At this late date it isn’t about the ancient layers of moral filth in the soil of bigtime college football; even UD, who giveth not a fuck about collegiate sports, can recite the (highly selective) history of ick Mitch Albom reviews here — all of his nostalgia prompted by U Mich’s latest coaching scandal.

Its six million dollar a year coach got to be coach when the coach before him was suspended for recruitment violations (the new coach – duh – was also guilty of recruitment violations) but hey that doesn’t even count in any university sports reckoning, does it? Business as usual. Sex shit, however, plus assault, plus the guy who earns five million more than the school president is as we speak in jail… They’ve dumped the dude for cause but he’ll sue anyway and end up costing UM many millions. Life of the mind.

Pennsylvania State University [will close] seven campuses due to financial constraints, while Louisiana State University [has] implemented a hiring freeze and other cost-cutting measures.

[B]oth institutions [recently] fired their head football coaches. Penn State [paid] more than $45 million to make head coach James Franklin go away … LSU fired Brian Kelly [and] gave him a buyout of $54 million.

Concerned parents are speaking out after more than a dozen fights broke out during the Parker vs. Ramsay football game at Legion Field, an event meant to celebrate non-violence.

****************

Hey but no one fired a gun. In Birmingham Alabama, that counts as non-violence.

Yes, wotta shocker. Football violence? Now I’ve seen everything.

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.

*****************

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…

*********************

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.