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.
Brian Burnett, senior vice president for finance and operations at the University of Minnesota, cautions a reporter that
spending sports revenue on academics could make the teams less competitive…. “You certainly can look at contributing back to the campus, but that’ll move you down the scale for competitive resources.”
Burnett’s is one of a number of gratifyingly straightforward comments on the relationship between universities and sports that UD has stumbled upon lately (scroll down a bit for some other examples). His remark appears in one of those archetypal Are we being had? pieces that periodically pop up in the local booster press… The hometown sports reporter seems to recall that high-ranking university personnel not long ago assured him that, what with this super tv deal and that super advertising deal, the university would shortly not only be in the black sportswise; it’d start giving money to the academic side of the university.
Like Herbert Hoover announcing prosperity was just around the corner, jock schools are always announcing they’re teetering on the brink of athletics riches, and the football-slobberers always believe them. Then after the incredibly expensive player sex scandal, the incredibly expensive buyouts of drunk horny coaches, the fans so grossed out by the players and the coaches that they’re not buying football tickets, and the crushing loan payments on palatial buildings for all of these wonderful players and coaches, it turns out hey we’re in the red for fuck’s sake. (UM is indeed in the red for fuck’s sake.)
BUT!
Happy days are here again! Just sit tight and athletics is going to be making so much money you won’t believe it and neither will the Classics department when athletics hands them plane fare to Delphi!
A brave, hard-hitting, contrarian editorial in North Dakota.
Braswell bobbled an option pitch and was chasing a fumble with his head down, and Abram launched himself straight into Braswell’s head. … [T]his is a textbook example of targeting…
It would’ve been an ejectable hit in a regular game, but in this game, it was simply a day-ender. Whether Abram was defenseless on the play, the contact to his head was so strong that any video crew in college football would’ve called targeting.
It was his teammate, too!
… as Horatio has the gall to tell Hamlet when Hamlet alludes to the massive, two-decade academic scandal at the University of North Carolina.
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Hamlet’s sports-loving buddy dismisses all that’s been happening at UNC as a bunch of rumors. It’s as unreal as all that stuff they’re whispering about Penn State…
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Or, as Nietzsche famously said, “We have sports in order not to perish of the truth.”
The New York Times alludes to UD’s buddy, University of North Carolina professor Jay Smith.
And … who else? Who else among the UNC faculty bothered asking? The cardinal rule of being a professor at a football factory is to shut the fuck up.
Or no:
Some faculty members took the role of useful fools, vigorously defending the indefensible.
Useful, and richly rewarded.
Meanwhile UNC has consistently treated Jay like a pariah.
If you’re having trouble understanding this treatment, look to the trustee at Penn State complaining the other day about Jerry Sandusky’s “so-called victims.” Victims! You’re talking about young men lucky enough to be forcefully anally penetrated by a coach so famous a brand of campus ice-cream – The Sandusky Blitz – was named after him!
“Kids were holding them down in the locker rooms, there was a lookout at the door watching for coaches not to come. They hold them down and stick various items up their rectum… including Coke bottles, deodorant bottles, steel pipes, baseball bats, and broomsticks.”
… “Some kids, mostly [high school] athletes, are calling the victims ‘rats and snitches,’” [one resident] said, noting that most of the alleged victims have remained anonymous. “A lot of people are saying they feel bad for [the accused], that they didn’t do anything too extreme.”
On Tuesday, at least one student, he said, was wearing a shirt adorned with a photo of one suspect’s face.
… “What the boys did was disgusting and terrible, but none of this would be allowed to happen if these kids were better monitored. I guess the teachers are too busy stealing money, having sex with students, and looking at child porn to watch the kids,” one mother said.
“People forget, don’t they?” she said, echoing other parents who pointed to the La Vernia [Texas] School District’s record of scandal:
In January 2016, a math teacher quietly resigned amid an FBI investigation—child-pornography charges followed months later. (He pleaded guilty to one felony and is due to be sentenced in May, according to court records.) In 2015, a 26-year-old physics teacher was arrested for the alleged sexual assault of a student. Then there were the allegations of theft and embezzlement, the suicide of a vice principal at the junior high school, and that time a seventh-grade teacher (and niece of a local sheriff) led police on high-speed chase and was jailed for possession of methamphetamine and assault on a public servant. She served five years’ probation after a stint in rehab.
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“This is Small Town USA,” [a parent said.]
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UD thanks John.
UD admires this Baylor University student’s opinion piece – it’s well-written and straightforward about the depth and viscosity of shit in which his school currently swims.
He begins with a handy review of the Baylor “Rape Riot” Bears – their alleged deeds, their upcoming trials… He might have mentioned the “52 by 31” lawsuit as well, but he’s writing under space limitations.
[T]hese things won’t be going anywhere. Baylor will likely have four former football players on trial for sexual assault during the next calendar year, and it will undoubtedly be in the news… So, my fellow Baylor students and fans, prepare for more bad headlines. Know that when you check the news, Baylor and sexual assault will continue to be paired together. Be ready to hear tasteless rape jokes and calls to shut down our football team from rival fans and people in far corners of the country whose only impression of Baylor is the dark things they see in the news.
At the end of the piece, he grasps for some hope – see my headline – and of course UD can’t blame him. But that very hopeful list of his – interim prez, new coach and athletic director – goes in the opposite direction, methinks. I mean of course what else can a school like Baylor or North Carolina or whatever do when its purulence oozes out for the world to see… Naturally the thing you do is bring out the new linen… But those of us who follow universities closely know that instability in the positions that matter (forget prez; at schools like these all you need for prez is someone who gets out of the way of the AD and the coaches) is simply asking for more trouble. Basically your choice in these positions is The Corrupt Veteran or The Deer in the Headlights. Neither turns out well.
… and University Diaries can’t wait for what’s next.
UD‘s posts on Auburn, one of America’s most scummy sports factories, are here.
… standard.
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UD thanks Jeff.