… for long detailed descriptions in the nation’s press of old men showering with young college athletes, or hanging around saunas masturbating while watching the lads, this is your lucky day.

It’s not Penn State this time, but it’s another one of America’s most spirited and disgusting jockshops – Ohio State.

Ohio State! Type its name in my search engine for an entire afternoon of beyond-sick stories from the land of healthy mind/healthy body university sports.

[H]ead [wrestling] coach Russ Hellickson had to physically drag the voyeurs out of the building on multiple occasions, and reportedly begged the university to move the team to a private facility.

Feast your imagination on a vision of masturbators, their tongues still hanging out of their mouths and their dicks still hanging out of their pants, being dragged outside by the head coach on the campus of Ohio State University!

[Bob]: Hey Betty how bout that physics exam.

[Betty]: What was that? Did you see that?

[Coach Hellickson]: They don’t pay me enough to drag these jagoffs out of the building.

And yeah yeah that nice congressman who used to be a coach there knew nothing of any of this.

… the University of Maryland.

Lawdy. Hand me my smelling salts.

The whims and vagaries of the TV people trump the attendees. The multitude of TV timeouts give the home viewer an opportunity to re-beer, recycle past beers, walk the dog, etc… while we in the stands are baked, rained and/or snowed upon while subjected to 120 decibel commercials or the always entertaining Guess What Our Starting Left Tackle’s Favorite Pizza Topping Is!

[W]e the ticket holders are asked to pay full price and get our lazy butts in our seats by kickoff to watch Our Guys pummel a Div II or III team 75 -3. My friends have dubbed these generic patsies the “Tennessee School for the Dead.”

I live in a state where the football program [is] getting out of hand and having several sexual assault claims has tanked enrollment. They rely on football to help get the school name out but that can go another way also.

Maybe the sight of men, who have never been in a college classroom, trying to give each other head injuries has simply become less entertaining.

… blaring music played on the sound system …

Clocked time of actual play in every NFL game over two seasons and found it averaged eleven minutes of action in a three-plus hour game. NCAA games are probably similar. Slow and boring, especially without the distractions a TV broadcast can offer. And that’s before you get into the issue of the apparent inevitability of brain trauma from playing gridiron football, which makes attending a game seem more and more like sitting in an ancient Roman arena watching gladiators kill and die for our amusement.

The majority of time spent in the stands is wasted listening to commercials, having music blasted at you during every stoppage in play, watching kiss cams, and being bored along with the players as they stand around waiting while referees review yet another play.

[Arizona State shows] people with milk mustaches sponsored by a local dairy, fans with weird hair styles sponsored by Sport Clips, muscle-flexing and air guitar contests sponsored by ??? All can be seen on the new 8 million dollar jumbotron.

A sport that almost guarantees that those who play it for any length of time are going to sustain cognitive damage cannot prosper for long.

[V]ery few football-playing rapists are ever held accountable.

Well…obviously the problem is all those outmoded stadiums! College presidents ought to vigorously campaign for new stadiums…you know, so they can attract the cream of the crop student candidates. And then they can hire coaches they can pay millions and millions of dollars. And then complain because the public isn’t supporting higher education.

And – check it out – almost no comments in defense of university football.

Da, is close to $85 million athletics debt at people’s university, but here is good news: Central Committee has just announced it is ‘implementing a budget management plan that will narrow annual deficits steadily until achieving slightly above break even in FY 2024′!

This is truly great news, and I cannot wait for totally deficits-free 2024!!

And remember, comrades – say it with me:

Success in athletics … is the biggest and best marketing tool a major university has at its disposal.

The propensity of America’s sleaziest university presidents to recruit/admit/hire/defend the sleaziest imaginable players and coaches now has a name: The Heimlich Maneuver.

Named in honor of Luke Heimlich, convicted child molester and, thanks to the eager backing of OSU president Ed Ray (so eager he’s talked himself out: a spokesperson tells a newspaper Ray is “not available for Luke Heimlich questions“), hero of the OSU baseball diamond, The Heimlich Maneuver designates the complex series of moves by which sportswhore presidents and their … uh … Andre McGees… do everything humanly possible to keep miscreants who can catch and throw balls students in good standing at their university. It really doesn’t matter what you’ve done, or indeed, now that you’re on campus, what you’re doing; block and tackle at a high level, and go ahead and drink drug bully rape assault steal cheat and shoot off your assault rifle to your heart’s content. We were all young once. Or, if we’re Jerry Sandusky, we’re all young at heart.

Even the majors are saying no to Heimlich; the only place he’s welcome is at the contemporary American university.

If your athletic department can support the massive amount of time and money involved in fielding a successful team, then by all means, go ahead and do it. But if your school is creating a football team from scratch as a way to raise revenues, or get attention for your school, or attract students, in the long term it probably isn’t worth it financially.

Pitino rapped.

Oh yes, Art Briles is a fine man, unfairly reviled as the football coach who with apparent indifference presided over the Baylor University football scandal…

This big ol’ Texas newspaper article spends not one moment asking the real question: Why did Art Briles recruit/retain eight people who turned out to be alleged gang rapists? We’re supposed to be impressed because after the accusation of gang rape “four of the accused players [were] removed from the team.” Why were they on the team in the first place, putting all Baylor students at risk? Why doesn’t the reporter – eager to absolve Briles of wrongdoing – mention his comment, in a text message, in response to the initial report of the gang rape?

“Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?”

It wasn’t Briles’s responsibility to avoid a situation where a significant chunk of his football team was made up of “bad dudes.” It was the raped student’s responsibility to understand that Briles recruited bad dudes and to stay out of their way.

No, nothing at all in the article about this:

“The football program was a black hole into which reports of misconduct such as drug use, physical assault, domestic violence, brandishing of guns, indecent exposure and academic fraud disappeared,” [a] court filing said.

Not a word about any of that in the article.

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

And that’s how you rehabilitate the morally despicable. If you’re Texas.

In the matter of the more than ordinarily mysterious suicide of the young (he was only 21) Washington State University hero quarterback, most people are talking about the recent autopsy finding that Hilinski already showed CTE. He had the brain of a sixty-five year old, the doctors said.

Which means scads of university football players in their twenties are probably running around with some degree of CTE. Hilinski after all was a quarterback, a position which typically receives less cerebral punishment than many others.

Et alors? Virtually no one in this country cares; they love football too desperately to give much notice to the early gruesome deaths of their gridiron heroes. People only noticed Hilinski because he wasn’t a mentally eviscerated former pro in his sixties, but still a kid. Same age as Owen Thomas.

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

No, ol’ UD is more struck by Hilinski’s father’s comment up there in my headline. Hilinski’s father thinks it’s pretty fucking weird that his kid’s buddies in the dorm had an AR-15 style rifle. Handy, simple, 110% deadly – just the thing for an impulsively self-destructive guy who’d barely hit legal drinking age. (Almost all very young suicides are impulsive.) Hilinski had never handled a gun, but his clueless buddies were happy to give him some pointers, shortly after which he stole the AR-15 and – with this powerful weapon of war – blew his brains out. An incredibly violent bloody suicide, this one.

“We’re always going to have suicide,” [one researcher says,] “and there’s probably not that much to be done for the ones who are determined, who succeed on their 4th or 5th or 25th try. The ones we have a good chance of saving are those who, right now, succeed on their first attempt because of the lethal methods they’ve chosen.” … The element of impulsivity in firearm suicide means that it is a method in which mechanical intervention — or “means restriction” — might work to great effect.

Hilinski’s father’s intuition is absolutely correct; had his son’s demise been more difficult and less absolutely certain than a firearms death, things might have turned out differently.

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

It looks as though no one in any way saw Hilinski’s appalling act coming. His suicide note, which will not be released, apparently revealed little or nothing of his motive (UD‘s going to guess that this means its content was pretty short and simple: Goodbye. Sorry.). FWIW, here’s a possible scenario.

Always very strong and healthy, he had begun to experience troubling symptoms: Some mental confusion, maybe some occasional trembling in his hands. Given his lifelong intense devotion to football, this would have panicked and horrified him and made him wonder about his future in the sport, not to mention the future of his general health.

Further, plenty of people who knew him have commented that he exhibited the macho stoicism typical of football guys: If you’re suffering, you don’t tell anyone.

Throwing a convenient big ol’ killing machine into that mix is just asking for it.

Too much of nothing, or too much of less than nothing: However you slice it, intellectual life at your basic jockshop is, er, a bit off.

Courtesy of Charlie, a reader, there’s this local yokel update on Oklahoma University, long ruled by Gotta Love Em! David Boren, and absolutely drowning in sports revenue..

But now they’ve got a new president, and he seems to have decided that the next step is to move toward creating an actual university on the campus, where “OU is bleeding money while Sooner athletics swims in it.”

Bleeding how much, you ask? After all, the more successful the front porch of the American university, the more successful the university, and it doesn’t come more successful than OU’s athletic programs, so OU must be…

One billion dollars in debt.

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

The yokel struggles with this. How can it be? His final line says it all:

We will wait and see what [this spectacular disparity] means, but it would seem to mean something.

I think we can do better than that. I think we can specify quite precisely what it means. It means OU is a football team with some sort of shabby deadbeat school attached to it somewhere. It means that, as a witty long-ago OU president once said of his school, “We want to build a university our football team can be proud of.”

But we don’t really want to, or at least David Boren didn’t want to. He wanted to soak his students for higher and higher tuition, and deny raises to his faculty, while paying top dollar – over the top – to coaches and their minions. Even as OU’s new president began making noises about how this wasn’t a great way to run a university, OU announced they’d just given the football coach a $1.7 million raise.

The only word for it is surrealistic: “[A]s the academic side of the institution finds itself in dire straits, Sooner sports sits pretty.” Academically, although OU designates itself a university, there’s no there there. The whole place is football. And if you think you can reverse that winning, nothing-but-football record, you’re nuts. The new president is about to discover what the word “culture” — make that cult – means.

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

And then there’s also massively indebted Rutgers – though here the debt in question is athletics itself. Rutgers economics professor Mark Killingsworth, after immense efforts to uncover the actual numbers from a most unforthcoming university, concludes that

the real deficit for 2016-17 … comes to a total of $35.4 million plus $11.9 million, or $47.3 million — the largest deficit in the history of Rutgers athletics. Despite [President Robert] Barchi’s oft-expressed pious hopes for athletics self-sufficiency, the program has now blown through a grand total of $193.1 million in deficit spending since he arrived in New Brunswick.

Killingsworth concludes by stating the obvious – obvious to everyone but the president and trustees of Rutgers:

[A]thletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.

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

Rich jockshop; poor jockshop. Don’t make no never mind.

Well, if you read this blog’s coverage of Washington State University, you’re not as surprised as this New York Times columnist. Because you would never call jockshop WSU an institution of higher learning.

… their massively overcompensated, violent, nutso football coach – the Roseanne Barr of the Gridiron – blasts out a hoax tweet, is informed it’s a hoax, and tells everyone who told him it was a hoax to fuck themselves.

[A doctored video] has been circulating for about four years among extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists; [it] splices elements of a speech [President] Obama gave in Belgium in 2014. The words are edited to make it seem like Obama told a European audience that “Ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.”

In fact, as the unedited video and transcript of the speech shows, Obama was saying the exact opposite, discussing two visions of power in the world and arguing that authoritarianism was a threat to the international order.

Actually, the version where Obama’s saying the opposite is also doctored. Here is the actual original, from a speech Baylor president Ken Starr gave at Baylor when the rape scandal broke under coach Art Briles:

American universities are too intellectual to win football games; athletic victory can only come when professors surrender their rights to mentally retarded football coaches.

But giving the stupidest person in the state the state’s highest salary is only Step One.

The winning coach must also be a moral cretin, happy to recruit so many bad actors that WSU football boasts more arrests than any other team (here’s a loving defense of the goofy adorable lads).

He must be embroiled in endless expensive lawsuits against his former university football employers so that his current employer is afraid to fire him (lawsuits and buyouts and bad publicity oh my!).

Did I say afraid? Unable.

… Leach’s newly signed five-year, $20 million [WSU] contract means they have no power to coach up their head man on anything and have no financial resources to buy him out if push came to shove — which it most certainly would if they tried to rein in The Prickly One. Moreover … this episode ensures that no other Power 5 school would consider hiring Leach away.

He must contribute to the school’s already appalling overall deficit by adding a $67 million athletics deficit.

He must, ideally, be the foreman at so demoralized a football factory that students must lecture professors, at the end of every semester, on their responsibility to give them final exams.

He must coach at a school that responds to massive sports scandals by appointing new presidents who can say huh? Dunno. Just got here.

And if you’re Leach’s Washington State, which happily scooped up the notoriously mad bad Leach cuz it doesn’t give a shit about anything except football (even sportswhore Texas Tech fired Leach after he tortured a player), you’re going to show your keen sense of irony by hiring a new leader whose main life accomplishment is this:

President [Kirk] Schulz chaired the NCAA board of governors, the NCAA’s highest-ranking committee, from 2014-2016. The board ensures that each division of the NCAA operates consistently within the basic purposes, fundamental policies, and general principles of the association.

When UD read that, she almost peed herself laughing.

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

Commentary coming in, and as usual Deadspin’s got some of the best:

[The] irony of a guy whose entire career has been spent at the public trough JAQing off about government power is a thing of beauty.

This one has a country music song twang to it:

[H]e’s every aging white moron …

(Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be…)

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

Sing it, Carly.

The concussed player you left in your office
The sound of you tormenting the kids
The look in your eyes like a nutcase
Your moronic conspiracy vid

Guess it’s our fault what you brought us
Our reputation’s dead on the floor
Why does your ghost still haunt me?
Cuz I can’t get rid of you no more

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

Another Deadspin winner.

I think we can all agree that tweeting racist memes about our first black President is an excellent way to recruit black athletes.

Giggle, giggle, goes Scathing Online Schoolmarm.

No.

Make that laugh out loud.

Talk about Freudian slips getting by reporters and their editors.

In an article stating the obvious – Moscow under the imminent World Cup regime will be both the world’s strictest police state and the world’s violent epicenter – the LA Times writer can’t help but let slip the even more obvious point that Russian corruption, in this and every other sphere, is not only widely, but wildly, credited.

… presiding over vile and violent world soccer, gets desperate enough to go the girl route.

Just hours before Richie Incognito, a violent paranoid wreck with a long history of mental illness, was hauled off to the hospital, this Vikings fan wrote:

[S]igning Incognito at least gives the Vikings more options at figuring out the best offensive line combination for next season… [H]e has seemingly turned a corner for the better …

Sho nuff. That’s what they said of Richie way back when he attended the University of Nebraska, and then during his … brief scholarship run at the University of Oregon.

Incognito fell into [a] mind-numbing pattern of offensive behavior, always washed away by the fact that someone was willing to ignore his troubles because he could physically handle himself on the football field. He’s been identified as a menace, suspended and dismissed. He’s been kicked out of games for fighting, accused of being dirty, and now, exposed as an apparent bully who shook down a younger teammate for $15,000 in milk money.

Universities and professional teams have been all over this profoundly damaged man for years and years and years, excited by the vicious bullying that is his sickness and their field advantage. Surely after Richie’s latest incarceration and observation for dangerous insanity he will be picked up by a team once again, and we can once again enjoy the spectacle of this volcano of a man erupting all over a town near you, as local reporter/boosters and coaching staff assure us he’s turned a corner.