David sends UD news of a just-built $62 million high school football stadium down Georgia way.

One of the stadium’s boosters justifies the expense by pointing out that, for example, the innovative seating arrangement lets the whole family hear sixteen year olds get CTE concussions in real time.

East Carolina U football players aren’t afraid to get up real early in the morning and get stuff done! Neighbors complained though and the players were arrested.

Two went quietly, while one hid in the house, hoping cops wouldn’t notice.

Their mug shots reveal a complex melange of emotions.

#1: KILL YOU FUCKERS

#2: Shitting my pants

#3: Mom and Dad are on their way to bond me out

… he’s clean as a whistle!

Ah the Gophers! Gnawing their way, for centuries, through the foundation of the University of Minnesota! Now they’ve got a nearly nine million dollar athletics budget deficit, and what to do? Hm, hm…

How bout we hit the students up for an extra one hundred dollars to pay for coach buyouts, litigation costs after scandals, upkeep on a massive underused stadium, etc etc etc.

Far as I can tell, UM students already pay 300 a year for sports whether they like it or not, so it looks as though UM is charging 400.

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Did they mention cutting down on travel expenses?

A third double fault from Anisimova on the opening point. Followed by another errant shot. And another. 0-40, three more break points. This is uncomfortable viewing. She just can’t shake the stage fright off. She needs the crowd to help her get into it, but they’re as subdued and shocked as she is. Even more so when Anisimova concedes the break to love. Anisimova has been known in the past for sometimes being fragile mentally on court, but had held her nerve so well in this tournament, especially when seeing off Sabalenka in the semi-finals. But she just can’t get going here.

Trial coming up for one of the University of Alabama’s many gun-mad basketball players. Couple years ago a whole bunch of players went out for some fun and ended up shooting a woman to death. I mean, one of them, a friend of the players’, actually shot her, but one of the players provided the gun blahblah.

So the guy who actually shot her just got sentenced to life without parole, and things don’t look too good for the player who handed him the gun. Trial coming up.

Another player out with his teammates that night had already established a “pat-down” entrance whenever introduced before a game (this was a precursor to the much higher profile Ja Morant bit), and he kept it going even after he began to be investigated in connection with the murder. Straightlaced Deadspin considered the fact that the pat-down guy was allowed to play at all “quite shocking,” but c’mon. It’s ALABAMA.

Anyway, here’s a local opinion writer gettin all boohoo bout bloody Bama but really baby nobody gives a shit.

Just as much fun as the monkey chants and banana tosses whenever a black player enters the field!

It’s true that we’ve had a field day with lacrosse and sadism on this blog. Far as I can figure, the deep alcoholism endemic to the sport, its privileged-folk provenance, and the near-universal tendency toward hazing in high school and college athletics, produces extreme specimens like George Huguely, and less extreme but still very dangerous people like the guys on the Syracuse high school team.

Huguely, currently rotting in jail, was a U Va lacrosse player who got drunk and beat his girlfriend to death:

In truth, there are many places in [lacrosse’s] culture where nights like the one Huguely had at Washington and Lee University in November 2008 – when he was Tasered after resisting arrest and shouting slurs at a black, female officer who had found him stumbling into oncoming traffic – garner acceptance and credibility. As with other sports teams and fraternities, stories like these are traded like war stories among lacrosse players; they’re the battle ribbons of a culture that enjoys hard-drinking and recklessness. They’re a kind of proof of one’s weekend warrior bona fides.

One thing to remember, as we talk a bit more about the latest degeneracy, is that the lads have guns now. When you add guns to alcoholism, entitlement, and sadism, you get what people refer to as extreme hazing, which is simply extreme sadism. Among the very young. Sixteen. Fifteen.

Aggression and alcohol abuse, of course, are hardly the province of lacrosse alone when it comes to men’s [high school and] college athletics. But, when it comes alongside lacrosse, there’s an implied element of absolute indifference and arrogance as well.

We’re into group psychopathy at this point, an unbounded Lord of the Flies viciousness. As a team you derive splendid new forms of human abuse and let their effects amuse you as you film your victims in order to share their agony with other sadists. (Sadism, you know, is very common.) Or just to watch your weeping pleading shrieking victims over and over in your bedroom. Lots of hazing – fraternity as well as sports – now involves threats with guns; but we can certainly anticipate actual killing with guns in the hazing setting quite soon.

You recall sports-only Marshall’s criminalized football team that we met back in 2015, right? Remember its way-impressive ranking on the Grid of Shame? Its contempt for its entire non-football playing faculty? Did I mention its criminalized football team?

Well, reverence for the Marshall Way of Recruitment survives all these years later, with one of their recent additions all drugged up and shot up on the streets of Huntington — and Marshall has even been quick to 404 the dude from its heroes page and good job on that Marshall though when you do it as often as this school does I guess you get it down to a science.

[O]ne [new high school lacrosse player] was taken [by older teammates] to a remote area in the county when people appeared from the woods, dressed in black and armed with what appeared to be at least one handgun and at least one knife…

[They] put a pillowcase over that student’s head, then tied him up and threw him in the trunk of a car before he was left in a wooded area in the southern part of the county…

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At least five new recruits were tortured.

Not only did the high school cancel this season’s lacrosse; the district attorney insists on prosecuting! Boooooooooo

Again the city has had to call off a match in progress because home fans were burning down the stadium.

For background, go here.

“I think it’s an issue of fairness. It’s … deeply unfair. … [At the same time, trans] people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression, and the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with, as well. So, both things I can hold in my hand. How can we address this issue with … decency, … and at the same time deal with the unfairness [in athletics].”

Well, pickles are new ones on me. Perverted locker room attacks on rookies usually feature brooms.

The Post’s coverage of the big game reminds me why I don’t subscribe.

… now that the new regime has barred transgender athletes from women’s sports.

Ol’ UD thinks Lia Thomas, who “won the Ivy League championship her senior year in the 500 freestyle, 100 freestyle, and 200 freestyle individually, as well as the 400 freestyle relay,” did the cause no favors by graphically demonstrating unfairness — in her particular case. (Thomas recently lost a legal effort to qualify for the Olympics.)

UD thinks that ongoing definitional and fairness issues (degrees of testosterone suppression, etc.) warranted waiting on trans participation until greater clarity/consensus emerged. “There are good, non-transphobic arguments for fairness in sports… ” But that’s all behind us now; going full-throttle trans deeply upset many people and no doubt contributed to Trump’s victory (“The Trump campaign spent nearly 20 percent of its overall ad budget on transgender attack ads.”).

Angry fellow athletes have sued Harvard (which hosted the Lia Thomas blowout) and others, and the language of their suit is fierce. “[T]he Ivy League and its leadership ‘labored for months behind the scenes to engineer a public shock and awe display of monolithic support for biological unreality and radical gender ideology by America’s oldest and most storied educational institutions.’”

Bill Bock, the plaintiffs’ attorney, wrote in a statement that “the Ivy League believed that if America’s oldest and most storied educational institutions led the way, Americans would suppress common sense and submit to radical policies that steal young women’s cherished sports opportunities and obliterate biological reality.”

“This lawsuit exposes the behind the scenes scheming that led to the attempt by Harvard University, UPenn, the Ivy League and the NCAA, to impose radical gender ideology on the American college sports landscape,” he added.

The plaintiffs seek “damages for pain and suffering, mental and emotional distress, suffering and anxiety, expenses costs and other damages against the NCAA, Ivy League, Harvard, and UPenn due to their wrongful conduct.”

Harvard has ended its transgender inclusion policy.