In other words, at Sacramento State, it’s a win-win!
In other words, at Sacramento State, it’s a win-win!
[A] Thanksgiving football game … ended in a bench-clearing brawl and led to at least one arrest… After a separate but seemingly related fight, Branden Diaz, 18, of Teaneck was arrested Thursday for allegedly assaulting a juvenile on Elizabeth Avenue, where the buses for the Hackensack Comets football team were parked… At a snowy Thanksgiving game in 2014, a Hackensack player intercepted a pass from Teaneck, going on a substantial run before veering into his team’s sideline. When Teaneck players who were trying to cut short the Hackensack player’s run also fell into the Hackensack sideline, a fight ensued… Also on this Thanksgiving, a fight broke out during the Eastside-Kennedy football game. Earlier in the month, there was a fight between the football teams of Pope John XXIII in Sparta and St. Joseph Regional in Montvale. Police also recently arrested an 18-year-old at a Ramapo High School football game. The 18-year-old was allegedly fighting an unidentified juvenile.
… “Our schools and the district as a whole recognizes that the behavior on the field on Thanksgiving Day is not the kind of behavior that is representative or reflective of the high standards we have for our students,” said [the superintendent].
Uh. Really?
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And how yummy is it that Pope John XXIII beat the shit out of Saint Joseph?
Cal football suffered a drastic year-to-year attendance drop this season after home games at California Memorial Stadium brought in an average of 36,548 fans per game — a 22 percent drop from last year’s average of 46,628.
… The drop in Cal football’s attendance comes as Cal Athletics faces huge interest payments from debt incurred by the 2012 renovation of Memorial Stadium and construction of its athletics complex. In total, Cal Athletics holds more than $400 million in debt, the most of any athletic department in the country.
… [One Berkeley student commented:] “If you see all these empty seats, you don’t feel a desire to go back.”
Watch closely.
[New South Wales] is planning for the likelihood that its new $700 million Allianz Stadium will be more than half-empty most of the time…
There are only three events that might draw more than a half-full crowd to the new stadium (and there’s no guarantee that its other events will fill even half of it), and Allianz will be competing to host those three with other, and in some respects superior, venues.
NSW plans to rebuild Allianz with two seating plans: a championship mode for the full 45,000-seat capacity and a “club” mode for only 30,000 where the upper stands will be blocked by a large advertising and information screen.
See how it’s done, every public university in the south? You simply block that vast empty acreage with vast advertising screens — a significant enhancement of the fan experience, for what fan doesn’t pant with excitement at the prospect of inescapable miles and miles of shrieking advertisements?
It was perhaps inevitable, in the intellectual life of our nation, that when one university rose above all others to express the essence of higher learning for so many of our citizens, it would happen on a basketball court among the scholar/athletes of the University of Alabama.
Their triumph was so intense that my own paltry rhetoric fails me. I will defer to one of countless chroniclers who, this morning, are celebrating this great academic institution.
A SPORTING EVENT FOR THE AGES: ALABAMA FIGHTS BACK AGAINST MINNESOTA WITH THREE PLAYERS
… In a match-up that was primarily seen on Facebook live, the 25th ranked Alabama basketball team played in one of the most incredible sporting events I’ve ever watched against the 14th ranked Minnesota Gophers… [After a huge on-court brawl,] the entire bench got ejected from the game, leaving Alabama with five eligible players for the rest of the game… That’s when the game truly started getting incredible.
A couple minutes later, [an Alabama player] picked up his fifth foul, leaving Alabama with only four eligible players for the final 11 minutes of the game. Less than a minute later, freshman John Petty landed awkwardly and needed assistance getting to the bench with an ankle injury. Alabama was down to THREE eligible players [who] fought back valiantly to make this a truly incredible game.
… I’m usually not glued to my screen during an early season college basketball match-up but this was a sporting event that I’ll never forget. Anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to watch this live should definitely check out the highlights.
The only thing UD can think of that would make this set of events more valiant and incredible would be if someone in the arena – or, hell, on the team – had a gun, and there had been an incredible and valiant massacre. It will happen. But we will have to wait. Meanwhile, anyone who has been watching higher education in America knows that the University of Alabama, in all its splendor, would be the place where this incredible breakthrough in the life of the mind would occur.
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UD thanks dmf.
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And don’t forget! It’s football season!
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Plus: If you want to keep up with the global bloodbath, a suggestion: Type FOOTBALL BRAWL into Google News.
If you’re interested in how the organizations that run all of these teams are completely corrupt, type FIFA corruption for international; for national, read University Diaries.
A writer could almost envy Louisville’s sports journalists. The whores, the bribery, the coaches, the chiseling ex-president – it’s almost too good. Tim Sullivan takes full advantage, in passages like this one:
At a time when it has been absolutely essential for [the University of Louisville] to be beyond reproach, it appears to have strayed beneath contempt. Lecturing the NCAA Committee on Infractions on precedent and proportionality from such a disadvantageous position risks being received as the epitome of arrogance and the nadir of self-awareness. It’s like complaining to a cop about being cited for speeding upon crashing into a parked car.
Nice. This is also good:
“At bottom, the penalty the COI imposed is simply unfair,” U of L’s appeal reads. “It wipes away the collegiate careers of numerous student-athletes because they were unwillingly drawn into McGee’s schemes; ignores the University’s efforts to investigate and redress McGee’s misconduct; and imposes one of the most severe sanctions possible – the vacation of a Division I NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship, two Final Four appearances and multiple seasons of competition – because of the participation of a handful of student-athletes who did little wrong.”
The problem with this account is that it paints members of the 2013 team as unwitting innocents — this though Powell has described several of them as enthusiastic regulars. At least two of those players – Chane Behanan and Montrezl Harrell – were formally disassociated from U of L for failing to cooperate with its investigation.
If your goal is to depict players as having sex foisted upon them, their active participation could pose a high hurdle.
LOL.
… in front of a million cameras on the sidelines of a football game?
Apparently this was too much even for Tennessee State University, which, over the objections of his teammates, has expelled Latrelle Lee.
Finally, an explanation. He keeps Vanderbilt’s stadium, full of fancy upgrades, free of messy crowds.
Ohio State, Florida State, Penn State, the University of Michigan, Texas State, and many other schools are either suspending their entire Greek system or suspending many fraternity chapters. The butcher’s bill is getting a wee bit too high, so time to take a breather before resuming the carnage.
After each [university football] game, we see statistics: number of third-down conversions, yards gained rushing, interceptions and more. But no listing of injuries. There are always injuries. We see the player down who doesn’t rise; the trainers rush over, he is helped up or carried off. We know concussions abound; despite the protective gear, we sometimes see blood flowing. This week, legendary sportscaster Bob Costas said football may soon “collapse like a house of cards” because of one “fundamental fact. …This game destroys people’s brains.” He acknowledged that tackle football is most dangerous for youths under 20.
Why is there no injuries list for each team after each game? (I don’t favor exposing vulnerabilities opponents could exploit. Anonymized statistical reports suffice.) By not systematically reporting injuries as important information, the football world sanitizes its narrative, making the game seem less harmful than it is.
Samuel Gorovitz
Syracuse.com
Yeah, UD sees where Lisa Wade is going with this…
But two can play that game! Imagine a world in which everything was the same about higher education except that there has never been quasi-professional football and basketball on many campuses. An 18-year-old waltzes into a dean’s office and says ‘I want to start a corrupt and bankrupting enterprise which will bring anti-intellectuality, illegality, violence, and global derision to our campus, and will ultimately put our president, athletic director, and senior vp for finance in jail for criminal neglect.’
The NYT‘s Frank Bruni forgets that frats/quasi-professional sports represents “the total way of life of a people,” as Clifford Geertz put it, and you can’t just decide to extract one element of a total culture (fraternities, university-sponsored alcohol sales at stadiums, coach-sponsored on-campus houses of prostitution for recruits and players, general excitement at the spectacle of college students getting their heads concussed, decades of fake courses, the adulation of violent, mentally ill people if they can play football, the routine cancellation of scads of classes so that everyone can attend games…) that you don’t happen to like….
Ooh, you don’t feel comfortable with guns in fraternity houses! The thought of packs of young men, alcohol, secrecy, weaponry, and post-game rage makes you uncomfortable, does it? Well fuck you. It’s a way of life, and you don’t get to say ixnay on the guns but the sexual assault of scores of female students is okay… Not at all or all in all, as Tennyson says…
… standing and seriousness has produced America’s latest fraternity death.