LOL.

Ain’t it?

In fact, at this point, UD assumes this sort of national attention paid to a university is a plus.

When Baylor first hired Art Briles
The prez and trustees were all smiles.
But there’s just no escapin’
A teamful of rapin’–
Get ready, get set, for the trials.

**********

And remember, kiddies: Baylor’s already paying Briles six million dollars or so a year to go away.

Truly, truly a blessing.

***********

Baylor University: Toxic Christianity.

While a lawsuit was almost certainly expected, if Briles thinks people at Baylor conspiring against him is why he doesn’t have another job, he’s clinically insane. Anyone associated with Baylor, its athletic department and its football team is toxic right now. Briles wouldn’t be considered for any jobs at any level even if he was carry a sack full of recommendations from Baylor’s administration.

After Briles gave an incredibly weak apology for the out-of-control program he ran at Baylor, did anyone think he would be getting a job any time soon? The guy just doesn’t seem to understand the havoc players wreaked under his watch and just how awful the culture he promoted was.

If Briles was smart, he’d have laid low for a few years, then mounted a comeback with some very serious apologies. Instead he’s out there suing his former employer and acting like he did nothing wrong.

There are enough overt racists among the students at Texas A&M to make the appearance of white nationalists there not that scandalous, not that surprising.

“When I heard about the Aggie European Alliance, I was disgusted; however, I was not surprised,” said graduate student Lia Epps.

Wonder why not.

*******************

The school has responded strongly (counter-demonstrations) to this guy’s appearance, but there’s no denying that, if you’re an American fascist trolling for recruits, making Texas A&M – rather than, say, Hampshire College – the first stop on your speaking tour is a good career move. Texas A&M specializes in worshipping naughty naughty naughty white boys.

Today we drop in on Oregon State University, which just last year was crowing about its football attendance numbers being way high, and now this year is keening over its ticket sales being way low.

Truth and illusion – who knows the difference? Eh, Toots? as George says… And anyway… the money people “expect OSU athletics to be operating in the black within the next three fiscal years,” so just you hold on to your hat! We’re gonna be tearing up the pea patch in no time don’t you worry and meanwhile we’ll just pinch this here eight million dollars to tide us over…

In 2007, [Humboldt State University] switched the Athletics Department’s primary funding source from the state General Fund to revenue collected by the student Instructionally Related Activities fees, which are currently the highest in the California State University system, according to Strategic Edge. HSU’s student fees have increased from $278 per semester per student in 2010 to the current $337 per semester rate, according to the university. [AD Tom] Trepiak said raising the fees any higher is not an option.

The funding model switch was made to free up funds for more academic purposes, according to a 2007 university memorandum of understanding.

But Trepiak argues that athletics are a form of academia.

“The job of a coach is to teach a student athlete how to do their sport, so part of that is a perception thing with people looking at it with their own special interest rather than the big picture,” he said.

UD finds this statement, at the end of an article in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s student paper, refreshing. It states the truth, bluntly. When you do this grotesque thing – when you import professional sports to universities, of all places – you’re going to have to prostitute the universities. That’s the cost of playing the game. Many of your players are going to play, and nothing else. Somehow you’re going to have to solve the problem of that pesky – even embarrassing – “university” identity, and it’s going to mean tutors who write papers for players, online classes ostensibly taken by players but actually taken by designated online-class-takers, and the creation of bogus departments with bogus courses designed to allow everyone to pretend that players have studied something.

Many of the players have already been admitted in bogus ways – they graduated from fake high schools (usually with reassuringly fervent Christian names) designed to produce legit-looking diplomas for sports guys. Your job, at Chapel Hill, is to figure out how to retain your recruits even though they’re not doing any schoolwork. Your biggest challenge is not the NCAA, which doesn’t give a shit, but rather the rogue tutor or investigative reporter.

A university like Chapel Hill – a community like Chapel Hill – sees itself above all as a professional sports team. Everyone, from the president down, has a role to play on the team. The president issues high-minded language about the glorious nexus of physical and mental achievement on campus. Professors pass the players along no matter what they do. Tutors do the players’ schoolwork. Local reporters are slavish panting boosters.

It all holds together very nicely – UNC’s bogus courses sailed along for decades – until, as most recently at the University of Missouri – someone has a crisis of conscience or something, and the ship goes down.

And then it comes up again. I mean, the scandal costs the school (taxpayers, often) zillions, and getting rid of a coach or two (this is de rigueur post-scandal: dump some coaches) is also expensive (you’re breaking a contract; plus these guys are liable to sue), but in the end none of these jock school academic scandals amount to anything. Even if you decide to dump the president, she’ll just move to another jock school, and you’ll have all the time and expense of finding another person able to talk about your rigorous academic program with a straight face.

Cost of playing the game.

… gets right back up on his Champions for Christ mount after the … unpleasantness at Baylor.

**************

And do you think the New York Post went out of its way to choose a photograph of McCaw that’s a dead ringer for this one?

********

UD thanks a number of readers for linking her to this story.

It’s that old devil called shame again
Hits a tutor and starts fucking up our games again
Puts a wrench in our plans, tears up our fans,
And just breaks our heart.

It’s that sly old son of a gun again,
He keeps telling her that she’s the naughty one again.
But we still have our coach, still have our teams,
And those jocks in my class.

… every day is a challenge. Ken Starr, Art Briles, gang rape and cover-up galore… All in the context of a very self-righteous, very Christian campus…

It would be a challenge for anyone [“Uh we’re pleased to announce we have the final numbers… Let’s see… ’17 women [have] reported 19 sexual or physical assaults involving football players since 2011, including four gang rapes…'”] , but Heath Nielsen is really struggling with it. Maybe it’s something in the Waco water supply, but (paraphrasing Tammy Wynette) sometimes, in Waco, it’s hard to be a man.

A sportswriter was photographing a football player after a game, see.

[The writer] had received permission from a football player to take [the] photograph, and after the picture was taken “Nielsen walked up to [the writer] on the right, grabbed [him] by the throat with his right hand, squeezed and pushed him away from the football player,’ an arrest warrant affidavit … says.

When [the writer] and the player asked Nielsen what the problem was, he replied, “He’s abusing his privileges,” the affidavit said.

To review: This is the guy in charge of managing the team’s public image.

Depends on what you mean by “return.” If you’re attending a university in order to watch professional football, “returns” mean a world-class stadium, professional-league players, and a multi-million dollar coach. It doesn’t bother you that your sports program is a “Ponzi scheme. Universities pay and pay and pay, but because they’re late to the party, they never see any payback.” Actually, students pay and pay and pay, as tuition and student fees spike to meet the humongous debt on new facilities and on a fleet of private planes for recruiting visits etc etc …

And even when, as at Western Missouri, things turn toward the “unsustainable” as your school loses gobs of money year after year after year, you’re going to want the place to keep fielding teams to the bitter end.

On an unsustainable budget, Western Missouri just “approved the installation of six new athletic programs,” so hubba hubba.

LOL. We’re counting down from November 2!!!!!

GO DUCKS

And equally special is this Deadspin update on that… peculiar institution.

Headline:

Baylor Confirms [Head Fooball Coach] Art Briles Knew About Alleged Gang Rape And Chose Not To Report It

Puke.

Former Baylor head football coach Art Briles and former athletic director Ian McCaw knew about an alleged group sexual assault and chose not to report it, according to a statement issued yesterday by the university.

A woman at the university, a student, told whoever would listen that five football players attacked her. At the highest levels, Baylor University did nothing.

This confirmation also indicates that the assistant coaches who spoke out last week in defense of Briles weren’t being truthful about his role in the scandal.

Moral squalor in defense of football is no vice.

Retch.

The majority of the football staff (including offensive coordinator Kendal Briles, son of Art) pushed back on [the claim about Briles] with a statement laying out an alternate version of events where the allegations were reported to the judicial affairs department. Now, the university has released a statement confirming that Briles and McCaw were both aware of the alleged group sexual assault and neither chose to report it.

Family values, university football.

Heave.

Baylor says that McCaw initially denied knowledge of the allegations when first asked about them in 2015, after other reports of sexual assault involving the football team began to surface. He then backtracked to tell the university that he had in fact been made aware of the allegations in 2013. The university’s statement does not say whether McCaw had any contact with the female athlete, but he said he chose not to report because he did not believe she wanted a report to be filed. This is not how university employee reporting responsibilities work.

AD leadership, Baylor-style. First lie through your teeth. Then when too much raping makes it impossible to continue to lie, tell the truth. Then lie again and say that your understanding, as AD, about reporting responsibilities, was that if someone doesn’t want you to report (itself almost certainly a lie) you don’t report.

Hurl.

Gag.

Spew.

The article itself couldn’t be more ordinary and banal; yet another American university football player has beaten the shit out of one of his fellow students. Yawn.

This player, on being kicked out of a bar, “deliberately shoved a ladder, knocking off [a fellow student who is an employee of the bar], who fell headfirst onto the pavement.” The student’s a senior; he had almost managed to get out of Miami U without getting his brains knocked out by a sports hero. (As you know, UD has proposed that big-sports universities should issue protective helmets to all of their students for just this sort of eventuality.)

What makes this article interesting is that in an earlier draft the writer seems to have spent a good deal of time recounting all the schools that wanted to recruit the bruiser, and sharing his stats on the field. Commenters gave the reporter hell about this.

Not sure how being told which colleges recruited him is relevant in an article on alleged felonious assault.

**************

You had 4 people overseeing this article and not one of you thought, “huh, maybe we shouldn’t glorify a soon-to-be felon with 4 paragraphs of his athletic achievements”???

**************

This article is horrific and indicitive of a mindset focusing on sports stats of a felon vs. empathy for his victim. What about the victim who had brain swelling and bleeding? This is his second arrest for assault and the Miami coach couldn’t even mention care or concern during his press conference? This is sickening.

**************

And how is the man who fell from the ladder and landed on his head?????

**************

Glorifying felonious assault article with a pitch about a guy’s stats and recruiting history is why this paper is a joke around campus.

But of course the larger local booster press writes these things up precisely in that way: Five paragraphs describing the power and skill of the player, and how it’s going to be missed if he’s suspended, and then one final paragraph updating the victim’s condition. Why should student publications be any different?

[Sing along.]

Free from the law — oh, happy condition!
Rapists have fled, and there is remission;
Cursed by the law but saved from the fall,
Starr hath redeemed us once for all.

Now we are free — there’s no condemnation;
Baylor provides a perfect salvation:
“Come unto Me,” oh, hear its sweet call,
Come, and it saves us once for all.