Are you braced?

Then let’s go.

[One of dozens of lawsuits against MSU] contends that [now-jailed MSU athletics physician Larry] Nassar raped someone — a former MSU field-hockey player who was 18 years old at the time — in 1992 and filmed the act while doing so. [I]t alleges that MSU — and, specifically, George Perles, a current member of MSU’s board of trustees who served as the university’s athletic director at the time of the rape — went “to great lengths to conceal this conduct.”

The article cites ESPN’s extensive reporting on a university-wide culture that for years enabled Nassar’s student-rapes.

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Ask yourself. Why is Perles on a university board of trustees? What sort of a university puts an AD/football coach on their board?

The sort of university that believes its athletics program is the most important thing about it, and wants the hushing up of the program’s many scandals to take place at the highest levels. MSU chose to give an AD/coach who already had a record of significant infractions a position as a trustee. Think about that.

Think about the long reign of Auburn’s Bobby Lowder (background on Lowder in these posts). The model, at these and other morally catastrophic jockshops, is a virtually all-male culture of sexual entitlement, cronyism, and secrecy. It’s how you get Penn State and Baylor and the University of Kansas and too many other catastrophes to mention.

… for use of passive voice above and beyond the call of duty. In response to a more than ordinarily ugly fight among players – and a coach!- at a recent football game, she wrote the following:

The incidents that occurred at the Sanderson v. Marfa football game on Friday, September 7th are unfortunate and embarrassing for both communities and school districts. There were actions by both teams that were unacceptable. The appropriate notifications have been made to UIL and TEA. The district will review the incident. Once all the facts are gathered, a decision regarding necessary actions will be taken. Until that time, and based on what is known now, we support our coaching staff.

Ya gotta admit that when it comes to failing even to touch on the subject of her statement – i.e., to use the word fight – the woman is punching above her weight. The incidents that occurred is so wondrous a phrase in its avoidance of actuality that even here, in her very first words, she sets a standard. There were actions by both teams that were unacceptable. Let’s not say what they were. And let’s use the passive voice: actions by both teams.. What actions? Don’t ask.

Notifications have been made. Who made them? What do you mean by notifications? Teams, not people, attacked other… teams. And the district will review… Do you mean you? The superintendent? Teams, district — keep it vaguely corporate and the appalling immediacy of students and their coach beating the shit out of people on a football field disappears. Once the facts are gathered, a decision will be taken. Gathered by whom? What sorts of decisions are available? Who will make them? Where are we…? What is known….? Who knows it…?

Let’s translate into English.

The fight at the Sanderson v. Marfa football game on Friday, September 7th angered and embarrassed all of us. Players on both teams attacked other players, and even a coach reportedly joined the fight. After I review footage, and talk to participants and witnesses, I’ll decide on punishments.

Note that SOS has dropped the superintendent’s last sentence. It’s dumb and unnecessary for her to pick sides when she just made clear she doesn’t know the full story.

‘Course, ‘family friendly,’ in the heart of the heart of the southland, might not be exactly what a coastal elite like UD would envision…

Truth be told, Jewish blueish UD has never, after all these years blogging about them, been able to make much sense of red-state tailgating qua tailgating; and the latest documentary evidence from Ole Miss hasn’t helped her along any.

I mean, before we go to the tape, and before we consider tailgating as such: Is it family friendly to break pretty much every NCAA rule? Repeatedly? Is the school’s last football coach, super-Christian Hugh Freeze, with his staggering lies and corruption, and his, uh, sexual issues, family friendly? Was the school’s large-scale racist rally after Obama won the presidency family-friendly?

Okay, and is an “all-out brawl” at the school’s last tailgate family friendly?

UD acknowledges that everyone in the video is well-dressed. She acknowledges a preponderance of chinos and polo shirts. This models, in a family-friendly way, good personal grooming for the next generation. But what are the children at the tailgate making of grown men, drunk out of their minds in the middle of the day in public, smashing each others’ faces bloody to the rattle of a thousand giant red plastic alcohol cups?

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I wonder if Ole Miss wonders why attendance at its games is tanking. Maybe this Ole Miss student can explain it.

Comment from ISU’s interim AD:

“Our community has demonstrated that they love their Bengal athletics. There’s just no question. I can see that from a mile away …”

Once again, everyone gets a chance to run down the field!

How long can a university football program remain on automatic?

A hollowed-out, expensive, stadium; a perennially losing team; staggering costs to students and faculty; a statewide embarrassment… Yet on it goes, tearing down the reputation and finances of a university forever and ever.

Take University of Kansas football. This 2015 article called the program “doomed,” but it wasn’t, even though the millionaire coaches, million-dollar buyouts, and on-field losses continue.

Increased football spending was supposed make more money for the entire Kansas athletic department. It has not. Instead, there has been a domino effect of failure: Kansas is second to last in the Big 12 in the number of men’s and women’s teams it fields…

This fall, Kansas fans figure to have a front row seat to the worst college football team money can buy — and a up-close view of how everyone else loses in the process.

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Apparently it’s all finally too much for one KU professor – a guy in the law school has tweeted:

What’s the argument for continuing KU football (serious question)? It’s an enormous money loser for a cash-strapped university. Life-altering injuries and cumulative brain damage are inevitable. Wouldn’t this money be better spent elsewhere (e.g. more scholarships)?

To charge KU students higher fees to support the football team (the biggest drain on KU’s athletic budget) just seems wrong. With yesterday’s loss to Nicholls St., it seems like an appropriate time to ask: why have a football team?

Not that this guy’s tweet will go anywhere; but UD thinks it’s worth noting that at least one person on KU’s campus is asking these questions.

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UPDATE: And then there’s the University of Maryland. A columnist in the school newspaper first reviews the program: Lots of seriously losing seasons; excessive and expensive coach changes; shitty game attendance; the heatstroke death of a player on the practice field; damning reports in the sports press of a “toxic culture” in the program.

In light of these problems and others, the time has come for frank discussion of a question seemingly absent from the discourse surrounding athletics at this university — namely, whether the university should continue to sponsor a varsity football program at all. There are a few compelling reasons to think the answer is a resounding “no.”

The whole massively costly football deal is “a project that will be useless to the vast majority of the student body.” Football players get concussed and may suffer lifelong brain injury.

Very nice final paragraph:

President Wallace Loh’s favorite metaphor for athletics is that they’re the “front porch” of the university, the face we present to the public. Allow me to extend the metaphor. If your front porch regularly required multi-million-dollar improvements, caused brain disease in those who sat on it and recently left someone dead, wouldn’t you consider removing it?

Bravo.

… begins!

Seven Florida Gators have been suspended for the season opener against Charleston Southern.

Dynamic sophomore receiver Kadarius Toney and senior defensive end CeCe Jefferson headline the list of players.

The suspension of Toney and reserve defensive tackle Kyree Campbell stems from their role May 28 altercation on campus with a group of local Gainesville men. Jefferson will sit out due to academic reasons, a source confirmed.

Defensive tackle Luke Ancrum, cornerback Brian Edwards, tailback Adarius Lemons and walk-on offensive lineman James Washington also will not play.

Toney and Campbell brandished Airsoft rifles during the confrontation in May. Then on July 22, police stopped Toney for a seat belt violation and discovered an assault rifle in his backseat.

Four Gators — receivers Tyrie Cleveland and Rick Wells, quarterback Emory Jones and tight end Kemore Gamble – lied to university police when questioned about the incident and had to appear in front of the student conduct council. None was suspended.

And every one of them on scholarship!

Well, that one’s got it all. A poorly ranked university whose students don’t even care about football lies pathetically about game attendance at its newly renovated stadium. Does it get any lower?

At Arkansas, which stumbled its way through a 4-8 season last year, scanned attendance was 58 percent of its announced figures. No matter, the Razorbacks’ football stadium is reopening this season with an increased capacity of 4,000 following a $160 million renovation project.

“[P]hony attendance figures are … another small piece of the rickety structure that holds up the college sports scam,” notes Deadspin‘s writer.

Another small piece?

The NCAA supposedly requires a 15,000 “actual or paid” two-year average attendance to stay in D-I, but even that threat appears to be completely toothless. According to the WSJ, “The NCAA accepts the announced attendance numbers schools submit ‘at face value.’”

And why? Why, why, why?

You know UD‘s take on why a school whose students don’t attend football games would spend tens of millions of dollars enlarging their stadium, right?

It’s because they can’t think of anything else to do. What else do universities… do?

COLLEGE FOOTBALL ATTENDANCE PROBABLY WON’T COME BACK,
BUT AT LEAST THERE’S BOOZE TO KEEP THE REVENUE FLOWING

In other words: Game day!

“And I can sit here and tell you over the past few weeks our team has gotten stronger.”

Ohio State University football coach.

An Ohio State University trustee has resigned, “embarrassed,” he says, to continue his association with a university BOT that cares more about games than … well, than about anything. Apparently this guy thinks he’s still dealing with a university, rather than a football team and its devoted servants.

“Most [trustees] were concerned about whether it was a several-game suspension or not,” he said.

“To me,” he added, “there was something altogether wrong about reducing it to a couple of games.”

Best for all concerned for him to leave the board. The Dear Leader will be pissed if this jerk is still there when he retakes control.

So now with all this talk of vanishingly few people going to football games (we’ve been talking about it on this blog for a long time), UD is here to tell you the truth about why it’s happening.

Recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dictum – Existence precedes essence. With football, it’s equally existential, though with a twist.

Existence precedes putrescence.

Did you know NASCAR attendance/viewership is also tanking, at an even faster rate than university football? NFL attendance/viewership is down too.

The core problem is one of – incremental, to be sure, but real enough – civilizational progress. We are failing to replicate yahoos.

With each passing year, our young men look at stands rich with drunks either screaming at fields rich with assholes, or enduring fifteen minutes of ads screamed at them from stadiums rich with Adzillatrons, and they ask themselves: Is it just me, or is this disgusting? Am I alone in feeling kind of dirtied up by what I’m being put through here? By the sort of people I’m supposed to be cheering for? By the whole cheesy exploitative atmosphere? Does anyone else notice the hypocrisy of all this clean-cut Americanism as the world’s thinnest overlay for greedy coaches, concussed players, and the total domination of tv revenue?

In short:

I have a life (that’s the “existence” part) and I don’t have to spend one moment of it with this rottenness (putrescence).

The problem is particularly acute on college campuses, where a real-time war is being waged between the pressure from the institution to civilize, and the pressure from the game to barbarize. At least NASCAR isn’t being staged on the fields of Harvard! The great disadvantage under which college football labors is its proximity to sources of human development.

As universities respond by retrofitting stadiums with less and less seating, it’s going to occur to them that things like football and NASCAR are assuming the subcultural status of professional wrestling and motorcycle gangs. Schools will begin the titanic task of dismantling the vast smoky hollow that was their football stadium.

Watch the demolition, and you will be reminded of people all over Europe pulling down statues of Lenin.

All-male, all-football Ohio State University gets the full New York Times treatment as it generates the sort of outrageous scandals (see, most recently, all-male, all-football Baylor) all-male, all-football settings (see Penn State) tend to generate.

At the end of its article about local reactions to the most high-profile of its many current scandals (the wife beaters and the male buddies who ignore the wife beating scandal), the NYT reporters quote a guy saying “[we] don’t want Ohio State just viewed as a football factory.”

But look up at the opening paragraphs of the story: its culture of sports above all.

Sorry, babe. That’s the definition of a football factory.

Own it. And pay for it.

Lawsuits stemming from abuse cases have led to multimillion-dollar settlements at other universities. Earlier this year, Michigan State set aside $500 million to settle with hundreds of victims of Lawrence G. Nassar, a university physician who sexually abused hundreds of young women, including prominent gymnasts. A few years ago, Penn State agreed to settlements totaling nearly $100 million with more than 30 victims of the former football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of sexually assaulting boys.

Get out your wallet. And keep it out.