… appears.

A career on the brink of success as the starter for a big name coach in a power five conference had derailed, and he had finished his college career playing his last game at Yager Stadium in Topeka, Kansas. In front of an announced attendance of 5,403 he had rushed for 17 yards on 13 carries and caught three passes for forty yards. And that was it…

[One day Brandon Bourbon] retweeted a link to an article from Scientific American that just a single concussion has the ability to triple the long-term risk of suicide. Bourbon suffered at least one concussion during his time at the University of Kansas, missing time in 2011 as a result of that injury. It is not hard to imagine that he suffered others during his playing days as well.

This single tweet, mixed in amongst Bourbon’s other Tweets, may have been a stab in the dark at an individual trying to understand and comprehend the lasting effects of head trauma…

… It is unclear what led Bourbon to take his own life. Did his 2011 concussion play a role? Was it years of subconcussive trauma to the head? Were there outside factors of which no one is aware? Was it the rapid descent from starter for a team in a power five conference to unable to continue his career at that level because of injury and NCAA rules? Was it the fact that he had lived and breathed football for decades, and with the end of his college career, the driving factor for the majority of his life had been removed?

Background here.

–Knighted.

We’ll use this Alberto Moravia title to describe not the moral degeneracy of twentieth century Italy, but the moral degeneracy of one of America’s most noisily Christian universities, Baylor. One of the victims of one of Baylor’s woman-beaters is indeed currently suing the school for “indifference,” and UD thinks she’s got a winner on her hands. It’s hard to come up with a university as consistently indifferent to beaten and raped women on its campus as Baylor.

Baylor knew three [football] players had serious assault charges against them and chose the best course of action was no action…

But you have to understand…

The one area on the field where [the team] consistently struggled was defense, and all three of the players in question were defensive linemen.

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I guess Baylor figures there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

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Remarkable candor on the ethics of accepting into a university setting – and deifying – violent people.

Talent trumps all, said Peter Schroeder, a sports management expert, chair of the University of Pacific’s Department of Health, Exercise and Sport Sciences. “A really good player can make a big difference.”

Some Eastern Michigan University Faculty Members Want More Funds For Academics And Less For Sports

(The link goes to Page Not Found; use search engine to get to article.)

Texas A&M’s chancellor, Johnny Football’s biggest booster, must be thrilled at Johnny’s latest play! Sharp can sleep well, knowing it was his relentless defense of Johnny throughout his violent, troubled years at Texas A&M that made it possible for the lad to come so far. Well done, Chancellor Sharp!

Word is to the provost gone and word is to them all
And word is out to all the press, and that’s the worst of all
That Mary Willingham taped her chats
With the highest Tar Heels of all

Oh rise, arise Mary Willingham
Make sure you’re in good hands
Or thou shalt be beheaded by
A posse of basketball fans

Iowa State University President Steven Leath said he would love to see athletics at ISU provide financial support to academics.

However, he was not optimistic about this occurring anytime soon.

“We are facing a number of very large, comprehensive serious lawsuits related to athletics,” Leath said. “So before we would change our budget structure and put money into academics, we want to at least get past some of these immediate lawsuits.”

It’s a good typo… Not a great typo, but a good one, and in a few hours, when the hangover wears off, the writer will correct it, so you will click on the link and go to the last line in the article and say to yourself Where does UD get off making up typos in order to make people look ridiculous? …

Anyway. I tire somewhat of Rutgers University (in the BBC series, Aristocrats, the dying Charles Fox says I tire somewhat of life), but HBO’s Real Sports featured it as one of America’s exemplary suicide-by-sport schools, and who can argue with the producers’ choice? The fairy-tale world of Fat and Skinny at Rutgers is undeniably riveting:

… Rutgers spent about $26,000 per home game (seven games) last season to board its team in a hotel on the night before kickoff and $69,154.20 total on food before four games.

… [One] Rutgers student … said he works two part-time jobs – moving furniture for the school and driving a cab – and still “can’t afford some meals.”

“Some days I don’t eat,” he said. “Some days I skimp by just drinking water.”

Asked … if he suffers from hunger pains, the student shook his head and said, “some days, yeah,” before adding, “sometimes there are events on campus where there might be light refreshments and things like that. I’d usually try to find one of those and go there.”

… to remain on the board of for-profit Devry. And a reminder of one of the many benefits of big-money university sports.

DeVry wants [Ann Weaver] Hart for the U of Arizona name and prestige, not for Hart herself. She brings nothing to the table, certainly nothing worth $170,000 a year. The University of Arizona name and its international distinction belong to all of Arizona, not to her for her private benefit or for the benefit of a private entity. (Alas, any moral force the Board of Regents may have had is long gone since coaches regularly appear on local TV as hucksters for businesses wearing their Arizona logos and even with the student Wildcat mascot in the background of commercials).

If you want to understand the University of Tennessee, one of America’s most depraved locations, watch this clip from An Officer and a Gentleman.

To understand why UT protects accused rapists, hires scummy coaches who arrive on campus trailing their scummy pasts like bright streamers, puts its athletic program in 200 million dollars of debt, and in every conceivable way craps on the word university, you have to understand that for UT there is nothing else besides field games. It has nowhere else to go. It’s got nothing else. Take away ball games and you’ve got a big gaping hole that owes money to every crooked coach in America.

Why, UD has wondered for years, do the citizens of Tennessee keep paying for this? True, they live in what has long been one of the most corrupt states in America.… So maybe they’ve given up. Maybe they don’t care that the money they work for doesn’t educate their kids but keeps dirty coaches in the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed. In a sane world, Tennessee’s residents would have generated a popular tax revolt or two. Instead, UD envisions them – much like the depressed vodka-swilling citizens of the former Soviet Union – motionless in their houses with the tv on to some shitty UT game, knocking back bourbon.

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UD thanks John.

Why not dig up Paterno if you want to win some games? Huh guys? Am I right?

These are the first felony arrests for a Georgia football player since Johnathan Taylor in June 2014 on domestic violence charges.

These are the second and third arrests of a Georgia football player this spring. Defensive lineman Jonathan Ledbetter was arrested last month on two misdemeanor alcohol charges.

First felonies since all the way back in… 2014! Things are looking up for University of Georgia football!

… even when we know a lot, we know very little, UD still wants to pay attention to the suicide of 24-year-old University of Kansas football player Brandon Bourbon. It reminds her of Ohio State’s Kostas Karageorge’s suicide, and Derek Boogaard’s, and the suicides of some other super-macho way-young heroes of violent sports.

I know there are many differences among these deaths. Some of them seem to have, in part, physical causes – brain trauma, mainly. Boogaard’s might have been an accidental overdose, while Bourbon and Karageorge hid away and shot themselves in the head. Some of these men were always troubled, always struggling in life, while others – Bourbon – fell from a very great height.

Still, there’s a common plot line here having to do with sports-obsession…

Start with Bourbon’s funeral service being held on his local football field. Because he played football in a part of the United States (Missouri) where football is worshipped, “I don’t want to say he was looked to as a god,” [a friend] said, “but he was idolized.” Americans are baptized on high school football fields. Grieving Americans scatter ashes on university football fields. Young men who play football are high priests.

Bourbon did not merely grow up in a part of the world where football is very important. He grew up in a place where the very passages of life – including his own funeral – may take place on football fields. He grew up understanding that few things are more important than football.

Intelligent, handsome, genial, he was offered a football scholarship to (among other great places) Stanford, and he originally accepted Stanford’s offer, but ultimately turned it down for Kansas, where he studied a typical jock thing: sports management. UD wonders if this initial step – 100% football over a school that takes its big-ticket athletes seriously as students – already hurt Bourbon, one of whose friends reports that he was “struggling with his spirituality” at the time he died. Serious studies in the arts and sciences are about (among other things) broadening one’s perspective and giving one ways to think productively about existential questions. UD isn’t claiming that a capacity to think more broadly about life in a way that might have helped Bourbon survive would necessarily have been the outcome for him of a good university education. But it might have been.

And then there were the injuries. Bourbon spent most of his Kansas years with broken this and torn that, which kept him out of play, and one can only imagine his frustration. Eventually he had to transfer out of his Division I school to obscure Washburn (Div II), a move that must have been crushing for someone who had been recruited at the highest levels. When Washburn was over, Bourbon was back in his little home town, bedeviled by former worshippers who wanted to know why he wasn’t in the NFL by now. “He was just struggling to figure out who he was and what he ended up really wanting to do with his life.” Well, yes. He was only twenty-four years old after all. But his football path had been set very early, and he seemed unable to step out of it even a little.

Suicide, says A. Alvarez, reflecting on his own youthful suicide attempt, is one of the things some people do when they feel really really trapped.

UD figures Bourbon himself might have been rather sardonic at the sight of his football field funeral. Born to it. Died to it.

That’s the beauty of it. The regents would never know. That’s the beauty of it.

… great big dirty world (quoting Randy Newman in this beautiful song). That’s why I’ve been posting somewhat less than usual.

But so what. I’m not blogging in order to share with you my distress that

globalization has allowed the capital and assets of the rich to travel more freely than those of everyone else. The result is rampant tax avoidance, labor offshoring and a class of elites that flies 35,000 feet over the problems of nations and their taxpayers. “The 1% can move anywhere they want and profit handsomely from the relocation,” says Peter Atwater, a behavioral economist. “But the 99% are left with the aftermath – the empty buildings of a deserted Detroit, the toxic waste from chemical plants in West Virginia or the unsustainable tax liabilities of Puerto Rico.”

Back in the mid-‘nineties, Christopher Lasch wrote a book whose title says it all: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.

Two decades later, it’s all much worse. Around $36 trillion has been taken from a world of suffering people. That’s almost as much as Harvard University’s endowment.

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And when UD thinks of little Delaware! Delaware, whose sweet flat little soybean fields she greets each summer on her way to Rehoboth Beach! Sweet flat little Delaware!

Mr Obama likes to cite Ugland House, a building in the Cayman Islands that is officially home to 18,000 companies, as the epitome of a rigged system. But Ugland House is not a patch on Delaware (population 917,092), which is home to 945,000 companies, many of which are dodgy shells.

Delaware, whose state tourism slogan, Endless Discoveries, is now Endless Justice Department Discoveries …

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No, no, she’s not blogging to burden you with her boohoohoo over this great big dirty world. She’s blogging to share magazine articles with titles like

ACADEMICALLY SKETCHY PROGRAM DEFEATS ACADEMICALLY SKETCHY PROGRAM, 83-66

She’s blogging to express admiration for the honesty about America’s universities that appears in this article:

To the NCAA, [academic fraud at the University of North Carolina is] a scandal, but to North Carolina and the athletes who took part, this was very obviously the right thing to do, a way of meeting scam requirements with scam action… By now, reasonable people see the NCAA’s insistence on the “college” side of college as a prerequisite for playing revenue sports as a mean-spirited scam — one bigger and more institutionalized than anything UNC is accused of doing. Academic fraud, in this case, is just what you call not keeping up appearances to the satisfaction of the people profiting off the scam….

The NCAA may well come down hard on North Carolina here, because that’s its role in this comic opera. UNC was playing their role to a T — the system as it is incentivizes exactly this behavior — until they went a little too far and made the “student-athlete” concept look the charade it is. In practice, the cheaters aren’t the programs that commit academic fraud. (Every major program does it to an extent, but one which keeps them from getting caught, which is what the NCAA prefers.) The cheaters are the programs that don’t even bother with the pretense that higher education is anything other than a cartel-imposed hoop to jump through.

Fuck the NCAA, and fuck anyone else who insists on forcing college upon kids who don’t want it just so their own paychecks can be bigger by dint of not paying the people who actually bring in the money. If UNC committed academic fraud, it was in the service of the reasonable, even noble, cause of letting athletes who wanted to do so focus on athletics. It’s merely an accident of history that college is in any way connected to amateur sports, and it’s time to start applauding the big-time programs that have found ways to take the academics out of college.

Damn straight. Whether it’s an international $36 trillion scam or a scam in the billions that’s turned some of our once-reputable universities into big fat jokes, we need to face up to it. We need to know absolutely everything we can about it. We need to be absolutely honest about it.

If we can’t do anything about it – and UD certainly thinks the trillion dollar one is unfixable – we need to figure out other ways to show the heavens slightly more just.

If we can do something about it – and we can definitely do something about the NCAA and the big-sport schools – we should fight. In particular, we should fight for the absolute decoupling of universities and big-money sports programs.