[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 39^th 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.

Our hero!

(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.

… and nobody came?

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.

[USC] had to deal with the notorious “Varsity Blues” scandal this spring which heavily-involved [Lynn] Swann’s athletics department. Throw in basketball assistant Tony Bland getting caught up in the college basketball corruption trial and Swann’s seat was getting awfully hot.

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Carol Folt’s letter to candidates to replace USC Athletic Director Lynn Swan: Sing it.

This overload …

I can hear your cleats clicking on the sidewalk

Beating to the rhythm of my heart

Caught up to you

You’re the only one I want

I follow you home every night

Just to make sure that you get there alright

Baby it’s true

Can’t think of anything but you

And what I need baby

Is a little bit of sympathy

I’m down here on my knees

It’s a twenty-scandal night

And I can’t live without your help

Won’t you help me cure this overload

Won’t you help me cure this overload

Won’t…yeh!

Oh, Varsity Blues

And basketball is nothing but skooz

Doesn’t that say something

Scum has taken hold of me, yeah

Baby I need you

You’ve got to see me through

Can’t take another scandal-night without you

Honey it’s true I am so hung up on you, yeah

… that UD has a thousand news sites from which to choose a link for you. As usual, though, she’s drawn to Deadspin, whose commenters are a sight to behold.

Much of Deadspin‘s Tyler Skaggs thread involves writers comparing notes on the opioids Skaggs took; in particular, they try manfully (UD figures they’re almost all guys) to describe what it’s like to take oxys.

I had liquid oxy after throat surgery and I felt like a rainbow over a lake filled with titties.

… and nobody came.

Poor Rutgers.

Read this. How are you doing? Do you have your Petrino and Pitino under control? Have you been able to add Ecarma and keep the balls in the air, or are there too many slimy coaches at UL for you to get a grip on? Do you understand why some of the slime has been bought out while some is fired with cause, generating zillion dollar lawsuits against the university?

But, er, what about the lawsuit UL has filed against its last president, UD?

Gevalt! One thing – three things – at a time.

Fans used to kill each other; now they go right for the players.

Return with me now to those glory days at one of this country’s establishments of higher learning, when Rick got down on his knees and begged Sebastian Telfair to gain his education at the University of Louisville. Telfair said yes! I will pursue my scholar/athlete career at your fine school, playing basketball, living in a university-provided brothel, and giving a big ol’ fuck you up the ass to my fake classes, all on the taxpayers’ dime — and the people of Kentucky could not have been more grateful and excited. To make matters even more wonderful, sports-mad James Ramsey, who would go on to become the nation’s highest paid public university leader by the simple expedient of stealing everything at UL that wasn’t nailed down, had just been appointed UL president!

Truly the stars were aligned at this fine school which some have taken, cruelly, to calling the U of Smell.

And now… Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! as Humbert would say: Look at this tangle of thorns.

Rick had to be gotten rid of because of sex, recruiting, financial and anything else you’d like to add scandals. Reduced to coaching Greek basketball, where the chain smoking, flame throwing fascists in the stands turn every game into a terrifying slaughter (holy shitkos), he is currently suing UL for forty million dollars haha nahnah got you you’ll pay up the ass for being mean to me while I was building a winning team even though we had to vacate all our wins cuz they was SO SO SO dirty. I’ll get you back, UL.

President Ramsay was forced to resign in disgrace for the aforementioned larceny plus overseeing the most pornographic sports program in the United States. UL’s suing him to try to get a few tens of millions back (it’s all been plowed into multifarious mcmansions up and down the Florida coast), and the latest on that is that during his reign Ramsay apparently told the then-chair of the board of trustees that a fellow trustee had bankrolled the brothel for the boys!! I do declare (fanning my lace stays with my perfumed hankie), it takes a whole lot for UL to do anything that would generate italics, bolding, and double exclamation marks, but this school constantly exceeds expectations.

… Uh, where we were? Oh, the hotly recruited Telfair... He was last seen ranting like a madman in court, where he was sentenced to prison for carrying spectacular weaponry (‘three loaded handguns, a submachine gun, ammunition, extended magazines and a ballistic vest’) in his car.

Ringside fun for everyone, just a few miles from UD‘s house!

******

They’re dropping like flies! Get to a ring while they’re hot. I mean cold.

Some headlines say it all, huh? And scummy WSU (feast your eyes) is playing all the tricks in the book on this one, like, I don’t know, let’s find some random year – 2023? – and promise that by that year everything’s going to be fine so Shut. Up.

*********************

Really, I just read over my last few years of WSU posts, and it’s … I have no words. Why would anyone have so little self-respect as to be a student there?

**********************

UD thanks Charlie.

Two in two years? Hell, that’s nothin’! It’s Bama, America’s most celebrated university football team. What do you figure the dude makes a year to holler at the boys? 3, 4 hundred thousand? Main strength coach at Bama makes around $600,000…