… following all the different dirt being kicked up in the Philip Esformes trial (earlier posts about the pious Esformes family here). Paying off all of Miami to help him run his rotten to the core nursing homes! Telling one of his comrades in crime to kill himself so as not to have to testify against him! Hiding frail baffled old people when his paid-off tipsters told him an inspection was about to happen! Giving Penn’s basketball coach three hundred thousand dollars to lie and say Esformes Jr was so talented at the game he should be admitted to the school!

Jerome Allen, while awaiting sentencing for taking bribes, took the stand in the Esformes trial yesterday.

Allen said that the son was not qualified to play varsity basketball at Penn. He said he lied to the prestigious university about the son’s qualifications because he had been bribed by Esformes during a series of trips to Miami in 2013. He testified that the father gave him $10,000 in cash each time, the money tucked into a brown envelope stuffed inside a plastic bag, during their meetings in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel… In total, Esformes paid Allen about $75,000 in cash bribes and an additional $220,000 in wire transfers into the coach’s bank account between 2013 and 2015.

Esformes’ lawyer said

Esformes’ son has maintained a nearly 3.6 GPA at UPenn, made the Dean’s List at Penn and plans to graduate from the Wharton School with the class of 2019.

But he failed to mention who Esformes has been paying to take the kid’s courses.

… the public face of that state’s university, certain responsibilities….

Ah fuck. It’s Nevada.

The air inside the arena was thick with smoke from cigarettes and flares, and the stands were packed with frothing fans. Almost none of them were women. There were even fewer children. In the front row, one man wearing white-and-green face paint shook a giant inflatable penis at the Olympiacos bench. Not far from him, another man, also in face paint, was shirtless and played a bongo he’d somehow smuggled into the arena. Basket teams in Greece have firms, just like European soccer clubs. Each part of the main fan area was divided into subsections with signs for identification: Victoria, Skyros, the Hooligans, Gate 13, Kavala, and, the hardest to miss, West Block, which unfurled a giant banner from the upper deck with a menacing gas mask emblem. When the Olympiacos players came out for warm-ups, the fans made the Greek fuck-you gesture and chanted in unison. I asked [my Greek companion] what they were saying, and he smiled: “Olympiacos, motherfuckers.”

Coach of Panathinaikos, the rival team? The University of Louisville’s most famous, most celebrated, most highly compensated (but not compensated enough: he’s currently suing the school for forty million dollars) personality: Rick Pitino. Read the whole article and you’ll see that Rick has finally found his level.

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And on the domestic front…

YEEHAW!!!! RIDE EM COWBOY!!!!

Report: Southern Miss Coach Who Wanted To Hire Art Briles Also Tried To Add A Player Accused Of Two Knifepoint Rapes

Sounds better in German.

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UD thanks Mondo.

... together!

Anal rape is all growed up.

…I’ve read about lately.

After repeated violent racist events on the University of Colorado campus, “all of Boulder’s fraternities have been banned from renting campus spaces for a year.” Hurling racist epithets at people officiating at their charity football games, driving a motorcycle “at a high rate of speed through a crowd of about 200 spectators and players,” and of course everyone beating the shit out of everyone else – the University of Colorado seems to have decided that these are behaviors incompatible with university life.

In filing an appeal, the frats have hired an attorney, who puts the whole thing in perspective:

“It gets a little rowdy, as you would expect of any football tournament between 19-year-olds. …They are boys, and they get excited playing football. It’s not like croquet.”

… Purge.

[The UNH football players] became involved in a large brawl at Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. The brawl sent one person to the hospital with minor injuries.

The fight reportedly began when one of the SAE fraternity brothers refused to let a football player into a party.

Deputy Police Chief Rene Kelley said the person who was involved left the house and assaulted several other people.

… Kelley would not confirm or deny reports that the people who joined the football players in the attack were wearing masks similar to those in the movie “The Purge” or that some of those individuals were football players visiting from the University of Connecticut.

“Playing in an empty stadium due to fan trouble, Marseille defeated 10-man Bordeaux 1-0 in a postponed French league game on Tuesday.

… Marseille was without Florian Thauvin and Kevin Strootman due to suspensions.

The normally boisterous Stade Velodrome was uncharacteristically quiet after fans were banned due to disturbances at Marseille’s home game against Lille on Jan. 25, when a firecracker thrown from the crowd landed near linesman Nicolas Danos. The game was delayed for around 40 minutes before play continued, and Marseille went on to lose 2-1.

The 18th-round game against Bordeaux had been delayed due to complications arising from France’s yellow vest protests.”

Wow. UD‘s been looking for a succinct summary of modern athletics, and there you have it! Well done.

If anything proves the theory football is becoming a gladiator sport of the poor performing for the rich, it’s the billionaire president who says the NFL isn’t violent enough also declaring he doesn’t want his son playing the sport… Trump, who has declared he wants more hard hitting in football, said: nope, I wouldn’t want my 12-year-old son Barron to play.

Good on this country’s football universities for decimating their students’ brains! Plus there’s their commitment to social justice: Consider the lovely racial angle to the current game, detailed here.

… has just performed its first West Virginia University student riot of the year (they riot all the time at Gordon Gee’s WVU). This one featured almost a thousand students hurling beer bottles at city workers trying to plow snow from the street students had chosen for their couch burning. As WVU sociologist Karen Weiss notes in her WVU-inspired book, Party School:

[T]he party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. 

They riot so much at WVU that it’s news when they don’t, as in this headline:

NO RIOTING IN MORGANTOWN AFTER WVU LOSS

This latest riot was quite violent and quite protracted, drawing various police forces and extensive weaponry.

Let’s start with the story at good ol’ Mizzou.

“So many cheaters! What are we to do?

Their tutors will write their assignments,” they said.

Then the NCAA came and chopped off their head.

At Penn State the coaches fuck boys in the shower

The big men on campus make lesser boys cower

Even the frat guys get ready to die

When the athletes at Penn State stop by to say hi.