Capacity of Aloha Stadium: 50,000.
Background here.
[The University of Louisiana] is playing Ole Miss on Saturday without four starters, each of whom is suspended …
[Okay. Four players is a lot at one time, but… ok…]
… The suspensions are related to the four being arrested during the offseason last spring.
[Related? Caused by, no? And were they arrested together because of the same offense? What’s the deal?]
Thirteen UL players, including those four, initially were arrested for conspiracy to commit felony theft.
[Whoa. Now thirteen. Thirteen, even by the rancid standards of this country’s student-athletes, is a lot. What gives?]
It’s believed the other nine served a one-game suspension at various points earlier in the season, but their suspensions were not made public at the time – and the Cajuns did nothing to make clear the real reason they were out.
[Murkier and murkier! So the university quietly suspended this player for this game and that player for that game without telling anyone… Cuz a couple of player absences per game isn’t going to attract attention… And the university said nothing about it…]
It some cases, it was thought the absent players were out because of injuries.
[Why was that thought? Because the coaches told the local press that?]
The 13 later had the charge against them reduced to criminal mischief, a misdemeanor, with a chance to have the charge eventually dismissed upon completion of a pre-trial diversion program that includes community service, drug testing and other program requirements.
[What the fuck did they do? Aren’t you a newspaper? Aren’t you supposed to tell me?]
… They were arrested April 25, following an investigation that produced video evidence of an occurrence at Huger Hall on campus.
[An occurrence? Now I’m laughing! WTF.]
The alleged victim in the case: former teammate Artez Williams, who was arrested for felony rape on the same day items allegedly were taken from his room.
[My head is spinning. Hold on. We don’t know what they did, but they did it to Artez, whose recent terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day featured an arrest for rape and the theft of items from his room, but whose woes also include a still-unspecified attack by thirteen current football players…. Or are we talking about the theft?]
Williams recently had a pre-trial hearing in which he was scheduled for another pre-trial for a date in 2018.
[… And?… But this is basically the end of the article…]
College football’s got all that stuff, plus it bashes your brains out.
… let’s consider a comment from an Arizona State University observer. Why is its stadium empty?
I grew up an ASU fan and will always be, but what has happened is sickening. $305 million dollar upgrade to a tax-funded stadium that has at best 9 games per year, partially empty, ludicrous. I wish we could go back to educating rather than allowing our teachers [to] try to become businessmen. There is a reason they teach and are not in private business. No private business would spend $300 million to upgrade a venue with only 9 games possible a year even if sold out. Bring back sanity!
So the insanity has made him too sick to attend games.
Other perennial excuses include high ticket prices, a losing record, and, well, it’s so much more pleasant to watch in your quiet home, with its absence of threatening drunks and ear-splitting non-stop ads from the Adzillatron.
Plus lately there’s something kinda… squirmy… about watching college football. “The reality,” notes Bob Costas, “is that this game destroys people’s brains.” Now maybe it doesn’t bother you to watch college students get their brains bashed in. I mean, yeah, probably it doesn’t. But Costas says that in a few years, as more posthumous CTE scans come in, even you might start feeling a little uncomfortable shrieking with glee when an opposing player is stretchered off the field, his hands shaking ever so strangely.
Now, now. You think the fun’s going to be over, don’t you? You won’t be able to give your coach five million dollars a year and each of your assistant coaches 2.5 million dollars a year; and there’s also that thing, in the proposed tax bill, about no more humongous tax deduction on that humongous donation you give a university for the right to purchase humongously overpriced season tickets.
[I]n 1988, Congress added subsection 170(l) to the IRS code that specifically allowed for an 80 percent deduction on donations to “institutions of higher education” that granted “the right to purchase tickets for seating at an athletic event.”
“Every time I think about it, I want to throw up,” [says tax law expert John D. Colombo]. “The effect of this exemption in the tax code is that my money, as a taxpayer, is going to help some guy be able to sit on the 50-yard line.”
These tax experts have jumpy stomachs. Most of us instinctively understand the educational and charitable urgency of tax-exempt bonds to subsidize new football stadiums (the new tax bill’s gunning for that one too), tax-free multimillion dollar compensation for coaches, and 80 percent deductions for 50-yard line sitting…
I mean, sure, everyone knows that “These [university athletic] programs are not consistent with underlying theories of exemption, and in fact are perfect examples of why commercial revenues of charities should be subject to taxation.” But boys will be boys, and boys write rolling around in the dirt concussing your head legislation; and no one is more surprised than ol’ UD that a bunch of Republican boys are actually sounding semi-serious about doing away with the fun…
But seriously – as opposed to semi-seriously – if you think any of these proposals will go anywhere, you also thought the University of North Carolina would be punished for twenty years of fake courses.
But at least it makes the trains run on time.
Twenty years of Julius Nyang’oro’s multifarious fake courses for athletes was fine by the University of North Carolina; one measly authentic course offered by Jay Smith made top administrators, as one, leap to the top of their desks screaming EEK. I mean, we can’t just approve every proposed course, and this one lacked clear and effective methods of keeping athletes eligible to play…
Oh but okay. I mean, if you must introduce meaningful content into the curriculum, I don’t suppose we’re in any position to stop you…
[T]here are a lot of people who, like me, are not used to showing school spirit through sports and don’t really see the point…
And I don’t understand why that is such a bad thing. [Why the] underlying assumption … that Penn “should” do something to increase attendance at sporting events and therefore increase school spirit[?]
The N.F.L. is a business enterprise where announcers are often capable of addressing the sport’s most pressing on-field issue only in tones of gallows humor. To wit: late in the Panthers-Bears game, the defensive end Akiem Hicks was slow to get up after the whistle. This prompted some brain-injury comedy in the booth. “They’ll take a look at him for a possible concussion,” said one announcer, proceeding to note that, “of course, [Hicks’s teammates] gotta pat ’em on the head.” His partner mildly marvelled, “It’s just part of the deal, Dan.”
It is a dark, unacceptable irony that an institution devoted to developing intellectual capacity would allow, let alone celebrate, the systematic destruction of what it works so hard to create.
Guy says universities should stop playing football – just because it knocks the stuffing out of students’ brains…
[T]wo vectors [are] colliding [at WSU] – football excellence and flagrant overspending. [So] WSU is at a crossroads. It will have to decide whether… any football expense is justifiable, or [whether it will] take another road, where some level of sanity and perspective about the role of sports within an institution of knowledge is regained… [WSU needs to decide if it wants] sports to occupy a place in the hierarchy of university priorities that is a bit less insane.
You better believe ol’ UD is just on the edge of her seat wondering which way Washington State University will go! I’m sure you are too! What a nail-biter!
Evil whoring assistant coach!
Evil whoring corporate roach!
Little boy innocent! Little boy blue!
Rick has no choice but to sue sue sue sue.
Indeed, we knew that was coming.
What you might not have known is the other big news:
Rick Pitino has just been named Academic Provost at the University of North Carolina!
This blog has long written about how big-time athletics infects a university, attracting to it scads of unserious students, jocksniffer administrators, and rich, control-freak, alumni boosters. Eventually the university is run by the two guys with all the money: the alumni booster (Boone Pickens; Phil Knight) and the football/basketball coach (JoePa Of Blessed Memory and Cached Statue; Still-Uncached Statue Man Nick Saban).
Every now and then one of these hopeless little North Koreas, with their Dear Leaders who take students’ money in order to play the pointless war games (KILL AUBURN!) that keep students in a stupor, decides to improve itself, to look more like a university than an experiment in repressive desublimation. But whether it’s Penn State or the University of North Carolina, the systemic sickness of the jockshop (Professor Emeritus Sandusky puts PSU’s leadership in prison; Julius Nyang’oro’s depravity ushers in mandatory class inspections for all faculty) will always – as the UNC observer in this post’s headline notes – overwhelm any self-improvement efforts and reveal the sick joke at the permanent core of the place.
*****************
UD thanks an UNC insider
for this post’s headline.
