… Torrey Green, who graduated with a top-ranked 7.0 sexual assault average, and on whom the school looks back with pride. No better time for the school to celebrate Green than now, when he’s on trial for “12 felonies — including kidnapping and rape — in seven cases, after seven women came forward saying he sexually assaulted them while he was a student in Logan between 2013 and 2015.”

Of course, they came forward years ago, but USU didn’t do anything. USU puts its resources into maintaining Torrey Green’s hero-page.

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USU’s finest is facing so many charges that his lawyer, in an act of editing-for-concision that Scathing Online Schoolmarm finds commendable, asks that all the cases “be merged to avoid ‘redundancy.'”

It’s so tiresomely repetitive, the details of one (yawn) rape case after another… You’ve heard one rape case you’ve heard ’em all…

This way we’ll save time and keep the jury awake…

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And after all, I mean… entre nous… it’s Utah, where a man can lose track of his sister wives… I’m sure it’ll be easy to convince a local judge that Green’s large blur of womenfolk can be herded into one trial.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm loves that genre of academic writing which is the outraged high-ranking campus sports-whore attacking legitimate professors and students at uber-jock universities. Before SOS talks about the email from an Auburn University dean that appears in my headline, she wants to share with you an earlier example of this classic clown-school missive.

In 2013, a women’s lacrosse coach at the infamous University of Louisville was informed that one of her players had been seen exercising her personal freedom by wearing a Michigan State sweatshirt. The coach left the following voice mail for the player:

Darby, change your clothes, don’t bother coming to practice today. Do you know that I just got a phone call about you wearing a Michigan State shirt? You obviously have no idea how serious athletics is at the University of Louisville. I do not want to see your face today until after practice, but your butt better be up in my office with a Louisville shirt on your chest when practice ends.

Schools like Auburn and Louisville are like this: They got nowhere else to go. They got nothin’ else. Nor, being game-cults, do they appreciate Winston Smiths who fail to conform to the cult. These schools got brain bashin’ ball or they got nothin’. They’re not about to go down without a fight when alien invaders like the New York Times expose their intellectual nothingness; they’re not going to let some random woman athlete introduce changes to their uniform; and they’re certainly not going to let some dissenting legitimate scholar get off scot-free. Me big macho school, on field and off!! GRRRRRRRR don’t make me mad….

It’s like… NCAA: FAAAAACK YOU.

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Auburn got so pissed at the econ professor on the faculty who kept complaining about its massive bogus course system – centered on the keep ’em eligible public administration major – that its president

took the highly unusual step of suggesting that the entire economics department be moved elsewhere.

In a memo written on presidential letterhead, [Jay] Gogue recommended that [Michael] Stern be assigned a new supervisor and that the department “no longer be a part of the College of Liberal Arts.”

It’s just what I’ve been predicting, mes petites, and Auburn will clearly be the first school to actually do it: The football cult’s economics department, with its expert financial review of the athletic program and its commitment to academics, must go. Exile. Banishment. Siberia.

And not only that – see again the email that I quote in my headline, from Auburn Dean Joseph Aistrup to the dissenting econ prof. Belitting; threats; a demand for recantation. The whole Orwellian number.

Indeed here is the model for the econ prof’s next step: Room 101, followed by I ask only for you to accept my love of Our Leader.

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[One Auburn professor] put a picture of Aistrup arm in arm with… the athletics director, on his office door, alongside photos of Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong-un.

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SOS thanks a reader for sending her Jack Stripling’s CHE piece.

The American version of Sophie’s Choice is playing out in Mississippi, and it is every bit as agonizing – more agonizing – than what Sophie endured.

Guns v Football. Guns, Football, Collide. Guns or Football. Guns, Threats, and SEC Football.

If a new bill fails to pass, you will have to choose between the two things you love most: Your AR-15 and the Rebels. You will not be able to bring your gun to university football games.

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Security officer, Vaught–Hemingway Stadium: You may keep one: football or the gun.

Snopes: Take my little girl! Take my baby!

… about his university’s athletics program. This blog chronicles tons of econ profs – people capable of actually running the numbers – who turn against their employers and detail the lies the schools tell about the money they’re spending on football. The latest guy is Colorado State University’s Steven Shulman.

[Student fees] have risen 45 percent since Tony Frank was appointed president of CSU in 2008.

Institutional support to athletics has almost tripled since 2008. These subsidies transfer resources from academics into athletics. As a result, CSU has not been able to increase instructional spending per student or protect itself from revenue declines.

Every time the state cuts CSU’s budget, the university is forced to cut academic programs. Only athletics is insulated from budget cuts.

CSU’s way-expensive new stadium hosts losing games attended by fewer and fewer people.

A commenter on Shulman’s column puts the matter well.

CSU [has] gambled $450 million (in bond repayments) on a sport that is a dying a slow death. Empty seats, phony bowl games, ethics problems – everywhere you look there are reasons to question the new stadium decision. The project can only be justified and supported by a few old alumni counting on tax benefits.

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That “old alumni” thing has UD thinking about how we might retrofit football into a truly twenty-first century university curriculum.

Pretty much everyone agrees football is over – dying a slow death, as the commenter notes.

Figure it’s got another twenty years as a professional sport, ten years at the non-southern university, and thirty years at the southern. (Down south, they’ll have to wait until the fan melee that turns into a mass shooting to really finish off the game.) It’s not too soon to start thinking about how we can excite our ahistorical students (postmodern Americans are ignorant of history, and live in what one theorist calls a “radical presentness”) in things antiquarian by featuring football, alongside, say, the Salem Witch Trials, as examples of pre-Enlightenment American ways of life. We might not be able to get our students to study Latin, but we can certainly interest many of them in the study of football, which will feature, for instance, field trips to massive rotting campus colosseums.

UD has long said that in a few years schools like Rutgers – run by jokesters and jocksters – will begin phasing out their economics departments, or at the very least introducing litmus tests for new hires.

Econ professors are among the very few on any campus who can actually run the numbers on athletics programs. The loudest among these professors often have access to the local newspaper’s opinion columns, and they can stir up outrage against massive sports deficits. The cleanest thing to do will be to shut them, and their departments, down. You could, short of that, hire only economists who have demonstrated that no amount of sports-related deficit is too great to outweigh their adoration of athletics.

Meanwhile, Rutgers has the curse of Mark Killingsworth, an econ prof who relentlessly, in opinion piece after opinion piece, chronicles what he describes as the brainlessness and insanity of that school’s president and board of trustees as they drive the place into incredible debt.

[The] real [athletics] deficit for 2016-17 can now stand up and be counted: it 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.

If you think this is bad … there’s worse. From the university’s response to another OPRA request, I learned that Rutgers currently has an outstanding total of $33.13 million in “internal debt” — the last of which won’t be paid off until 2030.

… The members of Rutgers’ Board of Governors have shown that, collectively, they are either too ignorant or too timid to do anything to restore even the most modest degree of fiscal sanity to Rutgers athletics: for them, anything goes. Apparently, they don’t understand, or don’t care, that athletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.

The only way to shut this guy up is to dump his entire department – call it a fiscal emergency, brought on by a temporarily high athletics deficit.

Former MLB pitcher Esteban Loaiza was arrested in San Diego on Friday on three drug-related felony charges, including possession of more than 44 pounds of cocaine and/or heroin.

… According to Baseball Reference, Loaiza made more than $43.7 million over his career.

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that the University of New Mexico is among the lowest of the low, not merely in terms of sports, but in terms of academic standards. (Feast your eyes. Skip over the New Mexico State posts, which also come up when you put UNIVERSITY NEW MEXICO in the search engine.). People pretend to be shocked when The Next Thing happens, but if you know UNM, the fact that they’ve just suspended their $800,000 a year football coach for – it’s alleged – racism, abuse of players, and, in the case of this post’s headline, not really dealing very well with rape allegations against his players – you ain’t shocked.

UNM has placed Davie on unpaid leave for 30 days and says he will have to take mandatory trainings, including on cultural sensitivity.

You bet.

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Update: Sports journalism’s best commenters are just getting started over at Deadspin, but there are already a few gems. Like this one:

The judges will need a moment to consider whether Dave Bliss’s post-UNM career should be taken into consideration when deciding the title of “biggest asshole to coach for the Lobos.”

… when she sees scathe-worthy writing, she rises to the occasion.

Here’s the SEC commissioner trying to get Mississippi university leaders riled up against the overwhelming passage, in that state’s House, of legislation clearly paving the way for conceal carry folk to bring their guns to football games. He intervened in the very same way when Arkansas tried to get guns in the hands of football fans; now he’s sticking his nose in the business of the good people of Mississippi. Here’s what he wrote to the chancellor of the University of Mississippi.

Given the intense atmosphere surrounding athletic events, adding weapons increases meaningful safety concerns and is expected to negatively impact the intercollegiate athletics programs at your universities in several ways… If HB1083 is adopted to permit weapons in college sports venues, it is likely that competitors will decline opportunities to play in Oxford and Starkville, game officials will decline assignments, personal safety concerns will be used against Mississippi’s universities during the recruiting process and fan attendance will be negatively impacted.

Yes, SOS hears you. ‘SEC Commissioner’ describes a position of dignity and gravitas. The SEC Commissioner is not in a position to say

I’m shitting bricks thinking about your wasted frat boys whipping out their AR-15s and blowing everyone away.

But he could still have done a better job of writing to the chancellor. Let’s consider how he could have issued his warning more eloquently.

There’s a stiff bureaucratic feel to the whole thing, isn’t there? And given that he wants above all to convey a sense of urgency, dead language of this sort does the opposite. Notice that he begins all bass-ackward, backing up to his point rather than stating it right out.

Given the intense atmosphere…

No. Start right off with guns. Guns make football games more dangerous, and they’re already somewhat dangerous. In other words, the whole intense atmosphere thing begs for clarification.

I mean, having for a long time read coaches and fans talk about university football games, UD would have thought ‘intensity’ in their regard referred simply to wholesome fellowship and partisan fun! No? Ok, then don’t leave me hanging: Is there something else intense going on at football games?

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Well, think about it, UD. Look around an SEC stadium during a game. Did you ever see so many police? Why do you think they’re there?

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But of course the commissioner doesn’t want to specify the nature of pre-addition-of-weaponry football game intensity, because there’s a large athletics industry supporting him and his family, and that’s nothing to fuck with.

So, along the same lines, he goes for the unbearably ugly negatively impact to try to delicately gingerly ever so lightly skip around …

Skip around what? Good writing is more direct than this. You’d have to be insane to add guns to crowds of drunk agitated immature males.

And now for the windup, which of course features a second use of negatively impact. Finds it so nice he uses it twice.

… it is likely that competitors will decline opportunities to play in Oxford and Starkville, game officials will decline assignments, personal safety concerns will be used against Mississippi’s universities during the recruiting process and fan attendance will be negatively impacted.

I wonder why football players, specially in the south, might not be happy to play in front of tens of thousands of Mississippi university students with big ol’ guns at the ready??? Hm. Hm. That’s a real poser.

But anyway… Let’s redo this final clause, shall we?

Pads and helmets can only do so much. Bad enough you’re concussing your head. You’re also putting yourself out there in a huge open shooting gallery with armed angry drunk southern males. Ditto for sitting-duck game officials. People get real angry at officials. In the pre-technological world of high school sports, you have to get up, run onto the field, and beat officials to death with your own fists. With guns, it’s a piece of cake.

Georgia will not hesitate to tell recruits trying to decide where to play that they definitely could get their asses blown off in Mississippi. As for your fan base: Though the lads’ aim might be wobbly from a few hundred feet, they’re for sure not going to miss the nice broad back of the guy two rows ahead who just called them a motherfucker. So your attendance numbers aren’t going to be enhanced. Unless you add all the new fans who are there to shoot off their guns.

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Yes, yes, SOS knows that she has slipped into the sort of language incommensurate with the moral stature of an SEC commissioner. Sorry.

Onward and upward at America’s most notorious public university, the University of Louisville.

“[T]hey could wind up brain-damaged. Fine. They’re professional daredevils. It wasn’t immoral to watch Evel Knievel. We watch stuntmen in movies.”

College football: A mind is a beautiful thing to waste.

… as always, worth a read.

America’s most violent university campus (details over many years here) does its thing after yesterday’s football game, and a student writes in defense of systemic rioting at U Mass Amherst because, after all, what else is there? High tea at the Emily Dickinson Museum?

Countless players suffer from early dementia, depression, confusion, suicidal tendencies, and countless other alarming, often mortal, conditions resulting from the game… [T]he beauty [of football] is the beauty of a car crash in an action movie —
only here there are no stuntmen, no C.G.I. As N.F.L. players often say, nearly every play feels like a car crash, a real one. Even after an “injury-free” game, players soak themselves in ice baths; they are, head to toe, an enormous contusion.

Eastern Michigan. A national sports joke. It has spent itself into the gutter on games. It thinks for-profit online courses are going to save its sports-dead ass. What absolute total idiots.

The vice-chair of the scandal-plagued University of Louisville’s board of trustees takes note of the fact that when your university has devolved to what whatshisface would call a shithole, it breeds a bit of animosity on the faculty when $55 million is found to make your stadium bigger.