And that’s why Baylor University is where it is today!

It’s a real red-letter day for university sports at that most fervent sports school, Penn State. Not to be outdone by America’s rape capital, Baylor University athletics, Penn State now waves goodbye to a president and a vice-president as they both go behind bars for child endangerment. Graham Spanier gets “two months to be served behind bars and two more to be served under house arrest,” while his vp gets “two [months] to be served in jail and four under house arrest.”

As for the Penn State athletic director whose talk a few years ago at a Knight Commission meeting in Washington was so disgusting, cynical, and insulting a whitewash of university sports that UD and others in the audience audibly groaned and laughed as he spoke: He gets “7-23 months with three months to be served in jail and four more under house arrest.”

Pardon my French, but UD can’t tell you what sweet poetic justice it is that this asshole is going to jail.

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A university president in prison for child endangerment! And all because he was afraid of Joe Paterno and his creepy band of Happy Valley fanatics. But anyway. That’s ancient history. Today we all focus our attention on that other dominant force on the campus of Penn State University: fraternities.

From a Deadspin comment thread:

Don’t worry- few Penn staters will be outraged. They’re too busy being outraged that people might expect their fraternities to act like civilized people.

UD‘s friend Jay Smith offers a very popular course on the history of college athletics that so terrifies faculty and administrators at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill — a place that felt perfectly comfortable offering for twenty years Julius Nyang’oro’s Bullshit for Jocks course — that they’ve cancelled it.

Ol’ UD is more than familiar with the Kafkaesque absurdities of football factories like UNC; but she will admit that the leadership of a school peeing itself at the thought of an eminent historian offering a course on a subject arguably more urgent than any other for corrupt jock-worshippers like UNC to think about is – well, hilarious. Truly a new low.

Here’s a school made sordid by athletics, and it’s now trembling at the possibility of merely thinking about the roots of its depravity.

Read the emails in this article.

Years after Jerry Sandusky went after a little boy in a Penn State University shower, that school’s president at the time faces sentencing in court.

… (see last three paragraphs), UD has followed the predictable – predicted – demise of Western Kentucky University as it embraces big-time football. As object-of-ridicule-and-contempt Professor Robert Dietel tried to tell the WKU idiots more than ten years ago, it’ll bring expensive slimy coaches and violent players to campus. It’ll drain the already paltry funds available for academics, and the steady march of player arrests will associate WKU’s name with criminality. The latest big roundup of players – for beating the shit out of a fraternity guy – on camera – is getting the national publicity it deserves.

I hope the WKU trustees who attacked Dietel are proud of themselves.

I felt dirty and gross for going to football games or supporting the school; I stopped going to games after my junior year.

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When it started to come out, some of my professors would [make] little sacrilegious jokes; they’d say things like “our good Baptist institution,” and there was just a level of acrimony to it.

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[T]he law students felt like their law degree was being cheapened by the scandal. It’s frustrating to be tied to a school that’s so obviously misogynistic. A lot of it was us being like, ‘Are you serious? It’s 2015, ‘16, ‘17; it’s an actual joke that people still think we can favor football over the safety of women on campus.’

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Football was fun, and it’s not as much fun anymore because it’s like, look at what some members of the football team have been accused of doing. For me there’s also some frustration there because we have a really good product in the education we offer our students, and it’s like, ‘You all tarnished that.’ When people hear ‘Baylor,’ they think about the football team. Our reputation has been tarnished, and it shouldn’t be.

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None of the women interviewed above mentions Waco’s great bar scene, so UD will. Those who think the Twin Peaks shootout was the only opportunity for Baylor women to get shot as well as raped need to know that the fun continues.

Who says the NCAA has been doing any oversight?

VIOLATED: Exposing Rape at Baylor University amid College Football’s Sexual Assault Crisis by Paula Lavigne and Mark Schlabach is scheduled to hit the bookshelves August 22.

Center Street Books of Hachette Book Group announced Wednesday it will publish the novel…

A person could be forgiven for assuming a story about an ostentatiously Christian university run by a six million dollar a year coach who looks the other way while his athletes brandish guns and gang rape would of course be fictional. It’s such a crudely conceived, over-the-top hypocrisy tale (including the last-minute desperate appointment of a female president) that most publishers would reject it as absurdly formulaic.

When a football player brandished a gun against a female student-athlete, the response again allegedly focused on the victim.

“What a fool—” [football coach Art] Briles texted an assistant coach, according to the court paperwork, “she reporting to authorities.”

Lordy.

And I do mean Lordy.

Here comes this CBS sports writer who dares make himself a national laughingstock by taking seriously the Christianity Baylor University craps on. Way he sees it, if you actually do ask what Jesus would do if he got caught running a rape factory instead of a university, the answer is he’d be so ashamed he’d shut the factory.

The latest lawsuit makes clear

what Baylor football unleashed on its campus and the unfortunate coeds whose lives are permanently damaged. All because an institution meant to teach, nurture and protect them allowed football to be valued over human decency and dignity.

Something about the following account from the suit seems to have disturbed the CBS guy.

According to the suit, the football team had a system of hazing freshman recruits by having them bring freshman females to parties to be drugged and gang-raped, “or in the words of the football players, ‘trains’ would be run on the girls.”

Considered a bonding experience by the players, according to the suit, the rapes also were photographed and videotaped, and the plaintiff confirmed that at least one 21-second videotape of two Baylor students being gang-raped by football players had circulated.

The guy has even thought through how Baylor can get rid of football.

You release every student from their [football] obligations but allow them to retain their scholarships if they want to stay. You help the coaching staff find new jobs and pay them until they do. You weather raging boosters who revolt and direct their money to meaningful causes. You have the courage of your convictions.

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What he hasn’t thought through is the got-nowhere-else-to-go problem. Without football, what is Baylor? Not much. That’s why they’re just as desperate right now as that Officer and a Gentleman guy.

The head of the NCAA, for instance, makes around two million dollars a year to “police… trifles.”

But of course he earns all that money not for policing trifles, but for lending his institution’s approval (after a few wrist-slaps) to criminal syndicates like Baylor University. He’s paid to legitimize universities that continue to bring to campus people who batter and rape their students.

That’s worth a lot.

But what do you expect. It’s the University of Florida.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm sees it all the time: When people find their beloved institution – with which they strongly identify themselves – in the swill, they defend it by turning on their grandest, haughtiest, most auspicious, rhetoric. Our Glorious Penn State is a Bright and Shining Light! We must do battle with the barbarians who distort the record of our heroic coaches! That sort of thing.

The problem is that this approach makes you look like Blanche DuBois defending her virtue and rhapsodizing about Belle Reve.

Grand and glorious Baylor University has fallen on hard times. It sold its soul to football victory at any cost (just like Penn State) and is currently, er, reaping the whirlwind. There’s a new gang rape allegation almost every week. What to do? What to say?

Well, this is what people are saying. Many people are saying that Baylor is a solid candidate for the death penalty. Some say the regents should resign. Some say Baylor should be kicked out of its conference. Some say withhold federal funds. Here’s a typical comment:

Shelving the football program for a few years would send a needed message in college athletics that enabling criminal behavior for the sake of maintaining a program’s national ranking and economic power won’t be tolerated.

And then there’s C. Stephen Evans, a Baylor professor who grandly implores people in and around Baylor to shut up.

I implore those continually criticizing Baylor in a public way to cease and desist. You are doing serious damage to Baylor’s reputation and demoralizing those of us who work to make Baylor a great place for students. Perhaps those of you who are not on campus every day do not realize how dispiriting it is to read such diatribes in the daily paper several times a week.

The reason this sort of writing makes you a laughingstock is that now everyone knows precisely how great a place Baylor has been for students.

[A] student-athlete told her coach that five football players had raped her at an off-campus party. The coach then took a list of names to [football coach Art] Briles, who said, “Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?”

Baylor’s the kind of place where students need to know before they get there that there are bad dudes on the football team and that it is the student’s responsibility to stay out of their way. There’s Belle Reve, and there’s reality. That’s the Baylor reality.

Critics of Baylor’s criminal disregard of its students are not doing damage to Baylor’s reputation. The regents, the president, the people with power at Baylor who paid Art Briles six million dollars a year to protect very dangerous people who could catch footballs did the damage.

When the Dallas News even bothers posing the death penalty question for Baylor University, you know fans of the Baylor Rapists are allowing themselves to wonder whether their football heroes really deserve their full measure of devotion. “If there was ever a case that warranted a college football program getting the death penalty, this sure is it,” says one sports site in response the latest team-bonding-gang-rape-on-film allegation. Did the lads even stage dog fights? Did they drug the women?

Oh, pish. Not to worry. I defy you to conjure a scenario that would draw a serious NCAA penalty of any sort. Let alone the death penalty. Cuz we just love our brain-battered boys to death.

The latest antics of sordid, farcical University of South Florida catch the eye of a local judge.

Coach Strong, if you are listening, in the last couple of months there have been two arrests of your players for very violent felonies. This court, and I’m sure I’m not alone, questions whether you have control over your players. It’s fairly clear you do not have control of them…

Of course Strong isn’t listening, and why should he? First, the judge is a girl. Second it’s two arrests in two months which is nothing. Teamwork, as you know if you follow this blog, means that some universities have ten player arrests in two minutes. Third, no one in the “community” gives a shit that some of its members “have to suffer at the hands of” USF players. Everyone understands that you have to make some sacrifices for the game.