… when this hero of a school that features the word Christian in its name beat the shit out of a bunch of people at a bar. No one cared, because he runs real fast, and he went on to be drafted by an NFL team.

And of course his Texas Christian University hero page remains proudly up online cuz you know he’s so great y’all and we’re so proud to be associated with him, especially now with his beat-up girlfriend giving interviews about how much she bled in his latest attack on her.

Yeah okay so it’s all too much for the NFL team and he’s been dropped. But you won’t find TCU taking down his hero page! A player who can really draw blood doesn’t come along every day.

Now this is impressive. This UD must share with you; and in addition UD must bow to the Greek people.

To be so supremely gangrenous, so suppuratingly pus-ridden, as to face expulsion from arguably the world’s most infected body (FIFA!!); to be so persistently, so top-to-bottom violent — from gun-wielding team owners who rush the pitch and threaten referees, to alcoholic fascists in the stands who beat the shit out of everyone — is truly to have accomplished something grand.

But of course the expulsion will never happen. Did Hitler expel Goering from the party because he was too anti-semitic? In world football, you can’t be too corrupt or too violent.

– has long assumed, correctly, that its ridiculous trustees will listen to the shit the athletics department tells them year after year about taking care of that pesky deficit. Crazed highly-paid coaches, some still working for the school, others suing the school; games in which no one takes any interest; student athletic fees through the roof; academic quality in the toilet; a deer in the headlights president and an empty-threat legislature – you know the drill. Trustees know the drill…

Cuz everything’s gonna be fine as soon as the athletics department not only kills the deficit, but starts making HUGE money. Hold onto your Stetson!

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

But every now and then there’s a kind of … eruption on the part of one of the trustees. One of them suddenly flies over the cuckoo’s nest and lets out his anger at having been lied to and infantilized for years and years and years. It never seems to happen at our most craven sports factories – Auburn, Nebraska, Louisville – but it can certainly happen elsewhere. Because it’s very rare and beautiful and precious and fleeting, like one brief brilliant flash of a peacock’s tail, we take note of it here at University Diaries.

Rob Doughty, president of the UNM Board of Regents – which is responsible for signing off on years of consistently failing budgets from [the] university’s athletics department – says he feels he’s been lied to and won’t rubber stamp any future athletics budgets nor consider forgiving any of the department’s estimated $7.5 million deficit before seeing significant changes.

… “I want to know right now, in front of everybody, why are we [this much] in the hole when I was promised last year that we had a balanced budget?” Doughty intensely questioned.

… “I’m very upset today. I feel like this Board of Regents and the folks that were there, and especially me, were misled and were told things that weren’t true. And [athletics was] making false promises.

“And, I have to say, that in my time at this university in the last four years, as I sit here today, I think I’m as mad as I’ve ever been…. I think the projection line was done just to balance the budget…. [I] want to know what research was done, what analysis was done to really back the projected figures.”

Hey can’t put one over on Doubty Doughty. That projection line was done just to balance the budget!

I’m sorry, kiddies. Either all of these people are idiots, or this is the way they want things to be. It’s a way of life. You don’t get to break in, a century after the cargo cult has established itself, and say Maybe building a landing strip for magical gifts won’t make the magical gifts appear…

Shaking My Head, the man says. Shaking my head cuz one day before the big scrimmage a chunk of the team attacked police and property outside a bar last night. This program, the man says.

But it isn’t just the program, right? Texas Tech is a university; a university whose current national rank is #176 , down twenty points from a couple of years ago. A real trailer park of a place, with violent tailgaters, sadistic coaches, 1500 current lawsuits from dismissed sadistic coaches, a freshman who a few weeks ago got annoyed and took his handgun out and blew the head off of a campus security guy, and, well, there’s jest a ton of stuff like that about this great Lubbock institution. Ask me about Alberto Gonzales!

So … shaking your head? You live in the world’s biggest academic shithole. There’s not enough room in all that shit to move your head, let alone shake it.

**********

UD thanks JND.

… with the safety of their community, as always, paramount in their admissions choices.

What do you do with a sunken Baylor?
What do you do with a sunken Baylor?
What do you do with a sunken Baylor?
Early in the mornin’

Give it a new coach and a female president
Give it a new coach and a female president
Give it a new coach and a female president
Early in the mornin’

Talk up how we’re absolutely positively Christian
Talk up how we’re absolutely positively Christian
Talk up how we’re absolutely positively Christian
Early in the mornin’

Keep your trap shut about recruiting practices
Keep your trap shut about recruiting practices
Keep your trap shut about recruiting practices
Early in the mornin’

‘Women can feel safe though our players rape them
Women can feel safe though our players rape them
Women can feel safe though our players rape them’
Early in the mornin’

‘It’s just a little sacrifice to give our heroes
It’s just a little sacrifice to give our heroes
It’s just a little sacrifice to give our heroes’
Early in the mornin’

Tunisia’s sports minister coins the term “stadium terrorism.” The FIFA representative reviewing the situation in Greece (he’ll be lucky to get out of Athens alive) calls it “unbearable that people are scared to go to a stadium.”

You never see women or children at many world soccer games. Before (on transportation to the games), during (at the games), and after (on the streets; in the pubs), the host city is on fire with drunk, rioting, gun-bearing men. Despite the measures governments have introduced (games played in empty stadia; tv blackouts; massive police presence and massive arrests; physical separation of opposing fans; targeting of known thugs and gangs) everything’s getting worse and worse and unbearably worse.

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

Only it isn’t unbearable. Scores die after games, and cities are torched; armed black-shirted gangs rush the pitch during the game and go after referees. So what. FIFA – a virtually all-male, ridiculously corrupt organization – will do nothing about the latest atrocity in Greece. It’s bearable. It’s all bearable. It’s all boys incorrigibly and escalatingly being boys.

And when it gets even worse – when players and referees are beaten to death during games televised all over the world – FIFA will still do nothing. Unfathomable amounts of money are being made, a lot of it by that organization’s corrupt officials. No one’s going to mess with a good thing.

The director of performance for UM’s football team receives $250,000 a year for knowing how to perform.

Recently, during a very long night of challenges, he hit all his marks and then some.

UM, a once impressive school, is now mainly known for drunks and Rich Rodriguez.

Hell, it isn’t even very non-weaponized thug-friendly.

Terrified spectators are scattering.

Greek soccer has been plagued by pitch invasions and violence on and off the pitch for years and authorities have repeatedly promised to clean up the game.

However, attendances have dwindled and this season only four clubs in the 16-team top division have posted average attendances of more than 5,000 spectators per league game.

In their own defense, referees will soon start packing heat, so that we can expect to see the kind of on-field fire fights that will, to be sure, remain attractive to a certain audience demographic (i.e., fans who also pack, and who can’t wait to join the fun), but will alienate any remaining non-weaponized spectators. Thus the 3,000 or so people who show up for most of the current matches will dwindle to a few hundred fully outfitted maniacs.

But hey. Gangs are people, too.

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

Corruption, referee intimidation, fan violence has been pandemic for years in Greece.

Add a league match in one of the world’s most anarchic states.

Add a team owner who’s a paranoid, violent, Russian oligarch.

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

I mean, so far, so good — no one cares that FIFA is hopelessly filthy.

No one cares that people routinely get beaten and killed in and around world soccer matches.

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

The whole thing: FIFA, club owners, fascist fans — it’s just pigs happy in the swill, and no one wants to interrupt the fun because if you do these people will blow your fucking head off.

They’re Walter Sobchak, at 1:30

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

But Walter’s so crazy that eventually his mad pistol-whipping ways get him in a little trouble, just like his real-life equivalent, eminent Russian statesman Ivan Savvidis. Ivan doesn’t go anywhere without serious personal weaponry and several heavily armed guards, and when a Greek team he owns ran into some trouble with a referee yesterday, he stormed the field along with his armed guard and with his hand on his gun and informed the referee “You’re over.”

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

What a pretty picture. Look at this (scroll down): Proud fascist enforcers, all of them dressed in black, swagger fully weaponized onto the field of play to kill the referee. It takes you back.

And forward. Nihilist kitsch again becomes the way of the world. You can see its most naked return on the fields of FIFA.

Life of the mind, USA.

When Pittsburgh swooped in to snatch a likely-to-be-dismissed Kevin Stallings from an underachieving Vanderbilt basketball program, it raised eyebrows. When he failed to win a single game in ACC play in his second season as the Panthers head coach, it raised fans’ ire. And now that it looks like it will cost the program nearly $10 million just to get rid of him, Stallings is raising one last thing — a question.

Just how incompetent IS the University of Pittsburgh athletic department?

How the fuck do we not comply with this?

… dumb.

You knew we’d check in on Western Kentucky University again, right? We’ve been following the fortunes of that school ever since Professor Robert Dietel, way back in 2006, excited intense ridicule and hatred from the school’s trustees for warning that going Division I would destroy the school’s finances.

Now ruined, and a laughingstock, WKU does what they all do: It hires a new deer-in-the-headlights president, a guy who looks the part cuz he wears bowties, and they send him out to shut down what’s left of the school’s academic side. Enjoy his picture. Note the deer-in-the-headlights look. And the This is a Real University; I’m a Real President bowtie. The copyright holder on the bowtie thing is sports-whore supreme Gordon Gee.

The trustees insisted that Dietel was an asshole and that classy coaches like Bobby Petrino and an incredibly expensively recruited (but less carefully vetted) football team would make enrollments skyrocket…

That rocket went flaccid and now Bowtie Bambi meets the glare of national news cameras head-on…