They’re not just big and bad.
If coaches, they may be the highest paid people in the state.
If players, they’re sports heroes. They get huge scholarships plus under the table payments. Bogus professors and bogus disciplines are invented just for them. All of the best buildings on campus are off limits to everyone but these students, with some interesting results.
The big and bad people – and of course not everyone on your big-time college team is a bad person – may bring a new kind of violence to campus, often working as the team that they are to beat the shit out of male students and sexually assault/film themselves sexually assaulting female.
The president and trustees of places like the University of Nebraska seem to consider what people like Richie Incognito do to their students acceptable collateral damage, and students seem to agree it’s worth it because you need people big and bad enough to beat the shit out of opposing players, and you might not be able to confine to the field or the court the generally violent disposition of big and bad people. Here’s a Rutgers scholar (Rutgers has distinguished itself for coach and player violence) showing his stuff.
I mean, lots of people drink and carouse and get into trouble in college. C’est entendu. But these guys are built like brick shithouses and they work as a team. You do the math.
Manducare Stercore Subridens
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[W]hile many Mississippi State fans might call for second chances, or try to say he was just defending his family to make ourselves feel better for taking Jeffery Simmons without any real repercussions, I just can’t bring myself to do it. I’ll just know we decided to take a really bad hit to the image of our school all in the name of winning football games.
Brian Hadad of Bulldog Sports Radio has often called taking Simmons similar to eating a turd sandwich. It tastes terrible going down and you just have to find a way to choke it down. He was completely right, but I’m not even sure I could anticipate how difficult this would be to swallow once we got here.
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But smiling while trying to get your shit down is nothing.
Football is so popular that people (myself included) have private conversations about how many people would have to die on the field before we’d seriously consider giving it up.
If you want to know the answer to that, consider the long history of drivers dying on the race car track. People in the stands dying at race car events. I think if we’re being honest about this, public deaths in the course of violent sports events are – fanwise – a plus.
Indeed, let’s continue with Chuck Klosterman’s argument:
There’s an embedded assumption within all arguments regarding the doomed nature of football. The assumption is that the game is even more violent and damaging than it superficially appears, and that as more people realize this (and/or refuse to deny the medical evidence verifying that damage), the game’s fan support will disappear. The mistake made by those advocating this position is their certitude that this perspective is self-evident… The contemporary stance on football’s risk feels unilateral, because nobody goes around saying, “Modern life is not violent enough.” Yet this sentiment quietly exists… Football could become a dead game to the casual sports fan without losing a fraction of its cultural influence. It could become the only way for a certain kind of person to safely access the kind of controlled violence he sees as a critical part of life… [Football will not become extinct; rather it will become] a mildly perverse masculine novelty.
But the more violence faction ain’t such a novelty, is it? It’s about to elect our next president.
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“Look, our nature, we like competitive violence. We do. As much as we talk about the quarterbacks, and where the game of football has gone the last 25 years, we still like when you show a big hit or a big tackle. We like that. You can throw five touchdown passes and that’s great. But one big hit, that’s what you’re here for.”
The elect are getting Raptured Up; the unfortunate will be Left Behind.
The state is a perennial Number One on Most Corrupt States lists; the university, which is ALL about football, issues presidential directives on cowbells. And no one would notice or be in any way surprised that Mississippi State has just welcomed with open arms a guy currently facing charges for beating the shit out of a woman – a beating you can watch on YouTube (take your pick) – if it weren’t for the current unpleasantness at Baylor… I mean, you know, it’s the SEC… Who really gives a rat’s ass? Be it ever so decadent, there’s no place like that y’all and shut ma mouth land… Don’t think y’all gonna find one person, male or female persuasion, who ain’t prepared to forgive Jeffery Simmons if he do get a bit out of hand… Small price to pay for one hell of a defensive end.
And here’s a sign of the times! Mississippi State is currently issuing protective helmets to all its women students. Distribution is mandatory but you can choose to wear yours or not.
Rape, unreported, robs me of my rest:
Rape, silly rape, our ardent team encumbers:
Rape, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest,
And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers!
[University of Louisville President James] Ramsey has been in hot water with the university as faculty and staff have polled for a no-confidence vote due to negative publicity and claims of mismanagement. U of L and the Foundation have also been in an ongoing state audit, which was stalled by late submissions from the university three weeks ago…
… Ramsey was paid $2.8 million by the University of Louisville Foundation in 2014, $1 million more than he was paid in 2013.
Thus sayeth UD: He who goes after a President for going down will himself go down.
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And suddenly there appeared The President of the Baylor Men, praising football, and saying:
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest my rapists to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With shame, disgrace, and getting fired.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a chancellor and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
So pathetic, what’s happened to the American university. One prominent lawyer consults another about how to run a university and this is what he’s told.
UD was amused, later in the Inside Higher Ed account of The Passion of Ken Starr and (according to reports) The Impending Martyrdom Of The Athletic Department, to read that Baylor’s orgiastic adoration of football “has concerned some on campus, who worry that a university so focused on football could lose sight of its Baptist mission.” Don’t they understand what everyone else understands? That there’s no light between Football and Faith?
Oh beautiful Starr the hope of light
Guiding the players through their indict
All through the courts ’till break of dawn
Into the land of Next Game Day
He does give out a lovely ray
Oh beautiful Starr of Baylor shine on
When Baylor was winning football games and no one in a position of authority had yet been booted out because of arrant indifference to sexual assault, one of the trustees described life on campus as “like an early rapture.” What will the people of Baylor do now that other teams are lifted up and they remain behind in Tribulation?
UD‘s advice: Win some football games.
How I wonder what you are
Are you in or are you out?
What is Baylor’s board about?
Twinkle twinkle little Starr
How I wonder what you are.
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UD thanks Van.
A Texas writer grapples with the philosophical implications of Baylor’s conscience-of-a-nation president, the man who had WHAT to say about Bill Clinton’s fellatio with a White House intern, now clammin’ right up when it comes to his football players. Title of the writer’s article:
Ken Starr, Full Monty on Fellatio 18 Years Ago, All Shy Now About Baylor Rapes
When Lewinsky describes the sex she had back then, she says it happened because “I fell in love with my boss.”
When scads of Baylor women describe the sex they recently had, with members of the football team, they don’t talk about love. They just go straight to the police reports.
[Ken] Starr .. wanted to make fellatio a national issue … And now that Starr is president of a Baptist university, he and the regents of his school are cloaking themselves in legalisms and claims of privacy on the arguably much more urgent question of serial campus rape.
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To jog your memory:
Starr, whose main claim to fame at Baylor has been beefing up the football team and building a new stadium, now has two star players in prison for rape, a third about to be tried, another player expelled, a fraternity president arrested and charged. This occurs against a backdrop of foot-dragging on federally mandated anti-rape measures and a pattern of stony silence roundly decried by national and Texas media including even the university’s hometown newspaper, The Waco Tribune.
The Silence of the Starrs. We’ve had a lot of that, haven’t we? Brings to mind that Edgar Lee Masters poem…
I have known the silence of the Starrs and of their teams,
And the silence of the buck when it’s passed,
And the silence of the AD and the Assistant AD,
And the silence for which juries alone find the word,
And the silence of trustees before football season begins,
And the silence of boosters …
Baylor University:
[A] nationally-ranked football powerhouse that can be classified as anything but Christian: a program that has developed into a nightmare of criminality engulfing the entire school community…
[We are following] the horrific news that has been spilling out of Waco, Texas regarding the overall tone and personality of the football program and the despicable actions of an inordinate [number] of their players over the years…
[Baylor features] an accepted culture of severe criminal behavior, sexual assaults and rapes …
[Baylor’s football coach] willingly and purposely recruited some terrible characters who he, his staff, the university and the local police department allowed to run amok while terrorizing a community.
There is the marauding horde at the city’s Christian university, Baylor:
There have been altercations, sexual assaults, hidden police reports and no discipline. Everybody is in on it, trying to keep the football gravy trainrolling unimpeded by pesky justice for victims of the Bears’ marauding horde.
And there is the marauding horde at the city’s breastaurant:
Sunday’s fight escalated to include knives and firearms as gang members fired at each other in the Twin Peaks parking lot, police said, adding that nine suspected gang members died and 170 were arrested.
If you’re a diner or a shopper or a university student, try to stay out of their way. Now that the state of Texas is open carry, this should become easier. The marauding hordes are now likely to be displaying their weaponry.
If you’re a student and would like to study amid the bike engines, gunshots, police sirens, and screams of the dying, UD recommends earbuds.