Missouri legislators are furious: Football players at the University of Missouri can’t carry handguns. Coach says so.

Rep. Joe Don McGaugh, R-Carrollton, called the policy “unbelievable.”

McGaugh is clearly shaken. He will need time to himself before he’s able to focus on countermeasures. I’m sure his fellow legislators are in the same boat.

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Once McGaugh and other lawmakers feel able to act, UD can guarantee that the kids will get all the handguns they want. Relax.

Caleb Helsley threw a touchdown pass to Taylor Armbristor to make it 14-0 after a missed two-point attempt with 7:36 remaining. He then ran for another with under a minute left as the Indians (1-0) led 20-0 at the break. In the fourth quarter, Helsley found Armbristor again to make the lead 33-6.

Gunfire on the McLain side of the stadium forced the game to be called with 2:30 remaining in the fourth quarter.

… we find one of their specialized coaches – he’s solely about conditioning and strengthening the lads – paid the sixth highest such coaching salary in the country. With contract extensions and all, he’s well on his way to half a million dollars a year. (His most recent salary is a “126.25 percent increase from his initial [2010] $160,000 salary with the Seminoles.”)

Now I want you to put aside petty distractions about FSU that are all in the past: the rapes, the thefts, punching women in bars, animal abuse, the conniving local police force, blahblahblah… I want you to think about this hagiographic Showtime special on this great team, this great school, this great community.

Watch the trailer – it features this guy, this strength and conditioning coach. One of FSU’s heroes.

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So – the nexus? The very crux of what makes a great academic institution?

Well, you’ve got the coach, and you’ve got the Showtime special. Now you need that ineffable combination of elements that makes for scholarly excellence. Let us put these elements together.

Let’s have this coach get stinking drunk in his campus office with the Showtime crew and then pile into his car and crash into a stop sign.

AND let’s let this class operation give him a slap on the wrists and insinuate in its public statement that it was all the evil Showtime crew’s fault for forcing whiskey into the hands of this great good and innocent man.

Now you’ve got it. The life of the mind, Florida State University.

He recruited a criminal onto his team. Nothing to notice there; virtually all universities take risks on certain players. But when this freshman immediately got to work at WMU, attacking a woman at gunpoint before suiting up for even one game, the feckless Fleck broke out with torrents of bullshit about what he’d done by bringing this man into the WMU community. Let’s listen.

Let’s listen, keeping in mind that it took a local news station less than an hour to find the player’s criminal record. WMU says it doesn’t do that… It doesn’t look at players’ criminal records because I dunno who ever heard of criminal behavior among football players? Why waste your time with that? WMU says it’s considering doing that now, going forward and all.

You dig as much as you want, you can say you have something, you don’t have something, you can dig as a head coach as much as you want and it is what it is at this point, and you just have to be able to use it for the future players as you continue to recruit them… There is zero tolerance for anything like that within our culture. Zero… I brought those two gentlemen [there were two WMU football players involved; this guy’s teammate “ordered the victim to take her shirt off, while holding a gun to her forehead, according to the testimony.”] into our culture and if I would have told you I knew what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have obviously done that because that’s not what our culture’s about. I feel like I failed because I couldn’t work in their lives to get them to not make that decision. We do everything we possibly can, every single day, to teach and promote decision making and we will continue to do that.

Ya gotta admit that in years of my recording scummy things scummy coaches say, this drivel (produced by probably the highest paid person at that university) rules. The big lie pompously reiterated (Zero. Zero.). Reiterated use of a voice one can only call the subliterate subjunctive. The obscene hypocrisy.

That’s what you pay your university coach for though, ain’t it? You’re after a guy who doesn’t give a shit about importing dangerous people to university towns if they can play football.

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UPDATE: I mean, really. Why has Fleck not been fired? Jesus.

Like Catholic, football-obsessed Boston College, Notre Dame of all places is beginning to show signs of spiritual strain. More and more fans confess that the school’s squalid football program – which slimes along its merry way accompanied by a tireless chorus of We’re godly from the school – is so squalid, so hypocritical, that they just can’t do it anymore. Notre Dame is a choir boy gone rancid, and while most of the congregants have decided through an effort of will to grip their hymnals ever tighter and ignore the stinky lad, some have become overwhelmed by the smell. They may still buy tickets to the games, but they’re “finding it hard to care very much.” They’re finding it hard to forget six player arrests in one night, and blahblahblah you know the picture. You know it from forthrightly filthy programs like University of Miami, and you know it from equally but not at all forthrightly filthy Notre Dame.

Notre Dame is Blanche DuBois flouncing around a dump, twirping about her moral purity and her clean bright Southern manse. You just want to look away.

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.

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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.

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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.