People are scandalized by the obscene post-game meltdown of Indiana University’s softball coach; but UD is much more scandalized by her very public dark-night-of-the-diamond moment, in which her rock-hard faith (shared with virtually all university coaches) that God takes a personal interest in the games she coaches suddenly collapses into skepticism.

God. Doesn’t. Care??????

Violent spectacle encourages manliness, and manliness ensures a nation’s capacity to defend itself and its values in organized warfare. Max Boot, defending football in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (against those who want to shut it down or make it less violent so that players avoid brain injury), clarifies the nationally sacrificial function of the players:

[T]hough football can be a violent sport, those who watch it are, on the whole, peaceable and tolerant — especially as compared with foreign fans of soccer (“football” to the rest of the world), who make up for the relative lack of violence on the field with melees in the stands.

It’s an either/or: You either sublimate man’s intrinsic violent anarchism by allowing him regular staged access to it; or you end up with compensatory chaos. (A milder version of this argument, by Walter Russell Mead, defends university football’s firing up of male atavism as crucial to the continued survival of universities.)

It’s a delicate balance; you want a culture that makes men capable of violence; you want that capacity stoked by violent sport; but you want always to be able to control the violence. That’s why Boot stresses the comaraderie, teamwork, and discipline, at the core of football, even as he anxiously echoes Teddy Roosevelt’s worry that if you outlaw football you’ll turn out “mollycoddles instead of vigorous men.”

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What sort of person would be a mollycoddle?

Well, let’s say some guy impugns your honor. If you’re a mollycoddle, you say I’m gonna tell Mom! You say I’m gonna tell my lawyer! If you’re a vigorous man, you challenge the guy to a duel. Or if you want to be civilized and sublimate that violence, you challenge him to go public with his impugning, to go one-on-one with you in a public forum, where he can repeat his charges and you can defend yourself.

But all that football watching hasn’t made Boot himself particularly vigorous. Just as he uses a research assistant to do the grunt work on his columns, he plans to use a lawyer to do his fighting against a fellow writer who claims Boot plagiarized him:

“I will defend my hard-earned reputation with legal action if necessary if you decide to print these scurrilous and unsubstantiated allegations.”

Take that, you naughty, naughty boy!

A university football team four of whose members are alleged to have raped an unconscious student, videotaped the rape, and sent the videotape to friends. They will go on trial soon, as will yet other players, named as accessories.

What to do?

The coach has already announced – before the trial, before we all get to see the film and read the text messages, before everything – that his non-raping players have “dealt with this, and we’re trying to heal and move forward.”

It’s all over, see, and now it’s just about the wounded – his players – somehow finding healing and turning the page. So that’s what to do.

But there are already indications that the poor lads are trying to heal approach might not work.

Take this open letter to Vanderbilt University, written by a recent graduate who, post-rape allegations, is having “a hard time feeling good about my allegiance” to the university.

If a Vanderbilt football player dropped out after his freshman year to go free Tibet, I’d be proud. When they’re kicked out for revolting crimes, I’m ashamed. It’s that simple.

This alumnus

proposed to the administration of the Women’s Center that they partner with athletics for some sort of… anything. Fundraising. Volunteer drive. A patch on players’ uniforms. Whatever, as long as it shows real public support for survivors of sex crimes, or works to prevent future incidents. The point was to give fans who are depressed by recent news something to be proud of, morally. The point was to show that Vanderbilt football stands with survivors of sexual violence.

Response from the Vanderbilt administration? Fuck off.

This annoyed the letter writer. That’s why he wrote the letter.

In making the decision to hold its breath until this thing blows over, the administration decides to be among those (many) institutions that contribute to a culture of quiet enablement.

Vanderbilt begins to look like Yeshiva University.

Tressel will be the first of many. Given current circumstances, nothing is more logical than handing the presidency of many of our universities to football coaches.

In one of the many bracing annual rituals surrounding university football – a newspaper article recounting the most recent and most heinous player arrests around the country – Nick Saban offers this intriguing analogy: The big-time university football coach is like a professor who can do everything right but still experience cheaters in her classroom.

Let’s examine the analogy.

In the same article, reporters ask rape-ridden Vanderbilt’s coach if he is “recruiting more players of questionable character in an effort to win.” The guy draws himself up and puffs out his chest and gets way huffy about the question… They all do this when the question gets posed… All of the coaches who recruit criminals to win games employ the patented area woman offended for fourth time in one day method in response to this oft-posed question. Gentlemen, how dare you! The gall!

It’s the same thing for UD, a professor. UD searches high schools all over America in pursuit of evil geniuses, Leopolds and Loebs and Kaczynskis and infant hedge fund managers … all the most brilliant and original sociopaths, so that her school can win the annual Shanghai List Championship. Has she, in her zeal, recruited a few bad apples? No, because you can never know how a person is going to be in advance… And everyone deserves a chance… And you talked to their mothers and their mothers insisted they’d behave… How dare you insist that UD‘s desire to win a contest overrode any sense of morality?

… back in the ‘forties. It put you right in the heart of historical events. UD wants to put you – rhetorically – in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, site of the Nick Saban Football Academy, where the reaction to the university giving a big scholarship to a student who just before his sophomore year drives drunk all over Tuscaloosa is not to worry about the well-being of your town but immediately to go to whether his absence from the team (assuming Saban suspends him even for one game) will doom your championship prospects. Headline in local paper:

NOW YOU CAN PANIC: GENO SMITH ARRESTED FOR DUI

Smith is certain to miss playing time early in the season. His absence may not be particularly noticeable in the Virginia Tech season opener, despite the fact that Smith is an excellent tackler and excels in run support. However, that September 14 game against the manically-airborne Aggies in Kyle Field will get a whole lot tougher if Smith misses any appreciable playing time.

No, not even a decent interval during which we ask ourselves whether a scholarship to someone who almost certainly won’t graduate and who drives drunk is altogether seemly…

Tuscaloosa, Alabama. You Are There.

Yes, becoming a vegetable is a reasonable price to pay for your family’s well-being; I’m sure we all agree with that.

Since our professional and university football players take the field knowing they could be concussed into oblivion, it seems perfectly reasonable to send them out there. I’m sure all the juries will agree.

Three more people — including a star wide receiver on Vanderbilt University’s football team — were indicted Friday in connection with the ongoing investigation into the rape of a 21-year-old unconscious woman at a campus dorm this summer.

Commodores wide receiver Chris Boyd, 21, is charged with one felony count of being an accessory after the fact. [He is accused of] taking part in an attempted coverup of the sexual assault through advice to certain defendants indicted last week as part of the ongoing investigation.

Also charged were Miles Joseph Finley, 19, of Bermuda Dunes, Calif., and Joseph Dominick Quinzio, 20, of Palm Desert, Calif., both accused of tampering with evidence.

They were high school teammates and friends of Brandon Vandenburg, one of the four former Vanderbilt players charged with multiple counts of rape.

Background here.

Graham Spanier, Holden Thorp, Gordon Gee, Donna Shalala, David Boren – As Chief Inspiration Officers of football factories, these leaders have taken whatever dignity the office of university president once had and run all the way downfield with it.

Rick Perry’s football factory – Texas A&M – has got itself a way-depraved chancellor who’s been out there boohooing over little Johnny Manziel and his drunken greedy ways. So the boy’s a lout — so what? Physical aggression, financial self-serving, and booze up the wazoo happen to be the values we cherish at this school, and Manziel’s three for three.

… but when four heavily recruited football players show up for their first semester and almost immediately team up to rape an unconscious student and photograph themselves doing it (these are the charges), your school has just caught and begun to run with the Penn State pass, and there’s nothing your pleading can do about it.

It’ll be a long carry, in part because Vanderbilt is one of the few remaining morally and academically respectable big-football schools in America, so there’s novelty here. Schadenfreude, too. People from all the dirtbag schools will certainly enjoy smearing shit on clean-as-a-whistle Vandy. And as the trial gets going (if there’s a trial) we’ll get all the Steubenvillesque details.

Yes, Vandy’s new to this, so maybe it thinks dismissing these people from the team and protesting the school’s innocence in the matter (Recruit predators? Us?) will do the trick. Learning curve time.

Make way for the lawsuits.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for an American university with a significant football program to stop bashing its students’ brains in.

Or, as the headline in today’s Denver Post has it:

CU’s Tale of Riches to Rags

Another headline might have been

… with a Frontline investigative report (League of Denial) due in October, just keep in mind that this brain injuring violence is happening at universities, where that organ is supposedly being nurtured.

Think about it. We recruit young men to our universities in order for them to get their brains bashed in.

Only in America.

Mark Fainaru-Wada, an investigative journalist… said that it was difficult for viewers who watch the game on television at home to really appreciate how violent professional football actually is, something that came as a shock to him when he covered his first San Francisco 49ers game.

“I remember being down there for the first time and being both utterly shocked and terrified at what I was seeing,” he said. Watching the game on “TV or even being in person [in the stands] does not do justice to how violent, how fast, how loud the sport is… When you’re down on the field, even on the sidelines, it’s remarkable and it’s terrifying.”

I know, I know. What a sissy.

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PS: Note the song that accompanies the program’s trailer:

Hear the screams from everywhere
I’m addicted to the thrill
It’s a dangerous love affair…

An ESPN commentator fails to understand the ethical nuances of being a Texan. (Audio.)

… whoa-woo-woo-way-whacked-out Western Kentucky University go totally trailer trash via its decision in ’06 to join Division I-A football. One of their professors, Robert Dietel, begged them at the time to reconsider, and got shat on thusly by the board of trustees:

Western Kentucky University’s board ran roughshod over faculty regent Robert Dietel last week, as it rushed to embrace Division I-A football…. WKU’s board told Dietel to shut up. Contempt dripped from [one board member]: ‘People on this board dedicate their time for free. They have better things to do than let some university professor just keep talking.’

In 2009, WKU was the only winless team in the country. Moving briskly to 2011, things looked just as bleak. 2012 was all about hiring major gross-out Bobby Petrino as coach, a move hailed as “slime time” by the nation’s sports journalists.

Can you top that???

Yes. For 2013, I give you…

FIVE TOPPERS HAVE BEEN ARRESTED THIS OFFSEASON

And that’s just offseason! Damn season hasn’t even started yet!

And who’s the good ol’ boy gets to talk to the press ’bout how serious he takes moral and legal hoohaw?

Yeah! Billy Bob Bobby!

Div I-A.  SCORE!

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UPDATE: Bobby Petrino makes a small appearance in this helpful pre-season rundown of notable plays on SEC teams. UD knows we can expect more of the same this year!