Oh, but who cares. It’s Auburn.
Oh, but who cares. It’s Auburn.
The way-Catholic Cardinal Ritter Is standing knee-deep in the shitter. But what can they do? That fucking tattoo. At least you can't call the team quitters.
[A] cellphone video, shot by [a player], … allegedly showed [Coach John] Roanhaus walking in the locker room and taking two $20 bills from a black wallet before stuffing that cash into his sock, according to an arrest warrant.
For weeks, players had been mysteriously losing cash from their wallets… It had gotten so bad that players had been suspecting each other of the thefts and Roanhaus claimed to be a victim too, parents said.
Roanhaus had even made players run extra laps at practice as punishment for one of them allegedly stealing, the parents told KOB.
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Miyamura High School’s football team has won just twice in nine games this season — though the Patriots did win their first game after Roanhaus’ arrest.
This guy, and a lot of other commentators, are really upset about Bulgarian behavior against England the other night. People are screaming so hard about what looks to ol’ UD like routine racism and fascism in the stands that the head of Bulgarian soccer – who saw and heard nothing during the game and is offended by derogatory remarks from various quarters about Bulgarian fascists – has been forced to resign.
Everyone’s droning on about how it’s happening onaccounta resurgent right-wing nationalism in Europe – which assumes that if you can liberalize a government you can debestialize soccer fans. Me no think so. Me think there’s really nothing political about these people. Me think if you asked them basic political questions they wouldn’t understand what you were saying.
Read any intelligent person on ISIS. ISIS is about nihilism and love of beheadings and enslaving; it ain’t very Islamic and it certainly ain’t political. Hate to get all Jonathan Swift on you, but a lot of people – er, young men – are real animals. (Most soccer stadium audiences around the world are currently almost one hundred percent young and male. Everyone else is too afraid for their and their childrens’ lives.) Countries that let them attend public competitive events get what they deserve.
Yet, as Mike Meehall Wood points out, Bulgaria (and other countries) ain’t got much choice:
[D]omestic games are played out to low crowds, where the only people who show up are those who really, really care, which is to say, the hooligans. The idea that the Bulgarian authorities can root out the boneheads is laughable: the stadiums would be empty afterward, so congratulations on not only becoming the guy who bankrupted the club, but also the one who incurred the wrath of the most aggressive and dangerous thugs in town in the process.
The hooligans know this, and thus act with near impunity.
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But UD! You’re talking about closing down soccer altogether!
Look. Countries already have shitlists of people they won’t allow into the games. Make the shitlists long enough and non-barbarians might start buying tickets. And anyway what are you talking about? Don’t you know that increasing numbers of games are played in closed-to-the-public stadiums because audiences are simply becoming unacceptably dangerous? I ain’t the one shutting down the show – that’s the soccer federation.
With the imminent incarceration of his latest personal attorney, the president is, according to three sources, about to name Washington State University coach, and Pepperdine-educated attorney, Mike Leach, to replace Rudy Giuliani. A longtime supporter, Leach has a framed and signed photo of Trump on the wall of his WSU office, shares the president’s love of conspiracy theories, obscenity, and violence, and is said to be “tired” of coaching fat stupid lazy worthless university students for a mere four or five million a year.
For background on Leach, go here.
He leaves, he tells us, on a high note; and who could disagree? From his refusal to step down from lucrative do-nothing corporate board seats even though they represented a conflict of interest; to his inept oversight, during his short tenure, of the most prolific, grotesque and high-profile athletic scandals American higher ed has ever seen; to his spending unprecedented amounts of school money on a football team so outrageously horrible that sports writers compete to describe it (“worst team in big ten history,” “so bad the big ten should kick them out,” “worst football imaginable,” “so bad it’s almost impossible“), Barchi has, allow UD to say, managed to embody to perfection the very essence of the postmodern American university president: Brainless, arrogant, greedy, institution-destroying, and deeply, deeply embarrassing for everyone involved. In other words: The bidding for Barchi to be president of your school has just begun!
… the hero whose hero page will never be taken down because he’s SUCH a hero, seems to have assaulted his way out of a professional career. I guess ASU liked being assaulted when Vontaze was a (cough) student there. It certainly continues to celebrate and boast about its close association with a notoriously violent asshole. Turns out, however, that the NFL does have some limits when it comes to truly crazy shits in the league.
Not that it doesn’t love them! It does love them, and it gives them lots of money and makes them team captains (Vontaze was a team captain!). Fans adore them; they’re paying for the big hits. But things are getting so wussy out there, with concussion bs and all, and the teams are under incredible pressure to suspend (Vontaze is ALWAYS being suspended) and even dismiss people like Vontaze.
Even Argentina’s beginning to worry about it, but American football pays through the nose to do the on-field tango with Richie Incognito, Antonio Brown, and Vontaze Burfict. Audiences love their moves; at a time when NASCAR carnage is at an all-time low, there’s nothing like football to keep the crushed-skull statistics steady. Crowds went wild, most recently, for beaten-comatose Mason Rudolph, dragged upright off the field because no one could manage to scare up a stretcher (each NFL team is only worth around three billion dollars so there are budgetary issues).
Vontaze has been suspended and Brown dropped. Looks as though it’ll take a few more Incognito attacks for the Raiders to do something about Richie. But even if the team has to give up Richie, Americans also love watching the legal and recruiting moves that ensue after the insane giants that bestride our game fields are removed from play. How will their appeal or lawsuit go? Which lucky team will now welcome the big bad head case?
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Above all, American football needs to do something about Juju Smith-Schuster and players like him.
[Ruldolph’s agony] was so upsetting that teammate JuJu Smith-Schuster was in tears on the field.
We don’t need crybabies out there making the audience think there’s something wrong with kicking the shit out of people’s brains.
[Vontaze] Burfict’s troubling pattern of behavior stretches back to high school. He was the top high-school recruit at his position in the country. Recruiting site 247 Sports listed Burfict as the 11th best prospect in the country and one of the 250 best prospects in the history of high school football; he still ranks as the 39th best player to ever come out of the talent-rich state of California. But Burfict received few elite-level college scholarship offers, and he ended up at Arizona State, a third-rate program. The best of the best had heard all about Burfict’s reputation: he had serious anger issues, the story went. One by one they chose to pass.
(Background here.) And he does a great job of evoking the game that dominates American university life.
You’re in the heat of battle. Your mindset is kill or be killed. Because the offensive linemen are still coming at you. You’re in war. You’re supposed to be able to be violent sometimes and other times you’re supposed to just be able to take your foot off the gas like that. That is hard, my friend.
I feel for this guy. Do I think he should be fined? Yes. Do I think he should be kicked outta the league? No. I think it is absolutely dead wrong. This guy has handled himself like a pro. And yes, he is a violent mother f’er and I love the way he plays the game of football.
Can’t think of a more appropriate setting for this activity than a university.
Here’s their hero’s page, their big man on campus, the pride of ASU. How do you get a hero’s page at ASU?
Burfict was … benched during his time with Arizona State after several penalties for illegal hits. One of those hits essentially cost the team a game against Stanford in 2010 after an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty gave them a first down inside the 10-yard line. Stanford then scored what would be the game winning touchdown.
They’ve kept the page up through his recent attempt to decapitate another player, and through all fourteen of his suspensions from NFL play. An icon of the American university! He kicks the shit out of other people’s brains; he’s just about the dirtiest player ever, a violent wingnut; but they worshipped him at ASU and he’ll be back in the professional game (How do you get to be team captain in professional football? Be Vontaze Burfict!) after this latest suspension cuz man can he hit. They want him to keep at it until he succeeds in decapitating someone. Then, with reluctance, they’ll hand him over to the American justice system.
Helluva game, football, and, as always, a terrific look for our universities.
[Vontaze] Burfict is simply out of control. When he was at Arizona State, he racked up 22 personal fouls in 37 games, and saw his draft stock slide in part because of his volatility.
ASU’s hero! Read his hero page!
… United States of America.
The hotly recruited pride of the University of Wisconsin. Go, Reggie!
Hey but Reggie: “Nearly” doesn’t count. Let’s see some real action next time.
There aren’t that many of these, and most of them are religious institutions. Yeshiva University has long been the standout, ruling over its students (especially its women) with an iron morality fist (would you expect any less from a school whose behavioral models have included Bernard Madoff, Ezra Merkin, Ira Rennert, and Zygi Wilf?). In 2011, when a woman student published a sex survey, she immediately lost her housing scholarship. Around the same time, another woman student published a short story with mild sexual content in a campus publication. The paper was shut down. AND sex filters were imposed on all male students’ computers. Not females’ of course! Because females don’t read… or, uh… write about sex.
And there’s the curiously named Liberty University, whose duce has generated lots of news copy lately. UD thinks The Onion captures the situation there best.
The other source of tinpottery is the southern jock school whose Dear Leader knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake! U Alabam’s Shahanshah Nick Saban has been in a snit because his subjects don’t go to the blowout football games (they’re always like 70 – 0) he puts on for their entertainment, or if they go they get bored and leave early… and then you know, out in tvland, viewers all over the country see them empty seats and Saban’s embarrassed etc. So the school now tracks its students’ movements:
Alabama is taking an extraordinary, Orwellian step: using location-tracking technology from students’ phones to see who skips out and who stays.
You better not be in the fucking library when you’ve been told to sit on a bleacher in 100 degree heat for hours of grinding nothingness!
But just as in other Orwellian regimes the population rebels, so in ‘Bama, the frat boys have been identified as the avant-garde of the resistance:
[It will] not be long before pledges are conscripted to hold caches of phones until the fourth quarter so their fraternity brothers [can] leave early.
Plenty of precedent for this, mes petites. Remember clickers?
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UD thanks Dave.