It’s gone way past Orwellian in Pullman Washington, where the most criminalized football team in the country, Washington State University, enjoys high praise from the police chief even as his officers keep arresting its players. The team’s coach, a big-mouth bully trailing accusations of player abuse from coaching job to coaching job, is loudly and persistently outraged that his guys, currently subjecting the WSU student body to torture and disfigurement, should be arrested at all, given that most of this stuff started during fights and other people were also fighting but his guys were picked up just because everyone knows who they are and just because they’re the biggest so they inflict the most damage.

Add humongous, ever-growing student athletic fees, and you’ve certainly got a creeping Ick Factor problem on that campus…

WSU is becoming a kind of laboratory for an emergent reality in American football schools. Until now, we’ve been told to regard player violence on many football campuses as a sometime thing – this domestic violence, that armed robbery, that melee, that beat-up freshman. The coach’s job was to be the wounded daddy, disappointed that junior had misbehaved. The player disappeared and we went on with the show.

WSU shows us how this picture has evolved. The coach has gone from disappointed daddy to belligerent defender of violent people. Sure, they’re violent! But so are a lot of other people, and if other violent people aren’t arrested, our guys shouldn’t be.

The violence itself has become less individualized and more team-centered: Attacks aren’t just one lunatic like Richie Incognito; they’re now liable to be three or four players working as a … team. Which is how schools like WSU rack up national most-arrested titles.

Everything’s getting more explicit: Under pressure from splashy New York Times exposés, police departments like Pullman’s are more likely to actually arrest players.

And though schools keep trying to fudge the numbers, huge spikes in student fees to pay for the glorious athletics department have not gone unnoticed.

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UD thinks Mike Leach, a very high-profile Donald Trump supporter, knows exactly what he’s doing. Once a man like Trump is elected, the sky’s the limit.

Trash all around.

… justice.

UD‘s pal Dan Kane thinks it’s time for the University of North Carolina to recall – in a four-part series – its august academic history.

WSU COACH UNHAPPY WITH POLICE ARRESTING HIS PLAYERS

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Unhappy coach
Left all alone
Playing to the press
Playing warden to your team
You are trapped in recruitment
Of your own device
And you can’t believe
What it does to me
To see you
Crying

Unhappy coach
Fly fast away
Don’t miss your chance
To field another team
You are dying in a prison
Of your own device

UD‘s university found itself with a basketball coach accused of verbally and emotionally abusing players. After a brief investigation, it has fired him. Background here.

No doubt Lonergan is considering a lawsuit.

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Duh.

No, I don’t suppose you’ll find this under Educational Mission on Washington State University’s welcome page, but students there are beginning to sense what’s up. Of course WSU’s athletics deficit is in the trillions, and of course they’re raising undergraduate student fees like mad and trying to fudge the numbers – that’s life in these here States.

But the question is whether WSU students will ever – in sufficient numbers – comprehend what’s being done to them. The grown-ups want to put on games. The young’uns don’t go to the games in great number. They have schoolwork. The grown-ups like to be invited to the president’s box during games, where they can get tipsy with him and talk money. The students wonder why they’re paying for the president’s box.

The sight of young people remonstrating with adults for the adults’ irresponsibility is strange and unseemly. But there you are.

As students and as an editorial board, we believe this proposed fee sets a precedent that students can be charged every time a university department goes into the red.

No matter how costly the fee, students should not have to pay extra due to poor budgeting by any department, let alone Athletics… [W]hy are students being asked to foot the bill for [the AD’s] budgeting decisions?… [W]hy is [he] spending money before he has cash in hand? … This fee does nothing to improve the education of WSU students, many of whom choose not to attend any sporting events and most of whom are not student athletes.

As an editorial board we believe imposing an athletic fee on the general student population is unfair to students and rewards financial irresponsibility. Schulz and Moos shouldn’t have to charge students to fix the Athletics deficit.

But sit tight, kiddies! We haven’t yet heard from the Cannabis and Liquor Board!

Other revenue sources included in the plan are doubled donations from the Cougar Athletic Fund by 2019, totaling $2 million in that year; beer sales in Martin Stadium, though the Liquor and Cannabis Board has yet to approve this; and increased single-game and season ticket sales for football and men’s basketball.

Once they approve beer sales (can marijuana be far behind?) you’ll forget about all your money worries.

In ten years or so, the university will be selling propofol at the games.

… eventually. Until that time, gutter-school University of Kentucky’s football coach Mark Stoops will have to content himself with a behemoth salary and a $12 million buyout – a buyout so obscene that this utter loser of a coach, playing to rapidly emptying stadiums, seems to have UK by the balls.

Stoops entered 2016 with a sense of security thanks to a whopping $12 million buyout that Kentucky, after dropping $126 million on a stadium renovation and $45 million on a new training facility, seemed unlikely to pony up and pay no matter how this season unfolded.

But one of America’s poorest states will pony up. (And it’s actually $18 million.) You know it will. When the only games going at your state university are football, basketball, bourbon, and coal, you’re going to spend what paltry resources you have on those games and nothing else. You have a proud legacy of filthy coaches, crime-ridden teams, blahblahblahblahblahblahblah to protect.

This local booster cannot believe it! One Washington State University football player after another is getting arrested!

Opened the paper this morning – the electronic version of it anyway – and saw a story by Jacob Thorpe about a Washington State football player being arrested for assault. A different Washington State football player. What the heck is going on? Let’s recap for those of you who haven’t been paying attention. There was a fight this summer in which some still-unidentified WSU players were allegedly involved. No one has been charged in that incident. Yet. Then starting safety Shalom Luani missed a week after an assault arrest. And now linebacker Logan Tago has been arrested, charged with assault and robbery in an incident that dates back to early June. Really? You thought Hangover II was bad, this is worse. And, in our version of Hangover III, we’ll also say the same thing we said when Luani was arrested. This has to stop. Again, we don’t have any idea of veracity of these charges. That has to be determined by the court system. But just the idea of high-profile athletes being even peripherally involved in such incidents makes us shudder.

Just the idea! Even peripherally!

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And when you’ve got those guys, and Mike Leach, and all, how can this be happening? Another shocker.

This University of North Carolina student (yes! UNC again – talk about scandal fatigue) – the student UD quotes up there – isn’t quite up on the M.O. of big football schools, so UD will help her. Listen up, oh latest victim.

Football schools are looking for big mean bruisers to play on their football team. Not all bruisers are nasty off the field, but some are, and football schools tend not to care much about off-field behavior. If Richie Incognito beats up a few Nebraska students, BFD. Put a guy like that on a campus full of wussses and they’re bound to irritate him at some point. As for coeds… are you kidding me? There are athlete dorms in this country which have been converted to whorehouses.

There are costs to winning, see. Students are of course obliged to pay the monetary costs. But there’s also surgery on that dislocated jaw (a player didn’t like the way you looked at him) and a lifetime of humiliation and rage because the school made fun of you when you claimed a player raped you.

Not that there aren’t costs for the school itself. Lawsuits galore from many injured parties. Ten million dollar buyouts to make foul sadistic cheating coaches go away. I could go on.

This latest UNC outrage will, UD reckons, be a big story. This blog will follow it every step of the way.

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UD thanks David and Ken.

Featuring many of the schools we’ve come to know and love at University Diaries.

A fight broke out on a field between opposing local college football teams.

Big deal. Happens all the time.

One of the players punched a referee trying to break up the fight.

Rarer, I grant you. But in the lovely world of football/soccer, not all that rare.

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Truly rare is the statement just released from the referee puncher’s junior college. Let’s have a look.

After closely reviewing video footage and interviewing those involved and outside witnesses, [Mt. San Antonio College] maintains that the student-athlete, Bernard Shirmer, unintentionally hit the referee. During a disagreement after a play, numerous people surrounded him and pulled him away from the opposing player. Out of frustration, Mr. Shirmer struck himself on the helmet, a habit he often does to calm himself down. In doing so, he inadvertently hit the referee and initially believed someone else had done so. Mr. Shirmer expressed deep remorse about the incident and any harm to the referee.

Talk about playing defense! When interrupted while fighting people, our lad calms himself down by hitting himself on the head. (Cue Monty Python.) Unable to find his own head, however, our player found himself hitting the referee, though in a strikingly dissociated moment, he was convinced someone else was hitting the referee. He’s really sorry about it now.

In an effort to give their students the best education possible, the McKinney (Texas) School District is building a $70 million football stadium.

Some university systems – Alaska’s, Hawaii’s, Nevada’s – are hopelessly mired in go-nowhereism and that’s for a lot of reasons and that’s not going to change.

The University of Nebraska system is like this, even though its chancellor insists the place trembles on the brink of being “a leading urban metropolitan institution.”

They don’t much cotton to academics in those parts, infinitely preferring sports. Sports gets gobs of money that other universities would use for instructors and classrooms and all.

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Consider the new cost-overrun and firmly in the red arena on the Omaha campus.

Although there’s a very nice, almost brand new, arena just down the road, and although wee Omaha already has too many arenas hemorrhaging money (one of them’s well on its way to bankrupting a town), UNO announced that building another new arena was imperative and we swear it’ll pay for itself right off the bat! Won’t need to use university funds, or soak students, or anything.

But stupid is as stupid does, and they’re covering their big losses on the thing with university funds, and that’s going to continue indefinitely. So you see how the sludge happens: Stupid sports-obsessed schools never get out from under their sports obsession.

But they don’t want to. Since they don’t see the point of intellectuality, what else would they do with their money?

… our scholar/athletes, wildly honored by their schools, go on to complete remarkable tackles in the NFL:

[Dallas Cowboy Greg Hardy] allegedly threw Nicole Holder, his then girlfriend, on a couch covered in loaded rifles and shotguns after tossing her into a shower, where she fell into the bathtub, and he drug her out by her hair and then strangled her with both hands.

The football hero with loaded guns on the couch and a girlfriend dragged by the hair and strangled … Nothing to see here. We Americans reserve our rage for Colin Kaepernick failing to salute the flag.

Aldon Smith

was arrested five times in three years with charges including DUI on three different occasions, vandalism, hit-and-run, and felony weapons charges, which were later reduced to misdemeanors. Smith was also taken into custody at LAX and charged with a false report of a bomb threat.

Chicago Bear Ray McDonald

was arrested three times between 2010 and 2015 and was named in a sexual assault investigation in 2014. His arrests were for drunken driving in 2010; assaulting his ex-fiancee, who was pregnant with his child; and once again for misdemeanor domestic violence and child endangerment. The latest instance involved McDonald assaulting a woman while she was holding his son, who was born six months prior.

Bruce Miller

has been arrested twice in the past 17 months, both for some form of assault. He was arrested in March 2015 for assaulting his girlfriend and breaking her phone. The initial report stated that Miller shoved his girlfriend and broke her phone after a verbal argument. Later, he stated he never shoved her, and she changed her story to coincide with his.

Then, this past Sunday, Miller was arrested for assaulting a 70-year-old man and his son at the Marriott, where he was told he was at the wrong room.

Before tackling the 70-year-old, Miller got thrown out of a restaurant:

Miller stared at the buffet line for about 20 minutes, then approached the queue and started arguing with guests over a sandwich…

“I believe he wanted their sandwiches,” said [a restaurant employee].

Giants kicker Josh Brown is every bit as great a tackler as these other guys.

His now ex-wife has accused him of domestic violence on over 20 occasions, and yet, even with his latest arrest, the Giants re-signed the 37-year-old kicker. Meanwhile, the NFL suspended him for just one game…