… 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.

… it staggers us, it makes the papers, it’s a big deal.

Sometimes, as in the 2016 case of Ohio State football player Kosta Karageorge, it’s not a mystery: Macho, covering up concussions that are starting to produce symptoms, easy access to a gun, a fight with a girlfriend, a history of depression. What one remembers of Karageorge is not the mystery; it is the unbearable pathos of his having placed himself inside of a dumpster before pulling the trigger.

More typically, the suicides of intense and gifted student athletes – like, most recently, Washington State University quarterback Tyler Hilinski – are indeed mysterious. Most exhibit few to no overt signs of serious mental disturbance; up until the moment of death, they seem genial, social, active in their sport. Indeed, intensely active – and this is something Karageorge shares with many more enigmatic student athlete suicides: All of these people seem too intense about training and winning.

“He was really hard on himself,” a Yale friend said of Cameron Dabaghi, who jumped off the Empire State Building eight years ago. “If he lost a tennis match, it wasn’t because of a blister or a bad line call … He believed in fairness, he believed he had to be better.”

“Madison [Holleran] was beautiful, talented, successful — very nearly the epitome of what every young girl is supposed to hope she becomes. But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly,” writes Kate Fagan about a University of Pennsylvania runner who jumped off a parking garage. Another woman, an intensely competitive track star at Wesleyan, set herself on fire on one of the school’s playing fields.

Hilinski took (without telling him) a friend’s AR-15-style rifle – a much more physically destructive form of suicide than the pistol Karageorge used. Certainly any discussion of young, often impulsive, student suicides needs to note the wide availability of profoundly destructive firepower in the United States.

Hilsinki’s predecessor as WSU quarterback tells Yahoo Sports:

“I feel like at times we feel like we can’t express our emotions because we’re in a masculine sport and him being a quarterback, people look up to you as a leader. He felt like he really probably couldn’t talk to anybody. We’ve got to change some of that stuff. We have to have resources and not have a stigma of people going to that.”

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A former Clemson player:

“Especially a male athlete, and a football player in such a physical rough sport, you never want to be the guy that’s having to admit that something’s wrong. You get that mindset of always pushing through. Nothing’s wrong. I’m good to go.”

One night, in the winter of 2013, crowds of Michigan State University students ripped trees out of the landscape, burned them in the streets, and jumped over the flames. Here’s the Nazi-book-burning-fun image. Close to sixty similar bonfires went up all over East Lansing in response to MSU having beaten Ohio State — another perennially torching and rioting school — in a football game.

You want links? You want links to decades of torching-the-town and scorching-the-earth and torturing-police-horses Penn State, Ohio State, and Michigan State? Sorry. Too fucking depressing. Look them up yourself.

It’s a long tradition: After football games, or after the firing of child-rapist-enabling coaches, or in celebration of holidays, hundreds of drunken shits gather at America’s football factories and attempt to incinerate their neighborhoods.

As if places like East Lansing weren’t bleak enough. Let’s establish a university where we admit hundreds of people who, as one, yank out of the ground all of the saplings planted in an effort to bring some life to our cold terrain.

A university! Maybe East Lansing harbors some gangs we might expect to do something like kill trees and set the town on fire. These are university students. Michigan State University is a university.

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But, as all of America’s media is madly noting today, MSU has a specific culture. (I’ve just linked you to today’s Michigan State University Google News page. Scroll down. Endlessly.) It’s the same culture Penn State and Ohio State and plenty of other NCAA-favorites (the NCAA’s getting excoriated everywhere too – like – hey – turns out it’s corrupt) exhibit, and it’s a deep culture – the work of decades of abjection in the face of athletics.

At this point, schools like these are basically distilleries. Rape and pillage are what you get when you’re a big ol’ distillery packed with twenty year olds.

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So the depraved people at MSU let a depraved doctor systematically rape hundreds of children. Same thing with a coach-rapist at Penn State. The president of MSU and the athletic director just resigned. And now we’re breathlessly told that this is just the beginning of the massive numbers of sports-related crimes about to be exposed at MSU.

Funny thing: It played out almost exactly the same way at Penn State! And Auburn! I could go on!

The trouble at Michigan State appears to go beyond Dr. Nassar, who was a university employee for decades and the physician to two women’s varsity teams. An ESPN investigation Friday described a pattern in which sexual assault complaints involving prominent athletes, including more than a dozen on the football team and a few in the celebrated men’s basketball program, were handled by the athletic department rather than through regular university channels.

Michigan State insufficiently complied with federal officials monitoring the university under Title IX, the gender-equity law, the report found.

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MSU … will not face criminal charges for [its] part in Nassar’s actions, though [it is] facing multiple civil law suits from over 100 victims of his abuse.

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It’s a culture, see? You don’t dump the prez, bring in a deer-in-the-headlights replacement, and create a new culture.

It is, as they say, what it is. The sadistic, greedy, amoral coaches who, once finally fired, dedicate the rest of their lives to suing the school for four hundred million dollars. The deities on the money teams who sack quarterbacks and women. The brain-damaged ex-football-hero trustees. The student body seething with alcoholic bullies. When they tire of watching pledges die from booze forced down their gullets, they head out to the town saplings.

The school’s too busy dealing with five ongoing high-profile athletic and academic and fraternity scandals to notice the creepy little team doctor or the elderly has-been coach off raping children somewhere. And all the decent people on the faculty, in the administration, and in the student body keep their heads down and do their work and pretend their school’s not a saloon.

… dismounts.

Philly sports fans have a reputation for being passionate…

As ever, UD recommends you read Deadspin’s account – including comments!! – of the arrest of one of Temple University’s sports heroes. Nobody covers the wonderful world of football like Deadspin, and their readers’ comments never fail to amuse.

Did you not see Cam Newton
Splattered all over the Superdome turf
And Dante Fowler Jr. slam Tyrod Taylor’s head
So hard into the EverBank Field grass that he sent him
Straight into concussion protocol?

The 60 mph collisions from 1970 are 90 mph now.
And it’s not Volkswagens anymore. It’s 18-wheelers.
Ben Roethlisberger is bigger than Dwight White was
When he played for the Steel Curtain.

… scandal of big-time American university sports.

A sample:

In May, Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, announced that it would increase its athletics allocation by $1.6 million while cutting $31 million from the rest of its budget and laying off dozens of employees. The faculty union pointed out that basketball, Wright State’s most popular sport, regularly failed to fill even half the seats in the campus stadium and decried the decision as absurd. “There’s no way of reconciling it or justifying it. It’s simply outrageous,” says the AAUP’s [Rudy] Fichtenbaum, who teaches at Wright State.