David Garland, Baylor University’s president, speaks:
I don’t know any school that has been as transparent as we have and taken the extraordinary actions we have… We’ve also published, on our website, findings of fact which in many ways are findings of fault… From a Christian perspective, we’ve confessed our sins, tried to repent and tried to make restitution.
Deadspin’s Tom Ley responds:
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen someone pack so many lies into so few sentences. [The] findings of fact report that Garland deems to have been such an extraordinary act of transparency was nothing more than a 13-page summary of the law firm Pepper Hamilton’s investigation into the school’s failure to handle sexual assault allegations. That summary contained almost no specifics, and there is no written record of Pepper Hamilton’s full investigation because the school asked the firm to deliver its report to the regents orally.
As for Garland’s appeal to look at his school’s actions from a Christian perspective, all he’s doing here is pulling the same sleight of hand that so many institutions that operate under the umbrella of Christianity have pulled so many times before: He’s taking the concept of redemption to mean that properly-identified Christians, like himself, always have a free pass waiting for them. This is how a hollow document, a few scapegoat firings, and engaging in legal battles with victims become repentance. Being a good Christian means whatever the good Christian wants it to mean, and David Garland fancies himself a good Christian.
UD‘s reading it now.
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Well, ol’ UD will already take issue with the article’s sub headline, which has it that alumni and the “authorities” are really angry about Raping Football Players and the Men Who Love Them… But really, given the culture of Baylor (as amply represented by its departing sports ministry guy), are we supposed to buy that? Women are weak vessels and if they find themselves in an unpleasant spot with a man it’s because they forgot their burqa and their Bible. Boys will be boys.
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[One of many lawsuits against the school makes] the startling claim that at least 52 rapes by at least 31 players had occurred from 2011 through 2014 — a period when the once-hapless Baylor football program became a dominant force in the highly competitive Big 12 Conference.
Hey. Price of doing business.
Who can blame Baylor for believing that Baptist Propriety for Women would mean the weak vessels would confess their shame to the sports minister and then shut up about it?
Who can blame Baylor for knowing that you want the most aggressive person you can find for your football team?
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“Success in athletics means that all cocks rise,” Kenneth W. Starr, then the university’s president, told The Times in 2014.
Haha. I mean “boats.” He said success in athletics means that all boats rise.
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Some women on campus will of course gladly sacrifice their virtue for the sake of the team. It is their sacred honor to pleasure recruits. One lawsuit claims
“attractive female students” in the Bruins [a “hostess” program] were expected to ensure that recruits had a good time on campus by, for example, engaging “in sexual acts with the recruits to help secure the recruits’ commitment to Baylor.”
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So. Wait now for the academic scandal… Now that the door’s been opened on Baylor University, wait for details about what professors at Baylor were doing (are doing) to keep some players academically eligible.
University of Oregon football co-offensive coordinator David Reaves spent little more than a day on the job but was paid more than $60,000.
… Reaves received $3,750 for 26 hours of work when he resigned Feb. 3 after being arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. [He] also received a payment of $60,000.
The world of professionalized university sports is super-seamy. It’s like a Fellini film with the surreality edited out and the depravity left in.
As UD often notes on this blog, none of us minds the even greater depravity of truly professional sports, where bloodshed doping and cheating are part of the spectacle. In the professional game, these are perennial, structural, cultural elements, like soccer riots in Brazil.
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But a lot of people retain a misty flimsy sense that a university… as opposed to a thirteen billion dollar professional league… that a university president… as opposed to an NFL commissioner…
So you get this… discomfort, when people are again and again made to realize that the NCAA is the NFL with less revenue (one billion v thirteen), and that major university athletic programs are … well, remove the word university.
Since everyone knows what a joke any academic component of most big-time university sports programs is likely to be, all it takes is for the tiniest shoe to drop for a ton of shit to hit the fan.
Take what’s been going on for a year now at the University of Missouri, where one – count ’em! one! – measly athletic academic tutor suddenly alleged that the whole tutoring of athletes thing was, you know …
Now Ms Kumar, like many of the people willing to profit off of the dungheap that is major university athletics, is not, on careful consideration, as pure as the driven snow. Her rap sheet’s up there in my headline. Yet her little peep about the program has a vast expensive arsenal of UM attorneys, investigators, and all the rest training its guns over the program with as much dispatch and authority as the Chapel Hill arsenal.
Yet while that fighting force roots out corruption, there’s still Ms Kumar, waiting with waning patience on the sidelines for her reward. One way or another she intends to make a lot of money – maybe a whistleblower settlement, maybe an exclusive magazine interview, whatever, but the point here is to pay off her debts.
Yolanda Kumar, the tutor at the epicenter of the Missouri athletic department’s joint investigation with the NCAA into alleged academic fraud, touched off a social-media firestorm Friday afternoon by offering to sell [names of campus wrongdoers] in exchange for about $3,000.
So add blackmail to the sordid landscape of higher education in the American heartland.
But this is nothing new for the University of Missouri.
“This is our biggest rival and our most serious game of the whole season and instead of being able to come together as a school, we will be amidst the joys and heartbreaks of rush,” explains a University of Mississippi student petition demanding the rescheduling of fraternity/sorority recruitment week because it conflicts with a football game.
Shortly after the petition began circulating, senior broadcast journalism major Walter Lyle shared his views on the issue.
Lyle listed ‘things on campus you SHOULD be signing a petition against:
confederate symbolism
sexual harassment
sexual assault
homophobic slurs
racial slurs
domestic violence
drug abuse
literally anything else’
LOL.
Baylor University football just keeps the hits coming. Year after year.
… and Blotto God …
If your university worships football, then Johnny Manziel and Richie Incognito and Jameis Winston and so many others in the pantheon shock and appall you again and again as they spit on the divinity you have granted them and leave your school as lost as the nation of North Korea will be, should The Dear Leader ever be called home.
The latest scene of disillusion and devastation is the University of Oklahoma, whose quarterback is a drunk who gets in fights with cops and then, when they try to arrest him, flees. A local scribe puts this football-god violence in the context of all the other such violence in the program and concludes it’s a real shame and something should definitely be done about it.
These are tough days for Sooner football. Not as tough as the final days of the Switzer Era when guns and drugs and woes abounded, and yet, the release of the Joe Mixon video and the revelation that Dede Westbrook was twice arrested for domestic violence before arriving in Norman has stained the program.
Stained? Woe unto thee, scribes and Pharisees! Be careful, when thou liest safe and soft, lest thou forget Baylor.
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UD thanks two of her readers for the Jameis Winston link.
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The tweets are coming in.
Positive for Oklahoma fans is at least Baker Mayfield wasn’t charged with punching any women.
All in good time my little pretty; all in good time.
Baylor University’s women’s basketball coach makes her contribution to the school’s effort to get past its rapes scandal.
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Sing it:
I’m gonna wash those rapes right out of my hair!
I’m gonna wash those rapes right out of my hair!
And send them on their way.
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If a mom don’t understand you,
If you play on separate teams,
Waste no time, make a change,
Ride that gal right off your range
Rub her out of the roll call
And knock her right in the face!
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(UD thanks Rick.)
They are a special elite among American universities – schools so indifferent to education and so sports-obsessed and so lame that the only news we hear out of them is big talk about – or investigative reports about – their stupid and/or corrupt athletic programs. The University of Louisville is the trend-setter here, but consider that perennial UD favorite, the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Although sports at UNLV is hemorrhaging money (Scold, scold, scold, say the regents, except they’re the group that cheered the school on and made it possible for it to lose all that money), its loser coach is peeing his pants over the prospect of a new immense $1.9 billion football stadium to accommodate all the people who don’t go to his team’s games.
UNLV would share the stadium with the soon-to-be-relocated Oakland Raiders, see, and excellent local characters like Sheldon Adelson will put up most of the money, see?… Are you getting as excited as I am? This vast structure will have the world’s largest Adzillatron spanning its entire length, so none of the twelve thousand people in attendance (and what amazing optics those numbers in that huge space will be for UNLV) will miss one millisecond of constant shrieking gargantuan commercials. The markings on the field will of course say RAIDERS rather than Rebels, and in general UNLV’s status in all of this will be that of a poor overlooked orphan cousin but it will have to put up I dunno around $200 million. BUT what’s $200 million when you already have a five million dollar budget deficit? Just add it to the fucking deficit! Big deal!
Oooh, but speaking of deal – Sheldon’s feelings got hurt in some way and he has pulled all of his money out. BUT Goldman Sachs will pick up the slack!
BUT Goldman Sachs has pulled out of the deal too!
I mean, it looks as though sharing a hot sweaty bed with casino gambling was too much even for the obscene NFL… But poor UNLV! It has no problem with the lower depths, but it might lose that big new stadium anyway…
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Yeah and now that the deal’s falling through you got all these local naysayers…
It is high time lawmakers, now meeting in regular session, reconsider the state’s commitment of room tax money to this harebrained, half-baked scheme to enrich billionaires.
Instead of sticking tourists with a 0.88 percent hike in the room tax, lawmakers should let them keep that money to spend on food, drink and gambling, which net nearly 10 times as much in tax revenue.
… Lawmakers should note that there is no stadium price tag in the bill they passed, and the stadium backers flatly refused to consider capping public funding at 39 percent of the cost of construction. It was $750 million or no deal. The cost of the stadium when first proposed was a mere $1 billion. It ratcheted up from there. What is to stop the Raiders from building a $1 billion stadium, tapping the taxpayers for three-quarters of the tab and getting the state to make the estimated $900 million in road improvements needed to access the stadium?
Besides, does UNLV really need a new football stadium, when it can’t fill the one it has? One that has adequate traffic access off a major freeway and abundant parking. Why is there a need for a stadium on or near the campus, when 93 percent of students live off campus?
Oh shaddap.
The University of Iowa is an avatar here.
How can it be running an almost three million dollar athletics deficit and at the same time have a stupendous winning record?
This was the year the Hawkeye football team went 12-0 in the regular season, won the Big Ten’s West Division and played in the Rose Bowl. So why did the athletics department end the year in the red?
I’ll tell you why. Because fewer and fewer – vanishingly fewer – people want to go to the games. Ticket revenue is drastically down. And this is the effing heartland, where everyone has a sacred obligation to piss themselves with excitement on game day.
The second element of the financial collapse is quite comical, quite in keeping with the florid absurdities of simulacral culture.
But although ticket sales were low, the undefeated season triggered performance bonuses for coaches.
Head football coach Kirk Ferentz, for example, picked up an extra $1 million in 2015 for milestones that included going undefeated, finishing ranked in the top 10, going to a New Year’s Day bowl game, being named coach of the year and having a team graduation rate of at least 70 percent.
UI coaching salaries, bonuses and benefits totaled $20.3 million for fiscal 2016, up from $18.2 million the previous year, reports shows.
The whole beautiful shows churns along, runs itself, rewards itself, with little input or involvement from any actual audience – and certainly little involvement from – uh – university students. The location of Kirk Ferentz’s milestones and rewards, randomly enough, does happen to be a university, but the university isn’t showing up for his big days. It only pays his bills.
You don’t get more simulacral than that.
Congrats Iowa. You’re the wave of the future.
Your university’s coach is an alleged domestic abuser, but you need him to coach a game. What to do? What to do?
Ah, fuck it. The game must go on. We can come up with some cover story about why we let him coach after we knew about the charges against him.
[The University of Colorado] says that the reason they did not take any personnel action against Joe Tumpkin until Jan. 6, in spite of the fact that Mike MacIntyre, Rick George and Chancellor Phil DiStefano knew about the allegations of domestic abuse on Dec. 9 or shortly thereafter, was that they did not have documents “from a court or an investigation by police….”
Since when does the university have to have documents “from a court or an investigation by police” in order to, at a minimum, pass the information they have about possible sexual harassment or discrimination on to the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC)? Many cases of sexual harassment investigated by the university are not even reported to police. As the former director of the Office of Victim Assistance, and one who had a part in crafting sexual harassment reporting policy of that time (2005-2011), I know that the policy then stated that any mandatory reporter (anyone who had supervisory responsibilities) had to pass any information they received about possible sexual harassment to the investigatory office.
There were multiple trainings about this for faculty and staff. My understanding is that, though policies have changed since 2011, they have only been strengthened.
Unfortunately, the conflict of interest between protecting university high-profile sports athletes, coaches and staff, and the university’s commitment to end sexual violence and discrimination by campus personnel is once again rearing its ugly head.
As ever, the physically fit/mentally feeble people running the sports show at Colorado figured we’d all be fine with their bs. As ever, we’re not.
Joe “100 Chokes” Tumpkin couldn’t have happened to a more obvious school. Put University Colorado Football in UD‘s search engine and go to town on a twenty year history of rape coverup, academic fraud, and all the rest of it, non-stop. The only question is how much this latest beyond-squalid event is going to cost the school. Will it cost them as much as Penn State’s Sandusky? (Quarter billion and it ain’t over yet.)
The Boise State football team dismissed senior linebacker Kameron Miles on Wednesday following his arrest on a domestic battery charge.
He is the seventh player to be dismissed from the team, or to leave facing suspension, since the start of the 2016 calendar year.
BSU’s coach is clearly worth every penny of his $1.3 million salary. If I were a BSU student, I’d be eager to give more of my tuition and student fees to a man with such a terrific eye for recruits.
It Never Rains but it Whores
[Singalong.]
Did y’ever wake up in the morning
And grumble as you tumble out of bed?
Your strength coach arrested — solicitation.
You might lose SAC accreditation.
The school of Ken Starr and Art Briles
Is drowning in lawsuits and trials
Your regents are vile but they won’t do town halls
You’re out of compliance with Big 12 by-laws
Yes, all day long,
Everything you touch goes wrong.
Teacher told us, when this happens, never to whine or wail;
The same things happen at other schools, but on a much smaller scale!
It never rains but what it whores;
If lady luck should happen to desert you,
Some gang rape’s never gonna hurt you,
So wait and the skies will all be blue.
It never rains but what it whores;
So what if all your troubles come in bunches,
Keep sticking to your silly little coaches,
And the sun will come shining through.
Bide your time and keep on hummin’,
Don’t you frown and sit around and weep.
Wait your turn, your day is comin’,
And you’ll be there on top of the heap!
It never rains but what it whores;
You may as well get all your worries over,
From then on you’re gonna be in clover!
Smile when you should cry,
For every cloud there’ll be a rainbow,
There’ll be a sunbeam for every raindrop by and by!
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[UD thanks many readers who have sent her Baylor updates.]