… I was over the top sometimes.
… I was over the top sometimes.
The University of Maryland is located in Prince George’s County, and Baker has had an excellent working relationship with the school’s president, Wallace Loh, who was dumped by football interests. From Baker’s statement:
Throughout this situation, Dr. Loh displayed a level of candor and courage that are a testament to his character. I applaud him accepting moral and legal responsibility for Jordan McNair’s death. It was a sign of true leadership, guts and integrity. It is unfortunate that instead of rewarding him for his courage, Dr. Loh was punished for doing the right thing.
Protests over the reinstatement of Maryland’s appalling football coach begin. The student government is organizing a rally for this Thursday afternoon (Mr UD plans to attend); there may also be a protest before this Saturday’s football game.
How long will the carnage at this university continue? Are there any rational people in leadership there? If so, they might be able to stop the bleeding. If they act fast.
Five months and one day after Jordan McNair collapsed at a Maryland football practice, D.J. Durkin, the head coach who oversaw the system whose failure led to the offensive lineman’s death, was reinstated to his job. That decision was made over the reported protests of university president Wallace Loh, who didn’t mention Durkin’s name at a Tuesday press conference and was told he’d be fired if he didn’t follow the regents’ recommendations…
[One of the football program’s trainers] allegedly used homophobic slurs and threw everything from food to weights to vomit at players, while other unnamed coaches forced them to watch graphic videos of “serial killers, drills entering eyeballs, and bloody scenes with animals eating animals.”
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Chicago Trib:
[For the University of Maryland,] being guided by the memory of a 19-year-old whose death was wholly and completely preventable means that the football coach who oversaw a program built on — among other things — demeaning players should be welcomed back. So here comes the inconceivable: DJ Durkin, back on the sidelines…
[T]he University of Maryland — in its entirety — is delusional…
“Greetings, mothers of prospective Maryland football players. Come in. Have a seat. Let me flip on this video of animals disemboweling each other, just to get you in the right frame of mind. Oh, sorry, is there puke in that trash can? Allow me to fling it across the room. That should do it. Would you like a candy bar? No? I insist. Seriously. Eat this &$%@#! candy bar!!!!!!!! Or else!!!!!!!!!”
… That DJ Durkin remains the football coach at the University of Maryland defies common sense and common decency. That Damon Evans remains his boss as the athletic director means Maryland has installed a leader who is defined more by his mistakes than his successes. And the entire university system has exposed itself.
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It’s all chaos, degradation, and continued danger, and the whole world is watching. Take a look at today’s Google News page for the University of Maryland.
A Forbes writer gets it right: Unless you’re Clemson and Baylor and Nebraska and the other total-football-and-nothing-else schools, you’re eventually going to find yourself deep in the same sort of shit Maryland’s in right now.
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The hot mess in all its glory.
Two things almost for sure:
1. Durkin will go.
2. This entire episode will end up costing the university at least ten million dollars, plus endless further costs arising from multiple lawsuits.
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Headline on this one: IN AN AGE OF REFORM, MARYLAND SAYS IT’S FINE WITH SLIME
President Loh …. advocated that Durkin be dismissed. Instead it’s the president who’s leaving. The coach, beggaring belief, gets to stay. Unknown is whether he can find anyone willing to play for him, now or ever again.
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The Maryland head football coach, who in the very best-case scenario, was so incompetent at overseeing a program that he allowed it to turn into one so toxic and so physically dangerous to players that it killed one, but who was so competent at instilling a culture of “fear” that players and subordinates were too afraid to speak up with their concerns, was reinstated on Tuesday, along with everyone else who bears responsibility for Jordan McNair’s death.
… As for why the board of regents appears so committed to Durkin, well, look no further than his contract. The coach is in the third year of a six-year contract that pays him about $2.5 million annually. If he were to be bought out, it would cost the school $5 million. If he were to be fired without cause, it would cost 65 percent of his remaining salary, or, again, about $5 million. If he were to be fired with cause, there would likely be an expensive and protracted legal battle. It is no wonder, that at just about every program, a football coach has more job security than a university president: He makes more money.
Maryland football does not turn a profit. It had run, for years, at a multi-million-dollar deficit, but believed that moving to the Big Ten would make it the money-printing machine it always believed it could be. But so far, by all reports, it’s barely breaking even, and has committed to years of serious expenses paying off its fancy new football facilities. The board of regents appears to believe the program cannot afford to take the hit of paying off Durkin to leave, and the likely accompanying loss in donations from insane boosters, on top of the inevitable lawsuit from McNair’s family. The regents announced yesterday, in so many words, that doing the right thing would cost too much money.
… and will certainly appoint, as next president, a go along to get along good ol’ boy. Paging John Thrasher!
College Park is happier than a trash can full of vomit.
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“[S]everal [football] players, including starters, walked out of [a] meeting with” the reinstated coach.
Bad, scary coach stays and university president goes. Datz the way it is, kids.
You do want to know? Okay, read these two pages (scroll down).
And now for an update, from a student writing in CMU’s campus newspaper.
[Virtually no spectators showing up for football games] is not exclusively a CMU problem. It’s the exact same problem that many other trivial Mid-American Conference schools face.
… The reported attendance at the CMU-WMU game was 10,097 people. By hand, I counted 255 people on the east side of the stadium at the end of the first quarter.
UD‘s very fond of a statement from CMU’s 2014 athletic director.
“Does it matter if you have no one at your game, or 15,000, or 110,000?” Heeke asked. “Does that somehow deem [sic] that you shouldn’t play football at this school because you can’t reach 15,000? [Like a lot of schools, CMU fudges like mad to pretend to the NCAA that it meets the minimal attendance standard.] If the school makes the decision to play football, why should it matter? It’s their decision how they want to manage the game and what they think their expectation is and what makes it a viable program.”
Does it matter that CMU paid this guy – Heeke – $300,000 a year when he made that statement? Does it matter that a public university runs an expensive and totally invisible football program? Does it matter that it has no one at its games? No! If the good people of Michigan, if CMU students and their parents, want to fund a bunch of guys (most of whom aren’t real CMU students) throwing a ball around in a huge pricey stadium GO FOR IT. We all know the state of Michigan’s so rich it doesn’t know what to do with its money.
All good writers know never to use exclamation marks! I mean, almost never!
But UD has stumbled over a piece in the U Penn newspaper which demands exclamation marks. She will now quote some of the piece and insert the quotation marks its content demands.
In the wake of the admissions bribery scandal! involving former Penn men’s basketball star and coach Jerome Allen, Penn Dean of Admissions Eric Furda is saying that safeguards need to be put in place in both the athletics and admissions departments.
On Oct. 5, Allen, who is currently an assistant coach for the Boston Celtics, pleaded guilty to bribery in connection to the recruitment of a student athlete – now Wharton senior Morris Esformes – to gain him admission to the University. Allen had been implicated in an indictment of businessman Philip Esformes, who had allegedly defrauded the federal government of $1 billion!!! and had used some of that money to bribe Allen and help Morris get into Penn.
… Furda suggested new professional development and training for staffers in both departments to prevent future incidents of bribery!!!!
[So a guy comes at you with tens of thousands of dollars, private luxury jet trips on his dime, and anything else you want, and says in exchange for this I want my kid who can’t play competitive basketball to get a basketball scholarship and thereby admission to your school. Slowly, now. Think it through. Is this RIGHT or WRONG?]
… [Morris] Esformes was accepted to Penn in 2015 as a member of Allen’s final recruiting class before Allen was replaced by current coach Steve Donahue. Esformes never played or appeared !!!!! on the men’s basketball team’s roster.
We’re all sinners, of course; but when you put “Christian” right there in your school’s name, as Texas Christian University does, you invite more than ordinary sinescopic scrutiny. A quick review of this blog’s TCU entries over the last five or so years definitely reveals more sinners than saints, especially among the football lads, who seem undecided whether they want to drug themselves to the heavenly gates or pummel other people to the heavenly gates.
UD was reminded of this curiously … heterodox school by their latest big national news: One of their most valuable football players has two arrests for domestic violence in the last seven months plus an outstanding bench warrant, since he didn’t show up to court for Dom. Viol. #1.
Since he’s a great player, and since TCU’s quarterback is out with injuries, and since TCU is desperate to win a game, they’ll just suspend him for a game or two.
Two? They’ll probably just suspend him for one. It’s the Texas Christian way.
… The teenage basketball stars are commodities to the hustlers and cons in the hoops underworld — and more disturbingly, sometimes to their own families.
… “So you’ve been pimping out your namesake since he was 14 years old?” [one player’s] lawyer … asked on cross-examination. [The player’s father] did not disagree.
… The N.C.A.A., of course, is not on trial, but it looms as almost a shadow defendant — a multi-billion-dollar enterprise resting on a pool of unpaid, disproportionately African-American labor. The inequities engender cynicism, and N.C.A.A. rules are not followed and not regarded as having any moral authority — not by the players, their families, their youth coaches or by many of the college coaches seeking their services.
Make that literal pimping at the University of Louisville, where teenage basketball stars and their fathers had special campus… housing… just for them.
One of their football players studied.
None of the subsequent unfortunate events would have occurred if he had not, wantonly, crazily, studied.
I trust this will be a lesson to his teammates.
This is the first sentence of an article by Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post. The link simply takes you to the front page of the Post; but you don’t need much more than the first sentence, do you?
If I can be sure of one thing about the moneyed mess that college sports in this country have become, it is that I don’t feel sorry for the schools that have willingly made basketball and football coaches the highest-paid public employees in thirty-nine out of fifty states while maintaining their showy convictions regarding the sanctity of amateurism.
[H]is verbal SAT score of 420 was below the minimum required at Florida, where the majority of freshmen scored 600 or above…
[There was] destructive impunity, drugs, and the company of bad actors he met through Florida football. This was the time when he snapped a selfie that later went viral — posing in front a mirror, a raised Glock handgun in his left hand…
[T]he Gators had so much contact with the Gainesville police that [Urban] Meyer once addressed officers at roll call. A running tally of arrests compiled by the Orlando Sentinel during Meyer’s six-year tenure reached at least 31, for offenses ranging from firing an AK-47 in public to throwing food at an employee at a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop.
The Boston Globe revisits the University of Florida’s contribution to the tragedy of Aaron Hernandez.
T.J. Gassnola is the president and head of the board of trustees of the University of Kansas. He is the face of the school. The front porch of the school.
T.J. runs basketball at KU, and basketball is just about all you’re ever going to read about when it comes to KU.
More specifically, he runs KU’s players. T.J. is in charge of giving them and their families huge wads of cash under the table at Las Vegas hotels to play at KU. T.J. keeps KU all basketball all the time. He is KU’s VIP, MVP, and HRH all rolled into one.
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Everyone knows there’s nothing wrong with outfits like Adidas – for whom T.J. also works – giving money to future basketball greats. This wise investment often starts well before these players launch their adventures in university education… well before they decide to take advantage of the intellectual resources of places like Lawrence.
KU enjoys an extremely lucrative business relationship with Adidas.
Marc Emmert’s multimillion dollar NCAA salary is predicated on his absolute indifference to the transformation of once-respectable American universities into stinky petty hilarious crime gutters, places run by people like T.J. Gassnola.
So. All good. Everyone gets rich: The player, his family, Marc Emmert, the University of Kansas, and ol’ T.J.
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So… FUCK the FBI. What the fuck? It sashays in like it’s king of the world, drags T.J. into court and makes him sing in exchange for reduced prison time for the many many naughty things T.J. has been up to … Worse yet, it makes KU and Emmert scrunch up their features, take a deep breath, and blow out the very best horseshit they can come up with about how shocked and disappointed and eager to be helpful they are…
UD‘s only sorry this woman is no longer KU’s chancellor – she came to KU after running Chapel Hill into the ground cuz of their athletic scandal, remember? She’s just the sort of person you want running a basketball factory, and she’s still getting paid too.
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We had a nice tidy world here, see. Emmert and the whole “university” thing at KU did the work of shedding respectability-light upon the scheme so no one would think anything dark and criminal was going on. The players and the corporate suits and the coaches pocketed the money and kept their mouths shut. But now T.J.’s talking, and it’s… well, it’s Kafka, kiddies.
The most absurd moment of a most absurd day at the federal fraud case featuring one of college basketball’s most absurd characters had to be the following … well, actually, there are many contenders.
Maybe it was when Billy Preston wrecked his Dodge Charger on the campus of the University of Kansas. The fact a top incoming basketball recruit was driving such a car caused concern with the KU compliance office, which investigated who owned the vehicle.
Text messages later revealed Preston’s mother Nicole Player bragging about buying the car for her son, but … the car was … registered with “Nicole Player’s recently deceased grandmother” who lived in Florida.
KU was fine with this explanation. Who wouldn’t be?
[I]n the process of looking into the car, KU discovered a wire transfer to Player that came from a man named T.J. Gassnola. Player lived in Euless, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Gassnola hailed from Ludlow, Massachusetts, a little town a couple hours west of Boston.
There appeared to be no good reason for this exchange – and there wasn’t, at least by NCAA standards. Gassnola, a member of Adidas’ so-called “Black Ops” group and AAU team owner, detailed from the witness stand how he had plied Player with $89,000 over the course of nearly a year, including a $30,000 cash payout in a New York hotel room and another $20,000 brick delivered while in Las Vegas.
But wait, that’s not the best part.
Worried there was no proper explanation for the payments, Player texted Gassnola to inform him she had told KU officials the two had been involved in an “intimate” relationship, believing such activity would somehow make it NCAA legal.
If you can’t get enough of this stuff – and there’s TONS – go here.
Better yet, go here. This narrative, penned by Kafka after he dropped acid, is truly one of the greats.