… got filmed – it’s alleged – by the director of media for that university’s athletic department – coming out of showers after games.

[He] made the recordings by positioning the camera at waist level and placing a piece of tape over the red light to conceal that it was recording. [Authorities] “quickly discounted” the possibility of that having been done accidentally.

He accidentally placed a camera at waist level hundreds of times?

Yes, I think we can quickly discount that.

Anxious editorial in the Duke University newspaper about the fiasco at the University of North Carolina.

Duke is absolutely right to be anxious.

The only weak part of the editorial is its repeated insistence that the leaders of UNC must have been shocked to discover widespread academic/athletic fraud. No way.

In response to Junior Seau’s suicide, America speaks. A football player is just like a police officer or a soldier.

This thoughtful take on the Steubenville lads reminds UD of something she’s noticed about local coverage of university athletes who’ve been arrested for sexual assault or hazing or DUI or theft or gun play or whatever.

Katie Heaney wonders why reporters often devote a couple of sentences at the beginning of the article to the charges themselves, and then spend the rest of the piece talking about how the team’s defense is going to be weakened while the guy’s on trial, but there’s this other guy, a freshman, and this might be a huge break for him and he might rise to the occasion… Reporters often jump right to the win/loss implications of a sudden, er, removal of a key player from the lineup. They’re writing a sports piece with a bit of crime attached to it.

In the case of Steubenville’s multiple accused athletes – high school guys about to go to the universities that recruited them to play football – Heaney asks

[D]o we need to know how many state championships they’ve won? Do we need to know how much the suspects, if convicted, will be missed by their teammates and fans?

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This goes to the rape culture of certain towns and schools – a culture whose existence these places indignantly deny. Pathetic Penn State will insist to its dying day that Sandusky was a grotesque anomaly, that nothing in its engrossing pleasure in violent games had anything to do with current events there. Notre Dame looks the other way. Montana looks the other way…

UD isn’t sure why it’s so difficult for these places to own their violence. They produce violence all the time – on the field, off the field. Steubenville produces young men – local heroes – who film themselves being violent. Football gets more violent by the day, and these places are right there, fashioning young men fully up to the challenge of brutalizing and being brutalized at the highest levels.

Think of the post-nuclear athletic games in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach if you want a sense of where these places are headed: “They’re doing it because they like to do it, honey.”

… dominated, of course, by Penn State.

But the football-team-rape archetype isn’t raping little boys in locker rooms. It’s raping drunk coeds.

Some universities are more notorious than others in this matter; and of course many universities don’t produce groups of raping football players at all.

There’s also the rape pipeline to think about – high school football player rapists about to graduate to college football player rapists. That’s what the Steubenville Ohio case involves — guys who’ve already been accepted to various colleges, but have started raping before they get there. What’s a college to do?

It’s behind a New Yorker pay wall, but you might want to part with six bucks to enjoy Jay Martel’s brief Guide to the Top Bowl Games.

Here’s its last paragraph. The rest of the piece is along the same lines.

The E-Z-Does-It Catheter Cotton Bowl

This may be the marquee bowl game, with the undefeated Texas State College of the Pacific Homicidal Maniacs setting their sights on the No. 1-ranked Tallahassee University Khmer Rouge. These two college programs consistently rise to the top of every major statistical category including early-onset Alzheimer’s, so expect a real donnybrook. The media-day disclosure that every player on the Maniacs, except for the placekicker, sustained a concussion last week – even though no game was scheduled – sharply raised the level of anticipation for this clash.

There’s also news on coaches:

Lodi State made news last year by firing the former coach Chet Bracker after three losing seasons and paying him the remaining six million dollars on his contract to leave. This decision raised eyebrows, especially when Bracker came back and had to be paid another twenty-two million dollars to leave again.

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UD thanks Jeff.

Children were raped on a college campus, not enough was done to prevent it, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is bringing up the “market for the sale of college-related apparel.“

… is being pioneered at Hamline University, where the coach and a player are simultaneously suspended.

Oh, plus fourteen other players.

This business of disgust – it’s intriguing. Filthy university football and basketball programs can go along for years – decades – and none of the sickening elements ever gather into one, fully realized, disgusting, Thing.

Each season has its gangs, its guns, its gruesome coaches and gutless trustees, its tailgate trash and post-game riots, its homicidal hazers… Each campus has adjacent streets lined with bars that choke freshmen with cheap beer until they stagger up, piss themselves, and go outside to drown … None of it is strong enough to gather to a Thing, to disgust people. Certainly the financial and academic destruction of universities for the sake of a few yearly games in half-empty stadiums fails to rise to disgust.

For disgust to happen, you need a couple of things. You need a sense, as Buzz Bissinger says, that you’re in a culture, that these things are connected, can be gathered into a full reality. You need to consider that your school may be rather like Penn State, where football was more important than the well-being of children.

But no – you’re not like that! And neither, if you talk to Penn State diehards, is Penn State. It was just a few people, a few bad men…

You need, also, to have a rudimentary sense of what a university is. If you have this sense, you know that virtually every aspect of big-time university football represents a direct attack on the institution. Mindless, greedy, booze-fueled, violent, stoking dangerous cult loyalties — we’re describing the compleat anti-university, a weapon aimed directly at calm, humane, rational, independent thought.

In its scathing editorial about the lawsuit Pennsylvania’s governor has brought against the NCAA (a disgusting organization, but there’s nowhere non-disgusting to go here), the New York Times writes:

In his complaints, the governor only confirmed the inquiry finding that the university’s obsession with football predominance helped drive the cover-up of Mr. Sandusky’s crimes. Mr. Corbett extolled football’s “economic engine” and bemoaned the “diminution in value of the Penn State educational and community experience” because it relied, he emphasized, “in part on the prominence of the Penn State football program.”

Let us have it back again! says the governor. We’re not a university; we’re a sports cult, and our bars are hurting.

… knew?

With video.

Yeah, people are staying away from Penn State games not because it’s hard to enjoy a football game while thinking about a storied coach who for decades raped boys in the team’s shower rooms while an even more storied coach looked the other way.

No, it’s those pesky sanctions.

Patching holes is turning into an industry in itself.

This was the smallest Sugar Bowl crowd since 1939 when 44,308 watched TCU beat Carnegie Tech 15-7. Back then, Tulane Stadium only held 49,000. The next year an upper deck was added, expanding capacity to 70,000 and the Sugar Bowl sold out.

If 50,000 people saw this one in person (counting the bands) I’ll eat a fried gator.

Louisville traveled as well as could be expected for a 13-point underdog. More than half the attendees were wearing Cardinal red.

It was the Florida contingent that was embarrassingly small. According to the Orlando Sentinal, Florida sold fewer than 7,000 tickets from its official allotment of 17,500.The Sugar Bowl committee didn’t make up the slack as there were empty seats on the 40-yard line in the Florida section, and an entire upper deck end zone never saw a soul.

Tuberville (background here: scroll down) to lucky University of Cincinnati!

Tommy Tuberville will make $2.2 million next season at the University of Cincinnati… UC will pay up to $931,000 to buy out Tuberville’s Texas Tech contract.