The more you know, the more there is to like, right?

What’s not to like about sports programs at universities whose personnel lack the independence to make sound medical decisions about the physical condition of school athletes during grueling practices… Where said personnel fear “retribution” if they for instance take a student who seems in distress out of that day’s practice session…

“We are killing our players.”

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And if the coach don’t get you, your frat bros will!

Dionne Koller, director of the University of Baltimore’s Center for Sport and the Law:

Was it criminal negligence? We need to hear more facts… I’m glad to hear the state’s attorney is monitoring this. We have a public university and we have the death of a student athlete. I would be sorry to see if the state’s attorney’s office just turned a blind eye. I’m not saying they should bring criminal charges, but this is certainly something they should be watching.

Headline, New York Magazine.

Point One: Some of us have been talking about it forever.

Point Two: People love violence, hon. NASCAR, NFL, WWE, stop me if you’ve heard this before.

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I like this dude who wears a MAKE FOOTBALL VIOLENT AGAIN hat.

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[W]hat (Maryland football coach D.J.) Durkin did? That’s college football. That’s sports… [T]o pretend that Maryland’s football culture is a unique football culture is to kid one’s self. The relative silence of college football coaches reeks of nervousness and self-preservation. They know it could happen to them too.

Remember UD‘s take on the matter. She giveth not much of a fuck what the NFL does. She expects it to be our most popular sports organization because it’s our most violent, and most everyone loves violence.

So what.

So we now know it turns many men into mental wrecks, some of whom kill themselves at rather early ages. It’s a commercial enterprise and that’s what it’s about and we know precisely now, with the science available, that that’s what it’s about, and a few players (chronicled on this blog) have looked at this fact and left the profession. The profession itself won’t do much of anything. It can’t. Nature of the beast.

This blog is about colleges full of nineteen year olds. Nineteen year olds just dying to get in the game.

“[M]ore than half of the Big Ten has now been the subject of a major scandal within the last decade.”

This writer worries about “a cultural problem.”

As UD has been suggesting for oh so long, it ain’t a cultural problem. It’s a cult problem. Many Big Ten programs are classic cults: Small secretive organizations fixated on arcane and violent behaviors, and led by extremely powerful charismatic authoritarians (aka cult leaders). They frighten everyone, starting with the university’s president, and they generate scandal after scandal because, like all cults, they’re fucking nuts.

Today’s faux shock is directed at the University of Maryland’s homicidal football program. And so it goes.

… down Memory Lane.

This was a couple of years ago. The student’s question went to the immense disparity in the president’s salary and various coaches’ salaries. Annoyed that the president blew off the student, Mr UD pressed the president on problems in the athletics program.

The president of the University of Maryland responded to Mr UD along these lines: There’s little I can do about the program, and the program can blow up at any time.

UD has always been rather astonished by the president’s honesty; because this of course is the fundamental truth of all big-time university sports programs. The jock school president – in the favorite words of the second-highest paid employee in the entire state of Maryland – is a pussy bitch and a bitch pussy and a pussy pussy and a bitch bitch pussy pussy pussy.

And the jock school’s big-time sports program can indeed blow up at any time. If you know even a little about how they’re run – and the people who run them – you know why these programs keep blowing up.

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Real men die for the University of Maryland football team, like 19-year-old Jordan McNair, who didn’t get much of a life, but at least lived it taunted as a pussy and tortured to death by a first-rate football power.

[S]ome number of Maryland football staff members probably belong in prison.

Which is to say that just as the university’s president anticipated, the program, having killed a player, has now blown up.

You need to go back to Rutgers’ celebrated basketball coach Mike Rice to get a sense of the sick sadism characteristic of the man we Maryland taxpayers each year pay $2.5 million. I mean, try reading through all of this without puking (puking by the way is something the UMD coach makes his players do … part of the school’s force-feed ’em til they’re monsters regime… ).

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A Deadspin report concludes:

One perfectly reasonable question is why Durkin, Court, and Robinson, at the very least, haven’t already been fired. Former Maryland football staff members say the current coaching environment of the program is intimidation-based; current and former players say these men routinely use intimidation and humiliation as motivational tactics; current and former players say they have a pattern of pushing teenagers past the point of complete physical exhaustion, in some cases to weed out and punish players they’ve targeted as unwanted. A pattern has been described that makes what happened to Jordan McNair a likelihood, if not an inevitability, but it says deeply troubling things about what Maryland’s athletic department deems as acceptable coaching behavior that Durkin’s tactics weren’t rejected long before now.

But we know why they weren’t rejected. It’s really not about “what Maryland’s athletic department deems as acceptable coaching behavior,” because Durkin and Court were after all hired at great expense to torture teenagers to the point where they can win football games. It’s about Maryland’s administration.

So look at what the president of the university said to Mr UD. He has no control over the program. His job is to resolutely look the other way, and to irritably say nothing to people who insist on questioning him about a program over which, officially at least, he has authority.

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It’s a mad mad mad mad world. Over in the shabby humanities buildings they’re committing seppuku if they fail even for a moment to use scrupulously sensitive, politically correct, language; in the sports palaces, they’re getting in front of 19-year-olds’ faces and spitting pussy and faggot and fucker and shit and bitch at them while making them run on a hot field until one of them actually dies from the abuse.

Far out.

But routine reality at many of America’s big-time sports universities.

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UPDATE: In response to another coach (Will Muschamp, South Carolina) passionately defending Durkin, since much of the reporting about his program is based on anonymous sources:

A player is dead, but Muschamp is more worried about attacking ESPN’s article and the staffer giving them information.

Glorious University of South Carolina.

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As usual, Deadspin has the most trenchant response to Muschamp.

Yes! Ohio State might go for the Ultimate Coacha Inconsolata move, and bliss it will be in that dawn to be alive to see it!

UD says GO FOR IT, OSU. GO FOR IT.

We need to go back to Tom Lehrer to begin to approach the ongoing Zach Smith story.

EX-OSU COACH ZACH SMITH
APOLOGIZED FOR STRANGLING EX-WIFE

For the Twitterverse, which spent the past week snickering at “#GymJordan,” the “King of the Sauna,” the obvious explanation [for his total denial of knowledge of sexual abuse of wrestlers at Ohio State University], of course, is that [Jim] Jordan is covering up his own hidden homosexuality or, far worse, that he may have participated in the abuse himself. There’s no evidence of either – but Jordan should have known he was opening himself up to practically everyone on Earth suspecting it.

Should Ohio State at some point move to fire [Urban] Meyer with cause, he would almost certainly then sue the school for breach of contract. Meyer would stress, among other points, that [Zach] Smith was not convicted of any crimes. In addition, Meyer would argue that he was under no legal obligation to fire Smith and that none of Meyer’s superiors instructed him to fire Smith. Meyer might also express or imply that other university officials, such as the athletic director, general counsel and dean-level administrators, had multiple opportunities to learn of, and respond appropriately to, the allegations against Smith. To the extent Meyer could implicate other university officials in any wrongdoing, the school might seek to avert a lawsuit and negotiate a settlement with him.

Yes, let’s hop forward to how much the taxpayers of Ohio will be out to get rid of Urban Meyer. Lawyers, years of legal wrangling, pr firms, replacement of all the university administrators outed and implicated, and then the settlement, will cost the suckers MILLIONS. And millions.

And of course OSU is looking at scads more expensive lawsuits arising out of both the Meyer/Smith and the Dr. Richard Strauss scandals.

But then Ohio is such a rich state.

The coach explains his no weapons policy for University of Florida football players.

“It’s a no-weapons policy in certain situations of how to be educated to not have (issues)…No weapons, that’s easy to remember. If I write out all the different (scenarios)—no weapons in these situations or have a weapon for a hunting situation, if I’m doing this, I store it at this location, I keep it here, I have gun safety rules and knowledge—that’s not a quick catch to them to register in their mind. Does that make sense?”

Which neatly explains why one of his players, found to have a loaded AR-15 in his car, will suffer no punishment.

As a Deadspin columnist rather querulously notes, ‘If a “no-weapon” policy isn’t designed to keep players from carrying assault weapons for the purposes of shooting people during altercations, there really is no point at all in having any weapons policy.’

Maybe it applies to nuclear weapons.

We shouldn’t forget, amid the current wrestling sex scandal and football domestic abuse scandal, significant alumni of that biggest of big-time sports universities. These are people whose words and actions speak the sorts of truths normally buried at places like OSU.

First let’s recall truth-bearer Cardale Jones, a football player who in 2012 tweeted:

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.

Ol’ Cardale counts as a wise man at a place like Ohio State, that rare person willing to just come out with it. Got all kinds of heat for it, too — but looks like he’s getting a bit of his own back these days. His tweet about the domestic violence scandal is short and sweet and attracting a lot of attention:

Funny how life works.

It’s clearly a dig at the coach at the center of the scandal – Urban Meyer – who like Rick Pitino is a big fat hypocrite and no doubt gave Cardale hell for telling the truth way back when. Pretty nice karma, ain’t it, Cardale?

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And do not forget Kosta Karageorge, a mightily-concussed OSU wrestler/football player who one night dressed all in black, crawled into a dumpster, and shot his brains out. Reminiscent of Tyler Hilinski and quite a few other high-profile, macho, campus suicides, Karageorge’s mysterious gun-inflicted demise seems to carry important meanings about one form of young, heroic, American manhood.

Maybe he can get the Ohio State wrestlers who are ready to testify that while a coach there Rep. Jordan did nothing in response to their telling him about their being sexually abused over a long period of time by the team doctor … maybe he can get them to reverse their position and say haha just kidding…!

ONLY AN IDIOT WOULD
BELIEVE URBAN MEYER

Dan Bernstein:

No reasonable person can now conclude that Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer did anything but lie through his teeth about not knowing that a Buckeyes assistant coach brutally attacked his wife in 2015.

… [Urban’s wife] Shelley Meyer [who knew about the abuse] is also an instructor at the Ohio State school of nursing and would have been bound by Title IX regulation to report such abuse — and is required similarly as a registered nurse. Her husband is also mandated to report.

… The only people who could possibly believe Urban Meyer’s version of events at this point are the willfully ignorant and the irretrievably stupid. Officials running a massive public university aren’t as likely to be the latter, but they wouldn’t be the first or last to have money and power turn them into the latest, shameful version of the former.

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Specializing in whipped toppings!