[West Virginia governor Jim] Justice … summoned both Marshall [University] President Jerome Gilbert and five members of the school’s Board of Governors to his office on separate occasions to demand that the school get rid of [the school’s football coach, and hire a friend of the governor’s], who is 73 and last was a head coach in 2004.

We’re only four months into this year’s Golden Handcuffs competition, but it’s never too soon for an update.

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Tradition remains important. In time-honored style, one arrestee wears instantly legible clothing.

Just to make sure he could be identified, [Adrian] Magee wore a pair of No. 73 LSU Nike shorts that matched his jersey number.

… has a hell of a football coach too.

Twenty players started a huge brawl on campus. All have been arrested for assault. The coach has made a statement.

“Anybody who has been a football player or a student on campus knows things like that happen,” he said. “It’s no problem. We’re going to handle that. The University did a great job putting out a statement on it. So we’re just going to take it and wait until they get done with their process.”

Because there’s no “I” in theft.

Get ready to hear a lot about Premature Tackle Syndrome (PTS), where a just-signed football recruit starts beating up women after signing his letter of intent, but before enrolling.

[Dantne] Demery’s next stop [player-arrest-ridden University of Georgia has dropped him after his arrest for pummeling his girlfriend], assuming he takes one, might not be another SEC school: The conference passed a rule last year prohibiting any school from accepting a transfer with a history of sexual or domestic violence.

However, it’s not clear if that rule applies to Demery, who had signed a letter-of-intent but had not enrolled at Georgia. A request for clarification has been sent to the conference office for comment.

Herein lies the tragedy of PTS. If you can just wait a few days after the letter of intent – if you can just hold on until you’re enrolled – you can maybe do all the woman-beating you want.

For most of us, that doesn’t sound like too tall an order: Just wait say 48 hours until your next woman-beating. But for those with PTS those 48 hours loom like an unscalable mountain. PTS sufferers simply must knock the shit out of their girlfriend, and they don’t do things by the clock. Let’s hope the SEC understands this.

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“People are angry with me,” [said his girlfriend, who went to the police,] but … she didn’t understand why.

“Is it OK for him to hit females?” she said.

Answer #1: You bet your ass they’re angry. He was a hell of a player, hotly recruited.

Answer #2: Absolutely, if and only if he can also hit quarterbacks.

PS: Raping’s okay too.

A perennial jockshop joke on this blog, CMU is shutting down the academic apparatus of the school to put on football games no one attends. Faculty is too expensive there, which creates a drag on the school’s sports subsidy.

Explaining this to professors and students in an open forum is certainly a challenge, but UD finds CMU’s approach to it impressive and instructive (pay attention, Rutgers).

1. Provide a safe house for the president [“CMU President George Ross was not in attendance.”]. A popular variant of this is to have the president attend, but be sure she has just been appointed the most recent of twelve or so interim presidents in the last three or four years. This allows the president to be there, but to explain in answer to all questions that she doesn’t know anything.

2. In their answer to all questions, administrators in charge of the public meeting must never use the phrase “student education,” and instead always use the phrase “student experience.” The adjectives holistic, organic, comprehensive, all-around, full, multifaceted, diverse and community may precede the phrase.

3. Constant references to the infinite delicate complexity of the budget are a must; the audience must be made to understand that a vanished faculty and behemoth empty stadiums and a president who presides over this outcome always getting raises are all, according to the math, budget imperatives that keep the university in glowing health.

Daniel Tosh is a comedian revered because he’ll say anything for a laugh. What he said during his show at the KFC Yum! Center Wednesday night was exactly what you’d expect a world-class wise guy to say.

Wearing a University of Louisville basketball jersey on stage, Tosh thanked everybody for their hospitality – especially the hookers waiting backstage.

A local wit sets the scene at revered University of Louisville, where the athletics department turned a jock dormitory into a jock whormitory for the greater comfort of recruits and their fathers. (Family values, U of Smell style.).

Things have gotten so twisted that no one asks why a violent sociopath was not only admitted to a respectable American university, but aggressively recruited.

Why are so many universities, like the University of Florida, criminally negligent (hello, Baylor) in welcoming to their campus community people who stand a reasonable chance of hurting members of that community (and environs) very badly?

Why – as if it weren’t bad enough – do these universities actually indoctrinate these admitted students in ever more heightened aggression (see, for instance, the EAT YOUR ENEMIES sign at the luxurious new cafeteria for University of Oregon athletes)?

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I mean, duh. You want the biggest and nastiest and most hopped-up fucking assholes out there for your football team.

So what’s all of this doing at a university?

Take a bow, Urban. “Meyer didn’t care, as long as the team was successful.” But of course it takes a village, not just one coach who let a violent troubled young man keep being violent and troubled because he played good football. It took the University of Florida fans, the University of Florida admissions committee, the University of Florida leadership…

Urban thinks that because he sprinkled God-dust on Hernandez and paid for his babysitters, he was one of the good guys.

Hernandez joins Lawrence Phillips as one of the pantheon of university sports heroes dead in jail by their own hand.

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UD thanks David.

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We’re going to be getting a lot of this shit in the next few days. It’s not that we exploited – nay, encouraged – this wreck because we wanted to watch him play ball…

If you must read it, try not to vomit.

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Gotta love the headline.

HERNANDEZ SUICIDE MARS NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS’ WHITE HOUSE VISIT

When it’s not about much except football, you’re going to choose some of your professors from among professional sports agents.

There was Professor Carl Carey Jr.; and, if they’d only played their cards right, these other guys might also have shaped the young minds of that state. For who better to teach UNC’s student athletes than the agents who will be representing them when they go pro?

The only mistake these other guys made was … Well, you don’t just hand them the money right there and then, dummy!

First you gain their friendship and respect by interacting with them in the classroom; later you bribe them to make you their agent. Dummy!

Arrest season comes early this year for the SEC, and a local writer in Alabam assures us there’s nothing to see here.

When you have a group of 100-plus young men between ages 18 and 22, the law of averages dictates that a handful of them are going to get into trouble of one fashion or another.

As I wrote nearly three years ago, this sort of thing goes on everywhere and has for decades. Your least favorite team isn’t “recruiting thugs” or cutting corners on character any more than your favorite team is or ever has.

And anyway, I wouldn’t enjoy too much schadenfreude at the expense of your rival team if I was you. As history has shown us, your time is probably coming.

RELAX. Twas ever thus; it’s universal; and it’s completely 100% natural. These guys are just like all the other guys hardwired for violence. Richie Incognitos are not made; they’re just random young men statistically likely to get into trouble.

Why, UD wonders, do people like this dude bother writing articles about a perfectly natural phenomenon? He knows it will happen every year, and he admits it’s entirely unremarkable. So what is the point of covering each crime?

Or if you insist on covering something that’s not newsworthy but simply normal, why not cover it honestly? Why not admit that what’s abnormal here is a system of universities and their administrators turning themselves inside out to recruit not normatively trouble-making young men, but carefully nurtured steroidal grotesques like college star Richie Incognito? Let the university-cultivated and university-venerated Incognito stand for the legions of highly evolved human battering rams that dominate life at many of this country’s universities.

Remember what the Alabama guy forgot: The whole sick feed ’em and need ’em system set up by universities, of all places.

There’s your story: The angry pummeling gods of the American university campus, and the students, faculty, and leadership that love them.

Here’s what you need to understand. Bouncing Baby Boy universities – like the University of North Carolina – want to watch their football/basketball games, want to use their jumbo building blocks to make new stadiums and arenas, want to pay their superhero ADs and coaches tens of millions of dollars AND WANT ABOVE ALL TO BE LEFT ALONE. That’s why UNC is as one coming down like a ton of legos on the president of the University of Maryland for having told UD’s hubby, Mr UD, at a UMD faculty senate meeting, that UNC deserves the death penalty. BOO. WAHWAH. BAD MAN. HURT THE BAD MAN.

NO ONE gets to interrupt the boys’ concentration on their games, their construction projects, and their dispensing of money to themselves and their friends; and certainly not no-count absurdities like university presidents… or, even worse, trustees.

As in – the U of Smell, known once as the U of L, and more formally as the University of Louisville, just had a major trustee eruption in the figure of pizza billionaire John Schnatter.

His outburst has of course been totally ignored by the university – BAD MAN. HURT THE BAD MAN. – but not by the media, which, ever since U of L’s athletics program turned out to be running a whorehouse for the players – a whormitory, as the place has been dubbed – has been a media magnet. The whormitory is after all only the latest sex and/or money sleaze coming out of that sleaziest of American universities, and it’s the kind of car wreck you just can’t look away from.

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Schnatter’s problem is that, rather than join the boys and keep playing games and building sports arenas and giving millions of dollars to coaches until the whole university collapses under the weight of debt and derision, he wants to try to fix things. He thinks there may be something wrong with the university. Athletics, he announced at a recent public meeting of the trustees, is “sucking the life blood out of this place.” He claimed that the athletics leadership won’t even speak to trustees, that it operates in a silent arrogant world of its own.

Here’s what AD Tom Jurich – er, I mean some spokesperson – said in response.

“Tom (Jurich) does not have any comment on what was said.”

I am not going to dignify your outrageous comments about my non-responsiveness with a response.

“If there ever was a death penalty case in recent memory, [the University of North Carolina] is one. But when you look at how much the NCAA has tried to run away from [the death penalty], I would bet a ton of money on it never being enacted again for a Power Five school.”

So of course the president of the University of Maryland is right, and the idiots condemning him are doing that because they know that he’s right.

I mean, you don’t want people running around saying that UNC deserves the death penalty when everyone knows it deserves the death penalty. Get it?

… about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill having so corrupted itself via athletics that it deserves the NCAA’s death penalty, life goes on at the increasingly pathetic UNC. Yesterday the Faculty Athletic Committee met to discuss this and that. Let’s listen in.

The chancellor kicks things off with an insipid pep talk.

“People come here every single year because of sports engagements, and they get very excited about a national championship, but they come for the other athletic performances too and they come for our arts and our other academic performances.”

Are you excited yet? Well, how about this!

The Faculty Athletics Committee met Tuesday to discuss students missing classes for the men’s basketball national championship game in Arizona… Committee members also wanted to address the issue of cheerleaders and band members missing classes to travel during the postseason.

FAC Chairperson John Stephens brought up the concerns of one biology professor who said students in the pep band missed as many as eight classes between the ACC and NCAA tournaments — almost one quarter of the semester.

Associate Athletic Director for Strategic Communications Robbi Evans said athletes were required to travel earlier because of media obligations, but cheerleaders and band members are not required to go to the game and must receive permission from their professors.

FAC member Andrew Perrin said he agrees that the community has benefitted from the national championship, but reminded the committee that everything good comes at a cost.

“For us to just sit around a table and talk about how fantastically wonderful it is that we won the championship and how many people were involved in it — I think we need to recognize that it’s not just lectures that get missed, it’s labs, it’s discussions, it’s experiential and participatory education,” Perrin said.

Yes, they must get permission, and I’m gonna be the professor at UNC who refuses Bob, The Team Barker, permission! Watch me! Watch me refuse permission! Because this is a serious school and I’m a serious person!

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And yes, in case you hadn’t thought about this yet, it’s not just the players who don’t go to class. It’s cheerleaders, the pep band – all the people who shake their ass for ten minutes and then plant it on a bleacher for three hours… All of them need to be absent too…

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But UD hasn’t gotten to the best part. What is a Faculty Athletics Committee, anyway?

It’s a carefully selected group of jock-adoring professors whose job it is to make little speeches like Andrew Perrin’s up there… About how, you know, it’s kind of not cool that our chancellor gives semi-literate sermons on the superduper superness of sports even in the shadow of our recent notorious academic fraud scandal… And that many students who are only tangentially associated with sports at this university routinely blow off class…

Yes, the chancellor does her inane enthusiasm thing, and the FAC professor does his inane Is this really a good idea? thing, and the UNC farce keeps rolling along until the next scandal…

So the president of the University of Maryland is in all kinds of trouble because he made a Kinsley Gaffe about the University of North Carolina deserving the death penalty — which, after decades of bogus jock courses, it certainly does.

… Wallace D. Loh, the president of the University of Maryland, responded to a question from a faculty member in a university senate meeting last Thursday by guessing — “I would think” — the North Carolina academic scandal “would lead to the implementation of the death penalty by the NCAA.”

All American media outlets are now screaming about how appalling it is that President Loh said that mean thing about UNC.

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But who was that questioning faculty member??

None other than my own Mr UD.