[Drae] Bowles, the oldest son of Madison County [Tennessee] Sheriff’s Office Captain Dexter Bowles, is polite and honest. He looks you directly in the eyes and says, “Yes, sir.” When he speaks about the full college experience — not just football — you believe him. He’s confident, but he isn’t cocky. He doesn’t think he knows everything…

“My dad has always taught me and my brother to carry yourself in a very (mannerly) way,” Bowles said that afternoon. “I’ve just learned that trait growing up.”

… [I asked his high school coach:] “Is Drae really that good of a kid?”

Most coaches, especially when you turn off your recorder, will at least be fairly honest with questions like that. They’ll tell you if a kid is disingenuous or a tad rough around the edges, or if he’s just a normal kid who means well but occasionally finds mischief.

[The coach] didn’t flinch.

“Absolutely,” the coach replied. “What you see is what you get. He’s always like that.”

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

Bowles went on to play for the University of Tennessee Knoxville, where he was allegedly repeatedly beaten by teammates for assisting a woman who was allegedly raped by one of his teammates.

The “factual allegations” section of the lawsuit claims that Bowles had taken the alleged victim, a plaintiff in the lawsuit referred to as Jane Doe IV, to the hospital the night of her assault and supported her decision to report the incident to the authorities. It claims that the fifth plaintiff in the case, who is referred to as Jane Doe V and the only plaintiff who was not an alleged rape victim, witnessed several football players “jumping” Bowles on Nov. 17, 2014, the day after the alleged rape occurred.

The lawsuit says Jane Doe IV later understood that “athletic coaches were present” during that altercation. It also says Jane Doe IV learned that Bowles was assaulted a second time by the same players in a team facility.

Bowles transferred out of Knoxville after all this happened and, you know, you can’t blame him. Knoxville can’t keep its women from getting raped and its men from being beaten.

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By the way, this is one humongous whopper of a lawsuit. Watch closely.

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Y’all come on down, y’hear?

… Spend any time reading about big-time university football and basketball and it’s like a thesaurus full of adjectives for morally vile. Some schools are so disgusting they’ve been given whole new names: not the U of L (for the University of Louisville, with its pimpy basketball coach) but the U of Smell. Almost all the Texas football schools exhaust the efforts of sports writers to come up with new ways to say absolutely rock bottom gagworthy – rape-besotted, self-righteous Baylor; Southern “Slush Fund” Methodist; Texas “Pain Slut” Tech… You’d think a university, rather than say a fleabag hotel, would aim for a modicum of dignity, a veneer of seriousness, a hint of higher things…

Every now and then a derelict university tosses into the scrimmage a gridiron hero who’s so flagrantly mentally disturbed that any location other than a football school or the NFL would pass on him. Norman Bates turns out to have one hell of a throwing arm, so you hush up his – teehee – little indiscretions; the university’s president is wheeled out to say he’s a fine lad with the waywardness of youth, and the students sell t-shirts representing him as Jesus the Christ.

Norman typically implodes after his short stint (it’s not as though he’s attending school) at Football U, and, if he’s Mister Texas A&M Johnny Manziel, he’s in the professional leagues for the full onset of dementia. Who knows why he waits for the professional leagues, where tens of millions of dollars are at stake, to wig out? Maybe he holds it a little bit together in order to be able to go pro; but maybe the pressure of going pro is too much or something.

Anyway every now and then the conspiracy of silence at these sorts of schools suffers a security breach. Seems things were so bad at Manziel’s Texas A&M that some of his fellow players transferred out in disgust. One of them gave an interview and everyone’s talking about it. So let’s see what the guy said…

Former A&M quarterback Kyle Allen says he transferred to Houston last month largely because he disliked the culture of the A&M football program — a culture that Allen says goes back to Manziel thinking the rules didn’t apply to him.

“I think the culture was a big part of it, and I think that stems from Johnny’s era there — the way that they let Johnny and [others] act there,” Allen told CBS. “They [could] do that and still win games because they had Johnny . . . and five offensive linemen playing in the NFL right now…

A lot of people were riding off that, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want and win on Saturday,'”…

UD sympathizes. It’s a delicate balancing act for coaches. On the one hand, you want the guys to act like insane fucking assholes, because that way they feel strong and invincible and able to win games. On the other hand, you don’t want their rapes and batterings to exceed a certain manageable number. Say one or two a semester. The difficulty of this subtle calculus is reflected in the coach’s sky-high salary.

I mean, it’s easy for a student journalist to say this:

I defended Manziel to the end of the Earth as a fun-loving, work hard-play hard future franchise quarterback and therefore I was part of the problem. He seemed fun and loving, but he was really just sick.

It’s far harder for the multimillionaire coach whose salary depended on keeping Johnny on the field to say this. And anyway the coach has a time-honored option: I did everything I could for Johnny. I loved him like a son. I think the discipline of the team and the games and the university family kept it together for Johnny; I think we were the best thing that could have happened to him.

Excerpts:

Why is the liberal media parading all these dead, demented former [football] players around? People get dementia and die all the time. You don’t see them parading around dead insurance agents… We don’t need a bunch of benchwarmers trying to smear the game every time some player rapes a woman or beats his kid.

Pussy-free zone.

The football coach makes millions and keeps getting raises. Everyone else gets cut after cut. Eventually the school will be little more than its football team.

Rick Pitino’s raise this year will be in the millions.

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

And turning your athletics dormitories into whorehouses for recruits, players, and the fathers of players, will, uh, continue to be viable:

If missing the tournament this year is the only penalty, more schools will take the chance.

… unless it’s inside a university-issued football helmet!

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UD‘s loving the CTE headlines leading up to the Super Bowl. Her favorite so far:

[Ken] Stabler’s Brain Damage Intrudes on Super Bowl Fun

In the same, er, vein:

Ken Stabler’s CTE Diagnosis Put[s] Damper on Super Bowl Glitz

There’s also:

NFL’s New CTE-Tainted Reality

This tainting glitz-dampening fun-intrusion risks making this year’s Super Bowl a kind of Masque of the Red Death, the field crashed by a guy in a red suit and a facemask.

Updated version of the party crashing.

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

Despite His Own Concussions, [Merril] Hoge Thinks Football Critics Go Too Far

Kind of a black knight thing going on there.

Both Richie and Johnny were obvious wrecks during their college years, but at Incognito’s University of Nebraska and Manziel’s A&M, keeping them on the field was far more important than noticing that their mental health was shot. Not only was everything bad they did fine, just fine; John Sharp, one of many washed-out politicians who run universities in Texas and Oklahoma, babbled incessantly to the press about Manziel’s adorable perfectness. He was “innocent” of all the wrongdoing of which he was accused. “My mother wishes I was as nice a kid as Johnny when I was a sophomore in college,” Sharp told a newspaper.

Manziel’s the kind of alcoholic no one could miss, but Sharp missed it, or didn’t care.

Yet what’s most important in this is Sharp’s leadership skills. As head of the university, he established for the entire community the proper attitude, the proper emotion, the proper language, to bring to their quarterback. Sharp modeled a paternal gruff humor, an indulgent folksy tolerance that turned into outraged attacks on the press for reporting the things Manziel did.

So now Manziel has really imploded — not that this means he won’t be picked up by another football team, of course, but he has certainly imploded…

And after all much of the fun of watching NFL games is watching players get fucked up six ways to Sunday on and off the field: concussions, domestic violence, on-field fights, bar fights… Something in us loves fucked up athletes and loves to witness and contemplate the things they do that finally get them locked up. Right now there’s the insanely hyped OJ Simpson tv series.

It is a story that could tell us, on a smaller scale, why O.J. Simpson was the way he was, and what happens when a young man is venerated for his strength and power, and never has to learn how to do anything else.

It fails to tell us any of that.

But we can learn something by looking at the presidents and chancellors of our universities, people like Penn State’s Graham Spanier and Texas A&M’s John Sharp. They lead their university communities in venerating players – and of course sometimes coaches – whose darkness turns out to have been there for anyone to see.

Non-essential? Non-essential?? Them’s fightin’ words.

The Baylor University Song

Each time a recruit rings I still run
I don’t know how in the world
To stop thinking of them
‘Cause I still love them so

This local editorial says all the right things about the budget-stressed state of Wyoming giving millions to university football and slashing millions from public education. (See this post for details.)

We don’t believe for one moment that this money is going to improve UW’s chances of having a winning football team – which really is the goal behind this. At best, it keeps pace with other schools in the Mountain West Conference. And it does nothing to ease the impacts of UW’s bigger problems: Quality athletes are not going to play in Laramie, at least not consistently, when they have options with better amenities and climates.

This is a myth, a dream, that UW’s athletics department and its supporters peddle. It is time to move on to a smaller conference and perhaps even a different division – at least in football.

True, there is some value in seeing athletics as the “front porch” of the university. But in times of fiscal crisis, it is unwise to toss millions at trivialities when cuts are being made that hurt the public schools, and UW’s academic programs, and the state’s poor.

The editorial board even tries to make the argument that sports are less serious than study.

Athletics are an extravagance; academics are not.

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

Wyoming is just like Oklahoma, where the University of Oklahoma’s president is yet again explaining to stupid us (“the public misunderstands”) that we shouldn’t even ask the question posed in this Tulsa World headline:

HOW DO [OU’S FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL COACHES] MAKE $8 MILLION AT A SCHOOL FACING A $20 MILLION BUDGET CUT?

We shouldn’t even ask this, because the money’s not coming from the state and hell that’s how people spend their money in Oklahoma! They don’t give a shit about whatever else the university does. What else does UO do? Don’t ask! Don’t even ask!

Boren misunderstands that the real question isn’t about state or non-state funds. Oklahoma and Wyoming are two of our most happily and severely concussed states. They don’t cotton much, round them parts, to thinking.

… meets in Fargo to discuss raising the student athletics fee 35.5%.

[Student] Conner Swanson … questioned why [the North Dakota State University athletics deputy director and senior associate athletic director for development] were requesting a fee increase when athletics and other organizations received an increase for a five-year plan two years ago.

“What has changed and why are you back two years later and not five?” Swanson asked.

“I’d have to go back and take a look at (that fee increase) and get back to you,” [the deputy director] said.

He’s outta there. They stayed in Division I.

… raging out of control.

Keeping them dumb in Wyoming.

********

And okay – today’s theme on University Diaries seems to be stupidity. I mean, UD keeps reading more and more Americans worrying about how stupid we are. The context seems to be the GOP presidential front-runners, and it’s not confined to the left.

I don’t mean obvious stuff like Bill Maher’s. The Weekly Standard, which UD thought was Sarah Palin’s biggest booster, just ran a review of a book called Too Dumb to Fail. Excerpts from the review:

I had thought that Matt Lewis’s new book about the conservative Republican future, Too Dumb To Fail, had a title that was accurate but a bit ahead of its time. Then, on the eve of the book’s publication, Sarah Palin endorsed the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, with a rambling “speech” that thoroughly earned a New York Daily News front page headline “I’m With Stupid”…

[Southern evangelicals] as a group tend to lack intellectual curiosity and rigor. Bringing a decidedly unintellectual group into the [conservative] movement, Lewis contends, encouraged the movement itself to move away from its strength, its use of argument to explain America’s challenges and propose real solutions that solve them…

Pandered to by [media] “leaders” who profit enormously from keeping their flock sheltered, this has created a worldview in which conservatives are an embattled majority suppressed only by the betrayal of elites and their putative leaders. “Informed” by such falsehoods, it is no wonder when we ponder a future as I write of a Republican party led either by a demagogue or a charlatan.

********

And here’s a description of the highest-profile student/athlete at one of America’s highest-profile public universities.

[Maty] Mauk isn’t just stupid. He’s a true hard working moron.

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There’s one thing UD likes about this sudden national freeing of stupidity from the closet.

When La Kid was a kid, she and I loved a series of books called The Stupids. Then we were instructed by a child-something specialist among our acquaintance that it was very very wrong to read The Stupids, very wrong to use the word, let alone laugh at The Stupids.

Of course UD and La Kid ignored this person. But it’s always sort of been in the back of UD‘s mind as an annoyance that this person said this to her and to her daughter. It makes UD happy to see how far we’ve come as a country just in the last couple of decades in terms of naming the problem openly.