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!

Season of fists and ripe concussedness!

— To alter Keats slightly as UD shares with you her excitement at the prospect of the return of university football… Those who scoff at the notion of student-athletes forget the contribution players make to the philosophy and physiology of violence. If our schools somewhat neglect their players’ brains while they live, this is amply recompensed by the postmortem attention lavished on their cerebral tissue. And the remarkable human wastage on-field prompts high-level discourse on violence. Dan Le Batard writes:

The gladiators who choose this particular career path are often shaped by broken backgrounds that help them arrive at football … with some sharpened and rewarded character traits that might not serve them as much away from the game. It is not a coincidence that the majority of football arrests occur during the offseason, when players have too much free energy and free time away from the [game’s] more disciplined violence …

This is not to suggest all angry, violent men would be good football players; it is to suggest you’ll find a lot of angry, violent ones in some of your best huddles. And football does a hell of a job of not only finding men who live on the edge of acceptable behavior but also feeding and needing them.

Or, as the words emblazoned on a cafeteria wall at the University of Oregon’s just-completed Ministry of War have it: EAT YOUR ENEMIES. Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, the University of Oregon boasts a special room where it fattens its young; but UO goes those stories one better by plastering the room with propaganda. Kill! Kill! Kill!

Le Batard points out the traditional conundrum of university football: You can’t win without significant numbers of unstable violent people on your team; but tip over into too many violent people and you’re going to be in legal trouble.

The last time Colorado was championship good at football, Sports Illustrated reported that one-third of the roster had been arrested. Ohio State went more than four decades without a national championship … until Maurice Clarett. Nebraska went without a national championship for almost a quarter of a century … until Lawrence Phillips. You can find links between arrests and compromised standards and winning all over college football, from those notorious University of Miami champions to the University of Florida ones who had 31 arrests in the brief time Meyer was there.

You can point to outliers, but it is much harder to find big winners without criminal complications than with them. Heck, in 122 years of football, Vanderbilt has been to only four bowl games but two of them have been the past two seasons … as their coach now uses a helicopter to find recruits in the Southeastern Conference . . . and last month had to kick four players off the team for alleged sex crimes.

You begin to understand the symbolic importance of spindly idiots in spectacles and bow ties at the level of the presidency. And cutesy quoters of scripture at the level of coach.

Le Batard concludes that we want “the gladiators [to] be more civil.” But how can that be? We want to watch them eat their enemies. We want them and their enemies to grow bigger and bigger and bigger so that the spectacle of the meal will be bigger and bigger and bigger.

Because something is happening
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones ?

This blog, written in the voice of Emory University’s president, shows you what a well-written satirical blog can do. UD selects the excerpt in her headline because over the years she’s heard variants of this statement from a host of overpaid university heads. I didn’t ask for this salary; the trustees set my salary; they insist on it…

These are people who spend their days and nights telling students to be independent thinkers, to become morally autonomous… Yet when it comes to the symbolically and practically important matter of their own compensation they’re suddenly sucklings. These tend to be same people who say ol’ T. Boone and Phil Knight insist that most of their billions go toward football, dammit, and there’s nothing we can do.

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UD thanks Carl.

A fascinating letter exchange is going on in the pages of the Roanoke Times about America’s Number Four party school.

It started innocently enough, with a caution to Virginia Tech fans as football season starts up.

West Virginia University has done nothing to curb the violent behavior of their fans and Virginia Tech has been warned of the violence.

Now UD has proposed that West Virginia University – smack dab in the heart of pillbilly territory – stop serving alcohol in the stadium and start unloading Lortabs. But so far no one in Morgantown is listening, so they’ve still got this violence problem.

Anyway, here’s the cascade of refutations. VT’s just as bad. VT fans wear VT gear to WVU games so they’re asking for it. It happens, it’s part of the game I think it makes the game fun (quoting this post’s headline).

It continues, more or less along the same lines, here. Violence, violence, everywhere.

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The War Room. Eat Your Enemies. I mean – hyuk! – don’t take no genius to know why this shit’s happening.

Congratulations, you have an opportunity to become an educated man and play great college football. A University of Virginia degree is one of the most prestigious in America. As the head football coach at this University, I want to formerly extend a scholarship offer to you.

Over the last decade, local debt in the Lone Star State has more than doubled, growing at twice the rate of inflation plus population growth. At the moment, Texas localities owe $63 billion for education funding — 155 percent more than they did a decade ago, though student enrollment and inflation during that period grew less than one-third as quickly. The borrowing has also paid for a host of expensive new athletic facilities, such as a $60 million high school football stadium, complete with video scoreboard, in the Dallas suburb of Allen.

We all knew the saying We want to build a university our football team can be proud of would be literalized someday. But who knew Argentina would get there first?

Nike University’s new facility: The reviews are in!

… Grambling State University?

“The athletics department runs at a $1 million-plus deficit on an annual basis. In the past we’ve taken those funds from the academic side and directed it toward athletics. This year (2012-13), we had to take it from auxiliary services — that’s student dining, the bookstore and dorms. We can’t do that again.”