[In a recent coaching session with the team, Buffalo Bills coach Sean McDermott] cited the [9/11] hijackers as a group of people who were all able to get on the same page to orchestrate attacks to perfection. One by one, McDermott started asking specific players in the room questions: …“What tactics do you think they used to come together? … What do you think their biggest obstacle was?”
If you read this blog, you’ve known for years and years that down them parts thems all be morons. If you’ve been reading the Star Tribune, you think this is actually news.
When wee UD studied at the Medill School of Journalism, we often discussed the qualities of a good lead sentence; in particular, you want to pack a lot of information in without creating a run-on feel to the thing.
The AP writer who had to pack all of the repulsive behavior at New Mexico State into her lead had quite a task, but she acquitted herself well, finding a place in one sentence for the guns thing AND the cock-grabbing thing. Actual shooters (of guns) among team members appear a little farther down in the article. When there’s this much material, you have to be selective.
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For the venerable history of this institution, go here.
A Texas school district is considering the use of eminent domain to seize a man’s longtime home and make way for parking at a new $50 million [high school] football stadium… The land has been in [79 year old retired carpenter Travis] Upchurch’s family since 1916, when his relatives emigrated from Sweden and settled in Aldine as dairy farmers…
Upchurch’s family has said it is willing to sell the property to the district after Upchurch dies or at least work out an arrangement that would allow him to continue living there. His daughter, Tara Upchurch, told Houston-area outlet KHOU-TV that her father’s health has deteriorated as a result of stress… “I ask that you spare my father from this unnecessary upheaval.”
Aldine ISD has made multiple offers to purchase the land in recent months, both before and after trustees authorized the use of eminent domain … Under eminent domain, the government can acquire land for public use as long as it pays the owner a fair price.
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For what profiteth a fifth-generation elderly Texan who wants to die at home compared to the compelling public value of a high school football parking lot?
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UPDATE: Ah fuck it.
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UD thanks a reader for the link.
‘As a non-native, I can’t relate. My high school football team held all its practices on an open field in New York’s Central Park.
At our team’s games, we didn’t sit in a massive stadium, but on old rickety bleachers. We never had a home game because we never had a home field.
But we excelled in book learning. Every one of my classmates was accepted by a college.
I know times have changed, but $100 million goes a long way in education.’
Oh shush. We all don’t need some New Yorker come down here tell us how to live like we should care we’re 35th among states in education blahblah. We’ll get that thing built and fuck you.
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UD thanks John, a reader, for the link.
Michigan State was happily on its way to bankrupting the school, via massive payments (an almost hundred million dollar ten-year contract extension!) to a football coach who racked up some winning games, when (quoting James Bond) “something big came up.”
Given that as recently as 2018 another Michigan school was out 500 mill because a team doctor also had something come up, you kinda wonder
1.) how does one of America’s not at all rich states keep finding all this dough (and more) in its university sports programs? and
2.) will the state ever realize that hugely expensive degenerates tend to populate American university sports programs at the highest levels? (Tuberville not high-profile enough for you?) Because once you get RID of, say, Tucker, he’s gonna turn around and sue you for hundreds of millions more, the way all of them do when you fire them, for cause or not. Right? Has anyone besides UD been following this history?
As daunting as the remaining two months remaining on the schedule appear, there’s also the potential for a lengthy legal fight with Tucker hinting at his intent to sue the university over the roughly $80 million remaining on his contract. Michigan State doesn’t want to pay a dime and will have to decide if it’s worth absorbing hefty legal fees and headlines continuing to link the school with Tucker or reach a settlement to bring the saga to an end.
3.) can anyone at these institutions of higher learning think about cause and effect? As in, when you suddenly give a hundred million dollar contract to a… not too upstanding person, might that money and power go to his head? Make him think he can get away with anything cuz he’s such hot shit?
Yeah. You kinda wonder why so many American universities are ineducable on the most basic patterns, the most basic matters.
Soccer fans beating each other to death happens quite often in Greece, Brazil, Portugal, Indonesia, Argentina, Croatia… all over, really. But mainly in Europe.
Now we’re doing it too, at our football games.
I’m figuring security’s really really good at confiscating guns, because so far we’re just beating fellow fans to death with our fists. As soon as Americans figure out how to smuggle Glocks through the gates, we’ll start seeing mass shooting.
On-field brawls abound these days; but this one, as a team was losing 0-24, stands out.
Apparently the losing team fought among itself — presumably due to frustration (“The Warriors are winless on the season and have been outscored by opponents 70-0 in two games.”); the opposing team seems not to have been involved at all.
So it turns out the whole high school has around 150 students, of whom let’s say half are boys; and of course a football team usually carries 40-50 players. Are we doing the math here?
Id est the school’s too small to field a competitive football team, but someone’s insisting on keeping the comedy going, paying a coaching staff (this is a poor part of Miss.), etc.
A post-football-game brawl in UD‘s Bethesda between between fans of the two high school teams (it’s not clear if players were involved) really failed to rise to prevailing American standards. The brawl featured UD‘s high school (Walter Johnson) and its traditional rival (Bethesda Chevy Chase), and managed only this much beyond the usual thefts and punches:
[T]he principals [of both schools] wrote that there has been mention on social media that a student may have been in possession of a weapon.
And hey that might not even have been a gun…
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Anyone who, like UD, follows the national trend of shootings during as well as after high school football games knows that ‘thesdan culture is way behind football mad/gun mad Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, South LA, Baltimore, and other hot spots. These places kill people during/after football! And it’s becoming a routine part of game day! ‘thesda’s just taking baby steps and UD‘s thinking it’s the parents’ fault for not having enough guns lying around the house for an easy grab when you get home pissed off cuz you lost.
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Vey, vey, the grownups say; what can be done?
Well, as you probably know, lots has already been done. Look at professional soccer if you wanna know where we’re headed. Massive fights and carnage means that in some places games are played in empty stadiums. It means police state level security, including elaborate surveillance of/barring of known trouble makers. It also means 100% young male audiences, as women, older men, and children flee screaming from the violence, which is to say that the very worst demographic has now been isolated in stadiums and thus you’re practically guaranteed violence.
Of course Europe doesn’t have all our guns. In Europe they have to content themselves with beating the shit out of each other and burning cars. Here we see what our firepower superiority implies: Forget fighting. Just go ahead and massacre the other team.
A miniature dog too; and after all that expensive education, he filmed himself practically killing the thing!
And man, the school where he used to play football didn’t waste any time…
Oh well. There’s always the University of Florida.
Background here.
If Huggins or the institutions of higher learning that employed and enabled him gave a rat’s rectum about “student-athletics,” he wouldn’t have spent 16 years coaching Cincinnati as it and he became nationally known for winning by recruiting “high social risk” players and academic non-achievers who had no legitimate reason to be enrolled in any college. Only 28 percent of his Cincinnati players, including walk-ons, reportedly graduated.
And he wouldn’t have spent another 16 years coaching his alma mater, WVU, paid up to $5 million per year to do so, apparently because WVU fully approved of his winning ways and means honed at Cincinnati.
So the national con of college sports — student-athletics — proceeds, no education, and in many cases fundamental illiteracy, in exchange for full scholarships, often on taxpayer funding.
And yet when you look for anyone calling Jack Jones a thug, what comes up is one of Boston’s preeminent African-American newspapers, which in one opinion piece calls him a thug nine times.