sports coaching position lays out non-criminogenic plans for greatness. Do not ask how anyone could possibly be that stupid. Just go with the Job thing.
Between 2003 and 2008, Rutgers’ overall athletic budget increased at double the rate of the university budget. This was made possible in part by the university, which, through student fees and its general fund, heavily subsidized the athletic department, sometimes to the tune of 40 percent of its budget. Worse, some of the athletic department’s budget wasn’t even accounted for, since it was kept hidden in off-the-books spending deals and secret contracts that were discovered by the Star-Ledger in 2008.
The New York magazine article from which I’ve quoted ends with this way-ringing endorsement:
Rutgers’ [ongoing] pursuit of athletic glory won’t be any more ignominious than anyone else’s.
A commenter adds:
Omitted by the author is the exceedingly discouraging fact that Rutgers Athletics amassed a deficit of $28 million last year, the second largest deficit in all of college athletics. All at time when state support to the academic enterprises of this once highly regarded public institution have been reduced significantly.
And a major portion of the athletics budget comes from a mandatory “student activity fee” supposedly instituted to fund things like student organizations, concerts, etc. Instead most of the fee is directed towards 84 athletes, 15 highly paid coaches, and massive athletics facilities.
This once highly regarded etc. says it all.
Many Oklahoma State University fans are shocked by allegations that OSU football players were paid, their grades were changed and that recruits received sexual favors.
According to the university, a series of articles in Sports Illustrated will allege that misconduct in the OSU football program occurred between 2001 and 2007.
OSU Vice President of Athletics Mike Holder said, ” We are shocked by the allegations raised about our football program…”
