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.

[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!