As [Baylor ponders] what to do [about a football player filmed savagely beating his dog], let’s not forget Queso the cat, murdered and mutilated by Baylor baseball players, and Baylor basketball player Patrick Dennehy, shot twice in the head by his teammate Carlton Dotson. And then there are the victims of sexual assault handled so well in house.

Another local reader admires Baylor’s contributions to the Baptist faith.

For a Christian school, Baylor needs to clean up its act! A fancy new stadium doesn’t mean anything when the alumni are willing to ignore athletes who rape women and beat dogs!

Rumors abound that Baylor is finally going to go the honesty route. They are apparently working on an official statement that will go something like this:

… is quite the spectacle for the violence-lovers among us. First there’s coach Leach himself, accused of abusing players at Texas Tech; then a couple of weeks ago a whole bunch of WSU football players apparently beat two students at a campus party; and now this:

According to Pullman Police, [WSU football player Shalom] Luani got agitated on Wednesday because his pizza order at Dominos was taking too long. Some other customers asked him to leave, and once outside, he got into a fight with a WSU student and broke the student’s nose.

There’s obviously good team coordination under Leach, because their regular reduction of select WSU students to a pulp has a remarkable about-the-head consistency: The players at the party apparently broke a student’s jaw, whereas here you have Luani breaking a student’s nose. Keeping it all highly localized. Good coaching looks like this.

So the question is what’s next? By UD‘s calculation (no one has yet given a clear number on the party attack), you’re beginning to see serious team depletion as significant numbers of players are suspended or removed because people are starting to notice the numbers of WSU students getting bloodied by them. It is, after all, really a numbers game: How many bloodied students can universities tolerate in order to attract the most aggressive football players to their campuses? Let’s say that right now WSU has two such students, with all the lawsuits and trials and publicity attending them. How many more before they fire Leach (and you really don’t want to fire extremely expensive, extremely litigious, Mike Leach) and try to find a coach who cares a bit more than Mike does what assholes he recruits.

These are the sorts of decisions that take up most of the time of the trustees at universities like WSU. How much blood do we mop up before we dump Leach?

…dies… If the football player actually kills the dog…

But that’s East Carolina. Maybe Baylor would have kept Zamora on even if he’d killed his dog rather than just beating him to within an inch of his life. Baylor’s special.

The ECU dog-killer is a typical American higher education story, a glorious tale of the life of the mind in our country. He was dismissed from Georgia Tech after multiple conduct violations. Instantly thereafter, East Carolina found itself uncontrollably attracted to this scholar/athlete, whose presence on campus, ECU was sure, would be a great boon for everyone involved.

Which university will now bid on the dog-killer? Recruitment coaches all over the country are eyeing his stats even as we speak.

Forget the six ND football players arrested in a span of a few hours last weekend for various violent offenses; cast your mind back to Notre Dame having recently paid football coach Charlie Weis a $19 million buyout.

Weis, currently doing nothing in a gated community in Florida while his wife buys horses, chats with an interviewer about his son’s effort to attend ND:

Charlie Jr. was on track to enroll at Notre Dame. Weis says [ND’s president] himself had promised that he would be accepted, as long as his grades and test scores qualified, which they did. But after Weis was fired, Notre Dame sent a letter deferring Charlie Jr.’s acceptance. Not long after that, Weis says, he got a call from someone in Notre Dame’s development office making him an offer: If he’d donate some of the money Notre Dame owed him back to the school — “seven figures,” Weis says — Charlie Jr. could get in.

Weis said no. Charlie Jr. ended up enrolling at Florida when Weis was offensive coordinator there for a year. Then he followed his father to Kansas. [To make matters worse for Weis, he also collected many millions in buyout money from Kansas. Now he’s a huge multimillionaire with nothing to do!]

Later, Weis says, a fundraiser for the school told him that Notre Dame used the [buyout] contract in pitches to donors, saying they needed to give more because the school still owed Weis so much.

Notre Dame: Classy.

At this late date in the history of scandalous Baylor University, we shouldn’t be surprised that this very assertively Christian University lacks the basic moral clarity a local newspaper columnist displays. “[W]hat Zamora did was illegal. But to me it’s not about the legality and more about what Zamora’s actions say about him as a person. A good, kindhearted, person doesn’t abuse innocent animals.”

[Baylor] fans just endured a disgusting sexual assault scandal and many are having a hard time supporting the team after that. But we were told all the guilty parties were removed from the team, so we’re not rooting for sexual predators. Baylor shouldn’t turn around and ask those who stood by them to root for an animal abuser.

Actually, Baylor just stonewalled – rather than endured – its way through a sexual assault scandal. It was dragged kicking and screaming to doing the right thing.

Baylor University is that most curious thing: a Christian institution seemingly designed to encourage cruelty and viciousness.

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

What I’m talking about at Baylor goes beyond the moral dissonance demanded of all serious football fans – you must adore a sport so freakishly violent that its beau idéal is Richie Incognito, even as you tell yourself you’re adoring clean-cut all-American fun.

But that’s nothing. That’s step one. Now place yourself at Baylor. Or at Notre Dame. Pile university and Christianity on top of all that dissonance. Reconcile vast mass worship of a hyper-concussive sport, quite a few of whose standout players feature, on the field and in their private lives, exactly the sort of lunatic aggression you’d expect, with some stubborn vestigial notion in your mind, some vague remembrance, that the bloody ritual you’re adoring takes place on hallowed intellectual and spiritual ground.

It should be difficult to enjoy yourself unadulteratedly under these conditions, as the bullies, brawlers, domestic abusers, rapists, and animal floggers (fuck academic cheaters; forget cheaters; c’est entendu) bloody each other down there…

But hey. Turns out not only isn’t it difficult; it’s easy. It’s a pleasure.

Because – to state the bleeding obvious – violence is the primary object of worship in the world of Baylor University. You’re sitting in Waco – home of last year’s enormous bikers-with-guns melee/massacre. You’re sitting in the heart of Trump territory. Your choice for national leader is the man who has turned a presidential election into The Rime of the Ancient Tackler.

Strangely, you don’t even like nobly violent people; you cheer on chickenshits like Trump – a man who crapped all over a war hero because he was captured and “I like people who weren’t captured.” You cheer on players who beat up women, children, and animals.

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

Some like it hot.

Hot and bloody.

It’s the Baylor way.

It’s an annual autumn ritual in America: College presidents and trustees all over the country snap to it and notice that they’re running a student-chiseling, all-football, all-losses, no-attendance operation…

No, that’s wrong. What actually happens is that other people (legislators, faculty, journalists, students) notice with the start of another academic year how beyond-belief bad things are in places like the Alaska public university system, and those people make noise and that noise forces the mindless somnolent deluded sports-loving trustees and presidents to…

To say this is the end of sports as we know it at our university!

Yes, these stewards of the university have figured out that you can shut everyone up each year by saying ridiculous shit like you’re right we’re just gonna have to cease all physical activity on campus:

There are three athletics options under consideration by the university. Under the first, the University of Alaska Anchorage and University of Alaska Fairbanks would end all sports.

WHAAAAA….???? My lower intestine just curled around itself and I’m losing control of my bowels… Please no… no…

So that’s the basic move, whether you’re EMU or Fairbanks or dozens of other ridiculous hemorrhaging jockshops – scare the fuck out of people and wait for them to shut up.

… officers.”

Or, as the Notre Dame University football program would put it, GAME ON!

He was a football hero at the University of Southern California. The quotation above is taken from a 2014 newspaper article.

Things have gotten worse for him.

BAYLOR FOOTBALL SEEKS TO REDEFINE ITS IMAGE

It’s a terrific local propaganda piece, appearing days after one of Baylor’s football players was filmed viciously beating his dog. The player doesn’t make an appearance in the piece; instead, the football coach is quoted going on at length about

“We have a lot of really, really good kids… All I can speak to is since I’ve been at Baylor. We’ve lost some kids that were dealt with previously [this is the coach’s delicate allusion to rapists], but the kids I’ve been associated with are quality kids…”

Kids, kids, kids! UD loves it when coaches talk about their players as though they’re little boys… And they do it all the time. They’re the daddy; the kids are their boys… And there’s nothing like a boy and his dog to bring a tear to the eye, is there? Just one of coach’s adorable charges… Already 25,000 very angry people have signed petitions, a few days after the dog beating, calling for the coach to throw the lad off the team… but… you know… he’s a quality kid and just needs a little talking-to from Dad. Nothing wrong with him really except he, you know, likes to beat dogs. Not even worth mentioning in this local story about how in lots of other ways Baylor football – hell, Baylor University – would really like to redefine its image.

But what are you going to do? A disgraced president finally forced out; a huge and growing rape scandal; a football player starring in a home video all about his fondness for flogging animals… The stuff just keeps coming. Maybe Baylor should ask itself why.

… Baylor’s latest depraved scholarship student/hero football player to be dismissed from the team. (He should also be dismissed from the school.)

Baylor University, a Christian university with a repulsive moral history (type Baylor in my search engine if you dare), has no problem retaining this person as a student and as a football player.

Only unrelenting pressure from the civilized world can have any effect on the people running this sordid university. Such pressure managed to get rid of Ken Starr. It can manage to get rid of the dog abuser.

Everyone from the president on down games the university ranking system.

The school is about pretty much nothing except football games.

The school’s budget goes to

an HD theater, a barber shop, a nine-hole putt-putt course, a golf simulator, a basketball court, laser tag, a bowling alley, an indoor slide and outdoor firepit

for football players.

Clemson: Games within games within games.

Buy a drink and pull a chair
Up to the edge of the dance floor
Bouncers bouncing through the night
Trying to stop or start a fight

Six University of Notre Dame football players got in so much trouble between last Friday night and Saturday morning that UD is worried they won’t be ready for church today.

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

But that’s the least of it. Six players is a lot for a team to lose, and there’s a season of football to be played.

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

No, no, calm down. They’ll all be back on the field in minutes. America’s most famous Catholic university offers compassion to its students who carry loaded unregistered handguns, beat up policemen, and resist arrest. After Friday and Saturday, there’s Sunday, when you receive forgiveness.

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

So. Six Notre Dame FB players arrested overnight. One more and [Coach] Brian Kelly gets a free sub, I think.

Rick Gregg

It’s been real, following the University of Nebraska on this blog. This proud enabler of Lawrence Phillips, Richie Incognito and a host of other great players has its own system for figuring out a person’s age: Three years per DUI. So in keeping his recruitment coach in the program after the man’s third DUI, Nebraska’s AD notes that the 45-year old is after all “a young man” with his whole life before him. So 45 in DUI years means that the guy is actually only fifteen years old.

In helping to put this guy back on the road to his fourth DUI, Nebraska’s AD showed the sensitivity and moral clarity for which this university has become famous.

“[We knew] we weren’t going to make everybody happy, especially those who have been uniquely affected by that sort of behavior. So we respect that and appreciate that.”

Yes, those of you paralyzed for life or, you know, bereft of a child because of people who drive drunk – you have certainly been uniquely affected! And we can all totally understand and appreciate that you might have an exaggerated reaction to this sort of thing because of your unfortunate personal experiences…

If you’ve taken an antiemetic in the last hour or so, feel free to put Nebraska in my search engine to review the history of this wasteland.

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

UD thanks John.

… appointment, WSU will want to hire as his replacement Montana’s Bruce Knerr — who just happens to be looking for a job!

The Livingston Public Schools Board of Trustees voted 9-0 to relieve second-year Park High football coach Bruce Knerr of his duties, according to the Billings Gazette.

Videos obtained by the Gazette show students sparring in lightweight boxing gloves under Knerr’s watch at the center of the gymnasium floor at nearby St. Mary’s Catholic School, where Park High’s football program was hosting a leadership camp.

Park junior Austin Peterson suffered five fractures to his eye socket and nasal cavity during a boxing match and required reconstructive surgery at a hospital in Spokane, Wash., the 17-year-old’s father told the local paper. Making matters worse, Knerr was aware Peterson had suffered two previous concussions, the boy’s father added.

“His skull was smashed in a depth of nine millimeters, putting pressure on the brain,” Austin’s father Tim Peterson told the Billings Gazette.

Atta boy! Far more scope for your coaching philosophy in college! Go for it.

Pledges to Coach and Fans that He’ll Get Better at It.

Ah Baylor Baylor Baylor Baylor.

Ah Waco Waco Waco Waco.

That university. That town. A very American crossroads.

I’d turn some of this into a song, but at the moment I’m exhausted from mowing my lawn in hellish heat.