Uh… football stands.
… are public, parents and students should be hopping mad. How is it that a dangerous gang of rapists was admitted to the school? Some of them apparently already had serious police records.
In this instance, they raped children. Fourteen year olds. Classmates. Teammates.
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Admitted, hell; these are football heroes. Students are instructed to go to their games and cheer.
Pschaw, say their lawyers. It was just hazing.
And hazing is totally legal and American as apple pie!
Pschaw further, say their lawyers. It’s the fault of administrators who didn’t keep an eye on the lads.
UD‘s pretty sure administrators not only didn’t keep an eye. UD‘s pretty sure administrators ran very fast in the opposite direction when they saw the gang coming.
So why were these guys sitting next to unsuspecting children in the classrooms of Damascus High School?
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Whoops. Every one of them turns out to be a stellar human being.
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New Zealand coverage. You can’t buy this kind of international publicity.
And, sure, similar attacks might have happened in the Champions League. Many have already pointed to the obvious example of Liverpool supporters attacking the Manchester City bus. But the big difference is the context, the control around it.
Our security apparatus is better.
Violence does love a vacuum, and it don’t get more nihilistic than bloody Buenos Aires football.
[W]hy do people care so much? What is the source of that passion? That, perhaps, is the most uncomfortable question of all. It is commonplace to discuss passion for a football club as an unquestionable good, but how healthy is it, really, for people to tie their self-esteem quite so tightly to the results of a football club?
What does that say for the other institutions from which meaning might be derived?
Can we even call it meaning? Isn’t it just jaw-dripping satisfaction at having eaten one’s enemies?
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Hours after yet more absolutely insane soccer violence, G20 leaders arrive in the city for a summit.
The protests, looting and attacks before the Copa Libertadores final came just days before world leaders — including Presidents Trump, Xi and Macron — descend on the capital for the G-20 summit. The violence raises questions about the city’s preparedness to welcome an expected 8,000 visitors this week.
The team owners, the gangs who run the various game-related rackets, the corrupt police, the corrupt armed forces, the corrupt government – all have too much of a stake in the matches to care about corollary damage. And anyway…. Ours, theirs, in the stands, on the field, on the streets…
As any habitual observer of Argentina’s lower leagues – where police escorts are even skinnier and the headlines at national level sparse – can tell you, barely a match goes by without an away club’s vehicle being subjected to such an attack, with the minimum of repercussions.
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The sadness of Argentina is that it has yet to disprove VS Naipaul, who in the blistering final pages of “Argentina: The Brothels Behind the Graveyard” seethes with disdain for a country that never grew up from being a colony, that worships idols, believes in magic, exemplifies misogynistic machismo, and will never move past a culture of violence, corruption, and plunder. These sentiments are hardly credible descriptions of Argentina’s past, present, or future, but Naipaul’s anger arises from witnessing cultural attitudes that Argentina still cannot entirely deny. There is still too much paranoia, still a tendency to quickly declare enemies, still an unnecessary level of acrimony on display in political life.
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In an entire special section dedicated to the scandal, less than 24 hours after the violence occurred, [a] Nación columnist, Francisco Schiavo, wrote that “this happened right when it should not have happened, with the imminent G20 summit putting the city of Buenos Aires on lockdown. But it happened,” he wrote, “because of who we are as Argentines.”
Reuben Foster’s team manager knows a good kid when he sees one.
[Foster] … served a two-game NFL suspension to start this season because of his arrest for misdemeanor marijuana possession in January in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and a gun charge that was part of his arrest on Feb. 11, when a loaded Sig Sauer 516 rifle was found on a bathroom floor. In June, Foster pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor weapons charge and was ordered to perform 232 hours of community service. He was also given two years of probation, during which he is barred from possessing guns.
In 2017, before he was drafted, Foster failed a drug test at the NFL combine after allegedly submitting a diluted urine sample. He was kicked out of the combine after an altercation with a hospital employee…
In May, a Santa Clara County Court judge dropped domestic-violence charges against Foster, a week after [his girlfriend] took the stand and recanted her allegations that Foster struck her in Los Gatos on Feb. 11…
[The] inside linebacker was arrested on one count of first-degree misdemeanor domestic-violence battery [last] Saturday night at the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay…
… reigns not merely in Buenos Aires (Argentine sports atrocities happen to be tonight’s global-media focus), but in empty soccer stadia everywhere. Fans, players, owners — so many now behave so violently that more and more games are played in Total Spectator Silence, today’s spectators being simply too dangerous to allow into the arena, or onto the streets near the arena. Games are postponed while authorities wait for everyone to stop beating and knifing everyone. When no one stops, games are cancelled.
Not enough that international soccer as an institution is fully, foully, hopelessly corrupt; to this sickening, all-the-way-down financial obscenity we must add disgusting endemic violence.
And… so…
On with the game! It’s a man’s world, babe, and if you think for one minute that injury rape and riot will stop international soccer (or American football, or American fraternities), you’re nuts. Meet the man of the hour, the face of the game, everyone’s soccer hero. Stand back! Everybody dies.
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And in other Argentine soccer news…
… whose last football battle featured the twenty or so Ole Miss students who showed up throwing drinks at the Mississippi State players before the game. During the game, virtually everyone on the field had a big ol’ brawl. Every player got an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.
Life of the mind, deep south.
It’s getting positively elegiac out there, as football scribes in empty stadia find themselves reduced to the elaboration of despair. At most of our universities, the whole lucrative rah-rah project has come crashing down, leaving intellectual institutions bereft of money as well as dignity as they desperately try, with cheap booze and trinkets, to get people to sit down and watch, in its full sordid duration, an unwatchable game.
It’s not just the disgusting injuries (concussions; “gruesome” fractures; coach-bullied players’ deaths from overexertion); the rampant violence against women and other students among players; the university-budget-destroying coaches’ salaries, buyouts, and lawsuits (“Schools end up not only paying millions to their former coach, and millions to their new coach; they have to pay millions more to their new coach’s previous school, so he can leave to come to their school.”); the institution-destroying bad publicity arising from corrupt merchandise and recruitment deals; the filth all over campus from drunk tailgaters the day after; student riots when they win; student riots when they lose; the school- and city-destroying insistence on building vast new indebted stadia to accommodate the two thousand people who want to attend games; university presidents pretending that borderline-psychotic players (Aaron Hernandez, Richie Incognito, Lawrence Phillips, Johnny Manziel) are just feisty charming lads; presidents honoring coaches who hang out in school showers raping children; assistant coaches who set up houses of prostitution in players’ dorms, for players and their fathers; the institution-wide academic scandals arising from the sickening compromise of faculty integrity as students admitted only for their football skills are handed bogus … not degrees, since few graduate, but bogus courses; it’s also the sheer boredom and insult of the stadium experience (“The issue for me is games lasting nearly four hours. TV commercials are killing the game … I just can’t sit in the hot weather that long in back breaking seats.”).
What a shocker that few outside of fraternity members (the functional equivalent of football players) and hopeless drunks (who aren’t even financially viable, since they typically stay just for the tailgate) want anything to do with the shit-show.
Where did the university go in all this?
Buried, under mounds of Bud bottles.
Faced with empty or near-empty professional and college stadia all over the country, thoughtful observers offer explanations, theories… This Cal Poly fan, marooned in the stands, sketches a phenomenology of the game he fled at half-time.
[W]hy is Alex G. Spanos Stadium on Saturday nights as empty as a bird’s nest in the winter? One of the first things that comes to mind is the style of football Cal Poly plays. Cal Poly’s offense is a variation of the triple option, which is why you hear people in the stands calling for the Mustangs to “throw the damn ball.”
The goal of the triple option, in an extremely reductionist sense, is to almost always run the football while making it extremely difficult for the defense to identify who has the ball. However this entails a lot of repeatedly running right up the middle of the defense. While this bears a lot of strategic purpose, running straight into a wall of defenders is definitely not the most fun thing to watch, especially when it is the 30th time you’ve seen it in a game.
I suppose you could make a bunch of helmets bashing another bunch of helmets – or pocketbooks – over and over again interesting – or comic? – (“Repetition is the essential comedic device.”) – but interest and amusement is not really football, is it? Football is mad screaming hyperdrive…
[C]omplicating a personnel decision that might otherwise seem obvious is [football coach Bobby] Petrino’s $14 million [!!!!] buyout and U of L’s comparatively shallow pockets.
Having depleted the Hickman Camp Fund to pay Tom Jurich’s settlement [!!!!!] and Chris Mack’s buyout [!!!!!!] from Xavier, ULAA’s largest source of discretionary dollars has shrunk from $16 million to $8 million. Though Petrino would not have to be paid off in a lump sum — his contract calls for quarterly payments on an unspecified schedule — the costs associated with firing him (and, presumably, buying out his replacement from some other school) could create significant cash-flow concerns for a department still burdened by its exposure in Rick Pitino’s breach-of-contract lawsuit [!!!!!!!].
Moreover, financial irregularities found in [UL president] James Ramsey’s U of L administration [!!!!!!!] and recent budget cuts imposed across campus pose a contextual challenge to an eight-figure buyout. It promotes the perception of athletics as apart from rather than a part of the university [LOLOLOL] and, at a minimum, invites blowback.
This is a public university, kiddies.
They wallow. They simmer in their own juices. They don’t get nowhere.
To be sure, they’re corrupt. I don’t want you to think they aren’t corrupt, or that there isn’t a connection between their being corrupt and their wallowing. There’s a direct connection. People can certainly make money off of wallowing.
On this blog, we make a point of following the nothingness of these schools, with a particular eye on their sports programs, since here the futility, absurdity, and nihilism is at its most obvious.
Take New Mexico. Here’s a typical recent article about it in the local press.
First sentence:
Missed budget projections, lingering debt and low game attendance have all contributed to serious financial troubles at the University of New Mexico Athletics Department.
There’s no there there, see? No one’s at the games – UD is surprised the teams show up – nobody’s in budgeting … The schools I’m talking about, located in America’s nature wonderlands, are an extension of their magnificent silent mountains, their deep echoing oceans, their stretches of frozen tundra…
Crucial to this vast chasm is a really stupid and corrupt state legislature, and all three of these states have them. A certain dance is danced, to be sure… I mean, like clockwork, when a school like New Mexico is in such profound shit that it demands more money from the state, the state says whoa wait uh what’s up over there? What you guys been doing? Didn’t we, uh, give you some money…? Don’t we give you some money every year…? So the head of the House appropriations committee pledges to
take a “fine toothed comb” to the UNM Athletics budget before determining what additional funding looks like, if any.
“We are going to dive into these numbers very closely,” Rep. [Patty] Lundstrom said. “The questions I am going to ask are about compensation packages. I want to know what benefits these coaches and the athletic director have. I want to know how much over their base pay they are receiving of taxpayers’ dollars.”
Yeah cuz for the last hundred years or so while the school lies there on the ground dead all the money we send you goes to the athletic staff and NOW’S THE TIME WE MEAN IT THIS TIME WE’RE REALLY GONNA …
UNM’s Athletics administrators and coaches are among the highest paid state employees. While [AD Eddie] Nunez has made cuts to programs to save dollars, he hasn’t made any cuts that would personally affect his own personal finances or the personal finances of his staff. The high salaries and many benefits that UNM Athletics administrators and coaches are entitled to by their employment contracts have remained untouched…
…[S]everal salaries [are] above $300,000 per year with a variety of 13 different types of benefits ranging from free-use vehicles to media pay, promotional pay, incentive bonuses, season tickets to games, country club memberships, retention bonuses, free spouse travel to games and in one case a relocation expense totaling nearly $20,000.
[Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: a variety of 13 different types is redundant. Just write 13 different types. You could even write just 13 types. The high number jumps out more if you just go directly for it.]
The AD’s response to this fact is a beaut. In an entire culture of stupidity, it still manages to stand out.
“I am a supporter of incentives because to me, it incentivizes people to do something. If they achieve it, some great things are happening.”
SOS will not attempt to parse this, because she is old and fragile; she will merely remind you that the athletic program at New Mexico is a debacle.
Which – if true – is why the principal of Damascus High School, near UD‘s house, was foolish to write in her initial public statement that the rapes were limited to the school’s junior varsity football players.
Background here. As you know if you read this blog, anal rape and high school football go together like a horse and carriage.