“Oh, no. I can’t [support Grambling football]. No, no, no. If I support them, I condone it.”
“Oh, no. I can’t [support Grambling football]. No, no, no. If I support them, I condone it.”
I’ve seen cynical desperate college athletics hires in my time, but nothing beats what Grambling – site of two very recent on-campus murders – has done in hiring coach Art Briles. At Baylor, Briles “repeatedly cover[ed] up allegations of assault, sexual and otherwise, perpetrated by multiple Baylor football players.” “[H]e presided over a culture with rampant sexual violence toward women, including a former student’s lawsuit alleging at least 52 acts of rape committed by 31 football players from 2011 to ’14.” Many of them were players he recruited, though he knew before he recruited them that they were very dangerous people.
*************************
So maybe what’s going on at Grambling is a kind of unprecedented college product-placement. Lots of people like violence, and some of those people, while being violent, would also like to be educated. At Grambling you’re guaranteed to be living near one of America’s most outstanding murder capitals, with a mass shooting not long ago at one of the school’s homecoming events; you’re also guaranteed an ethos – embodied by Coach Briles – of tolerance of sexual violence and physical assault more broadly.
… the handshake line. Others are defending it.
For those opposed, the call is for something more appropriate, with many arguing for a circular firing squad.
No one pulled out a gun and killed everyone. It was just a huge brawl, started by the University of Michigan basketball coach. By current American standards, it was sportsmanship of the highest order.
But then, UM is a very classy school.
And UD uses any golf game! For UD, there’s no white noise like the sotto voce, basso continuo, green-hills-far-away gestalt of golf.
Of course she’s not the first to discover this.
She discovered football as white noise in a long, very thoughtful New York Times comment thread appended to the 450th article UD has read in which a conscience-stricken person reckons with his inability to stop watching football even though it’s so nasty. This particular cri-de-coeur has become so common a plaint that it now constitutes a whole school of American philosophy: Reformed Calvinism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, Post-Thiesmann-Fracturism.
But what she really wanted to share was the most thoughtful comment of all. She plucks it from comment obscurity and places it here for you.
“Football is really the new American Pastime, not baseball. It’s like guns at this point – woven into the meaning of being American for large swaths of the populace. Among the potential player pool which is largely Black (as am I, and I played and loved football), it is still seen as a “way out” — fortune and glory overrides concern for CTE in their 50s. For a teen, life ends at 30 anyway. And for all the racism in the sport, the players are still largely black and show up to play every weekend, so it’s only logical that the public takes its cues from them. If they all went on strike to protest, then they could really open eyes.
And let’s not overlook the “manly” aspect of it. Those with more of a progressive streak will scoff at the barbarians smashing their heads together, but we’re still mammals. And mammals are hard wired in specific ways. Yes, over-glorification of manliness and the NFL’s fusing with military marketing is particularly perverse. But it comes from a real place.
Remember, boxing was a huge sport for a long time. 95% of the spectators would never get in a boxing ring to get their bodies pummeled for a living, but yet they came to watch. Now MMA is picking up where boxing left off. Let’s face it, we have a bloodlust as long as it’s someone else getting bloody.”
The hideous University of Hawaii is a perennial subject on this blog, in particular because of its sordid sports program. They’re always hiring high-priced asshole football coaches, always quickly firing them amid scandal, and then always digging into their empty pockets to pay the coaches zillion dollar buyouts. You’d think a university system might, over the course of decades doing the same stupid ruinous thing, learn a thing or two. Not Hawaii.
Game attendance is pathetic. Deficits are astounding. But above all the place is constantly buying out assholes. The latest is standard-issue hyperchristian hypocrite Todd Graham, who between sermons about Christ’s love talks dirty and treats players like shit. You see this dude all over university football – Son, let us pray, you stupid cunt hold onto the fucking ball. Its more sophisticated form can be seen at places like Baylor, where soldiers of the lord preside over armies of rapists.
… South Carolina State University continues to boast of its association with Phillip Adams, severe CTE-sufferer and mass murderer. The school wants everyone to know that he got his first pummelings on their campus – pummelings that would, in the fullness of time, turn Adams into a psychotic killer. Awwww.
But university football does so much more than shred young brains. It typically generates endless fulminating corruption/lawsuits, and just as typically eats up much of a university’s revenue. At the University of Miami, which, to be fair, is a sewer of both football and non-football corruption, they’ve just impoverished the faculty to give an eighty million dollar contract to a football coach.
As Sepp Blatter (talk about a blast from the past!) finally gets indicted, this New York Times writer does his best, within the length restrictions of typical American newspaper articles, to summarize the hundred or so years of everyone within fifteen feet of FIFA stealing all of its money. The hilarious larcenous briberous free for all which is professional soccer just keeps rolling along, of course; but nothing in the organization’s history will ever come up to the tightly organized crime that Blatter oversaw. No wonder he is the recipient of so many honorary degrees.
I prefer not to, says the football coach at Washington State, and haggadah tell you (Passover pun), UD‘s always had a soft spot for silent machos who canter off and everyone watches them go and says What a man and No one will ever know why and Miss Ellie’s daddy he owns the biggest copper mine in the state and everybody knows she wanted to marry him but.
Nick Rolovich gave up fifteen million dollars and the wild adulation of the entire Evergreen State because he refused to get vaccinated because… because none of your goddamn business is because. Fine. Nuff said.
[Consider] the Raiders’ decision in 2018 at [Jon] Gruden’s behest to sign Richie Incognito, a player known to have a past of bullying, racism, and homophobia. Gruden would go on to call Incognito a “leader on this football team” when he was signed to an extension in 2019.
Yeah well people all over are unloading on the self-email-outed-ex-coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, but who knew these two steroidal psychos were on the same team? UD didn’t know, and UD‘s been blogging about batshit Incognito since his intellectual sojourn at the University of Nebraska.
[Gruden] found space on his roster for Richie Incognito, a confirmed bully who was suspended for intimidating a Black former Dolphins teammate with racial slurs.
It warms the cockles of her heart to know Gruden and Incognito were… together… at the end…
She sees them embrace in a manly farewell, and hears Incognito’s final words to his bro — “And now nothing remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my affection.”
*******************
AWKward. Defenders of Gruden are falling all over themselves to point out the double standard of happily allowing squads of criminals and maniacs (see above) into the NFL but booting out a guy who writes disgusting emails. Dudes have a point, but in making the point they are offering the world a high-profile, complete list of all the dangerous shits who Americans worship because they play football. Not sure Gruden’s defenders want to publicize precisely how deep that problem goes. Might make people want to do something about it.
Yeah where the FUCK do they get off…..
*************************
The ironies in this downfall are as crude as Gruden himself, but let’s just get it said: He’s always calling everybody else a dumb prick; but what do you call someone who loses $100 million in salary because he’s too stupid to know you don’t write anything controversial in an email? Who else is that stupid?
“USC and its athletic department spent much of the past few years embroiled in various stupid scandals... USC was one focus of the Justice Department’s men’s basketball corruption case that went public in 2017, and the program finally got hit with NCAA probation earlier this year as a result. In 2019, USC was on the front page of the New York Times (and not the sports section) for its central role in the Varsity Blues scandal, wherein rich parents fabricated and bribed their kids’ way into elite schools. [USC] administrators [have been] dealing with racketeering and corruption cases and NCAA investigations… [O]utside legal disputes stemming from USC’s 2000s NCAA problems weren’t entirely wrapped up until the end of July. This July.”
********************
“USC had to fire back-to-back coaches in the middle of the season. Find another major program so badly directed that it’s had to do that.
And then USC had to do it again this year, something no other major program has even had to contemplate. Think of the degree of mismanagement that requires. From an incredibly immature Lane Kiffin to an incredibly intemperate Steve Sarkisian to an incredibly incompetent Clay Helton, they turned the keys of one of college football’s historic top three programs to an over-their-head trio of not-ready-for-prime-time players.”
*********************
The second writer, who calls USC’s program “dead,” doesn’t even mention the very special Sarkisian/Puliafito/Nikias magic, about which UD wrote a few years ago. Surely he doesn’t mean to leave out of his autopsy the very top of USC’s leadership!
Whether it’s rape, dirty recruitment, or assault, Boulder has long been front and center — and they’re keeping the beating-the-shit-out-of-everyone thing going with hotly recruited hometown hero Carson Lee, who titles his Twitter page with Isaiah 41:10, which in his case would seem to go something like yea, I will repeatedly pummel thee with the immense right hand of mine immense arm.
*************************
According to the affidavit, the man said Lee punched him about 30 times. Doctors later said the man suffered a fractured skull and internal brain bleeding.
*************************
Only nineteen and blessed with spectacular tackling skills – thirty blows resulting in the sort of brain injury you only see inflicted at the very highest levels of university football. Thirty shows commitment. It shows follow-through. It shows star quality.
UD fully expects Colorado to hold tight to Mad Dog Lee even if he’s found guilty; but on the off chance the school decides to let him go, we can all sit back and enjoy the spectacle of increasingly mindless, vicious university football factories taking their chance, one after another, on the guy. Eventually maybe he’ll hit the jackpot and turn into Richie Incognito.
The highest paid public employee in Washington, the highest-profile person at the University of Washington, its big bad super macho football coach, shrinks at the sight of a needle. Refuses vaccination.
The governor’s after him. The university’s president is after him. The local press is giving him hell.
Plus he’s one big putrid bowl of putrid as a football coach.
Some on campus argue that three million dollars a year might find better uses than the care and maintenance of a needlephobe who can’t win football games.