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.

In one of many similar pathetic appeals across the nation, Minnesota’s Star Tribune editorial board begs its readers to go to its state university’s football games. The prospect of what looks to be 13,000 empty seats at UM’s opening game (“cold weather will not be a legitimate excuse for staying away”) seems to have generated panic and depression at the newspaper, which no doubt realizes that widespread and growing indifference to the game will have a serious impact on its circulation and ad revenue and all.

But look how they make the case, petites.

The university has made a large investment in coaching salaries and facilities. Gophers fans can be part of the solution by buying tickets, getting the maroon and gold out of the closet and coming back to campus on game days.

Parsing the logic here is a challenge. I guess the crux of the thing lies in the word “solution.” Uh… because UM, over intense local opposition, insisted on building a stadium it can’t afford, and because it hires incredibly expensive jerks throughout its athletics programs, the citizens of the state must bail it out of all the financial and legal and reputational problems it has predictably brought on itself.

UM, in other words, has done its part in steadily bankrupting itself, demanding more and more sports money from its students, and making the school a laughingstock when its AD turns out to be a drunken idiot who reels around town “asking if he [can] perform oral sex” on random women; now the good people of Minnesota must do their part by spending huge money to attend games in which they have no interest.

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The Wall Street Journal just published a piece – COLLEGE FOOTBALL’S GROWING PROBLEM: EMPTY SEATS – which features in its first paragraphs (the only ones you can read without subscribing) the self-same University of Minnesota. It explains why the local editorialists pleaded with their readers not merely to buy tickets but to actually show up in the stadium on game day. WSJ:

When Minnesota hosted Nebraska at TCF Bank Stadium last year, the game featured charismatic new Golden Gophers coach P.J. Fleck, a home team fighting for a bowl berth and a big-name opponent. The announced attendance was 39,933—an OK crowd for a crisp November day in Minneapolis — but it didn’t tell the whole story.

Only 25,493 ticketed fans were counted at the gates, 36% lower than the announced attendance and about half of the stadium’s capacity. More than 14,000 people who bought tickets or got them for free didn’t show up.

Glad you asked.

…they cling to guns and football.

But… you know… BRING ‘EM ON!

At no point in a long article about an insane drop in participation does the reporter even vaguely, even tentatively, allude to some of the likeliest reasons UM’s incredibly expensive newish (2009) stadium stands more and more empty.

Of course the stadium almost never filled up for football (it can seat 80,000! but they count 50,000+ as a sell-out), never made the money its boosters said it would. Goes without saying. Boys will have their big toys, and students will pay for them.

But now it’s really getting bad. Embarrassing, in fact, as cameras pan vast viewing deserts, and as the university hemorrhages money.

The reporter duly writes down what the athletics people tell her about all the shit they’re doing to make it ever so much more fun to sit in a hellhole full of troublesome drunks (UM has already desperately made booze freely available) than watch on your phone, or, best of all, not watch at all. She says nothing about a raft of player and coach sex scandals, enormous buyouts of said coaches…

Somebody needs to tell her that spending a lot of time and money cheering on really gross people and programs isn’t an attractive prospect for a lot of students and locals. You can throw all the incentives you want at people, but if your program keeps pumping out scandals (and what program doesn’t?), you’re going to keep losing your audience.

Yes, that’s what we always think of first when we think of Berkeley, isn’t it? Sports.

As with the dying Goethe, so with the dying college football game, the famous final words will be:

Mehr licht … bier!

Throw more beer at the little shits!   Still more!!

Whether it’s the real game, at a high school, or the virtual game, at an entertainment complex, football and Florida go together like Smith and Wesson.

Put America’s most violent game together with virtually universal gun ownership, throw in an open public venue, and POOOOOF! Mass shooting.

The shots and shrieks are recorded by all the dying people, so the soundtrack of America writes itself: Concussive hits from the game; RATATATATATATATATA; fuck they’re shooting run; bodies running; grunts; bodies falling.

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And Parkland’s only four hours away! The Sunshine State’s full of opportunities – at many of the same locations! – to get killed in a large-scale event.

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Their flagship university.

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[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.

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SEVENTEEN TRILLION

“How many mass shootings in your state will it take for you to do something?” David Hogg tweeted to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).