If you’re a current student at Rutgers University, this is what you have to look back on as football season gets under way!

If you’re not a current student, apply today, and join the fun!

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1. A portion of the team is an armed home invasion gang.

Lloyd M. Terry Jr., 20, of Wrightstown, was arrested Wednesday and charged with armed robbery, armed burglary and conspiracy to commit the armed robbery.

Terry is the sixth football player at the university to be charged this month with either the home invasions or a separate assault of a student in April…

In all, 11 current and former Rutgers students are facing charges in these two cases.

2. Although the football coach (salary well over a million dollars) recruited and/or retained these players, and has even reportedly put pressure on faculty to give passing grades to one of them so as to allow him to stay on campus, he remains in good standing.

3. Although a number of Rutgers students have been assaulted by football players, you can rest assured that “university officials [have] announce[d] efforts to bolster security on campus.”

“[T]he university will begin reaching out to nearly 10,000 students who live south and west of the College Avenue Campus to offer window alarms and light timers and advise them on ways to be more safety-conscious.” Number one way: If the football team shows up wanting your stuff, give it to them.

… football field.

The grill itself is divided into four sections. There’s even an observation deck from which the sausage-curious can watch Williams cook. The Big Taste Grill truck requires a space 20 by 90 feet to park and is driven by a man named Al Acosta.

… must be current Job One for the trustees and boosters at Indiana University. Jock school presidents are supposed to keep their mouths shut about rule-breaking and cheating and crime on their teams. They’re supposed to leave the We’re waiting for all the facts to come out announcement to the Athletic Director.

Can you think of anything the president of the University of Alabama has ever said?

Page One in the jock school workbook quotes Gordon Gee, veteran jock school president.

Asked whether he had considered firing [Coach Jim] Tressel, Gee said: “No, are you kidding? Let me just be very clear: I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.”

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There’s something both inappropriate and pathetic about a jock school president who thinks what he says matters, and who actually lets himself get all puffed up about an athletic program that has absolutely nothing to do with him.

Indiana University President Michael McRobbie issued a blistering warning Tuesday to members of his athletic department staff, telling them player misbehavior had to stop.

McRobbie’s stern admonishment came during remarks at the department’s annual all-staff meeting, at which the president often shares his thoughts on the academic year ahead. Departing from his usual position as supportive but passive when it comes to athletics, McRobbie didn’t mince words when discussing the recent spate of off-the-field incidents that have made unwanted headlines in Bloomington.

… “What I do not want to see is any more stories of repeated student misbehavior. They embarrass the university, they embarrass all of you in Athletics, and they are a complete distraction from our primary role as an educational institution,” McRobbie said. “This misbehavior simply has to stop.”

Supportive but passive: The ideal jock school president is the iconic ‘fifties housewife, with a twist of Kay Adams-Corleone. McRobbie will soon be out on his ass.

[College of Faith] was held to negative 100 total yards against Tusculum College in Tennessee this season, an NCAA record. The final score was 71-0.

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UD thanks Andrew.

High school refs and umps are falling left and right. This tyke killed a soccer ref; this one killed … a soccer ref! But this one… I mean, haha, these two… killed… nah hell they just assaulted him give them a break… a football ump.

Football comment threads now routinely feature remarks like the one in my headline, in which the writer sweeps up our fondest, most recent, game memories into one long sentimental sentence.

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As soon as these two are out of jail, Baylor’s gonna come knocking, since the guys have demonstrated a capacity for violence our highest-profile sports factories get off on.

If, on release, they film themselves gang-raping someone, their recruitment at our very top-ranked football universities is guaranteed.

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Ah, Texas. Special Texas coverage of a Texas event. Headline in the Dallas Morning News:

WHEN PASSION TURNS TO VIOLENCE

Ah oui, so it was love’s burning passion! There’s a thin line between love and hate, and those lads, bless them, entered the field with so much love for the game burning in their hearts… But love can lead us astray… There’s that book, Men Who Love Too Much… They should read that book…

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Thanks, Texas! We’ve made it into the international leagues. Even footballers are impressed.

UD thanks Mondo.

Playing big-time, winning football is hard enough when you’re a high school team. There may be excesses. Occasionally some of the guys are maybe gonna get excited and start forcing digital anal penetration on the new recruits. The way they did in Sayreville, New Jersey.

Playing big-time, winning football is even harder when you’re a university, which Richard Mendoza, who lives in Sayreville, is in a privileged position to understand. Mendoza goes from a setting of local games where teenagers lucky enough to make the cut are anally raped, to state-wide games where players form packs and just for the hell of it break students’ jaws. Talk about a font of wisdom. Mendoza’s been there. What does he have to share with us about football, high school, university, etc.?

We … have to understand that [Rutgers is] trying to play and move up to big-time athletics … There are going to be missteps. There are going to be kids you bring into the program who are of questionable nature. But you’re trying to win games. You can’t tell the coach, ‘Win, win, win — but never have a problem.’

Now, I’m not condoning this at all. Coach (Kyle) Flood has to deal with the repercussion of this. … He needs to answer why he’s not bringing people into the program who are great. But at the same time it’s an interesting dynamic. They want him to win but they also want him to be a great citizen; sometimes that’s a difficult road to walk.

Mendoza and his buddies, interviewed at a Rutgers game

believe that Flood’s career 24-16 record is the key reason that the arrests and Flood’s alleged meddling in a player’s academic issues are national headlines. They point to recent arrests and accusations that other programs’ players have faced, like at Alabama. “It just seems to be glorified because he’s not winning as much as these other coaches,” Mendoza said. He suggested that if the program were 8-0 at the moment, these off-field issues would not be as big a deal. His buddies nodded in agreement.

“The difference between Bobby Knight and Mike Rice? 790 wins and three national championships,” said Michael Porcaro of Scott Plains, N.J. “All the things Mike Rice did, Bobby Knight did. Bobby Knight does it, he’s the leader of men. Mike Rice is a monster.”

Rice was fired as Rutgers basketball coach in 2013 after ESPN aired video showing him mistreating players in practice.

“Not that what Mike Rice did was right,” Porcaro said. “If he worked any job, what he did would get him fired. But you know, when you’re mediocre they’re less likely to look over (something).”

It’s an interesting philosophy. You’d think it would be just the opposite – that the high-profile big winners would get noticed by everybody, rather than the under the radar losers. But Rich and the guys are saying that winning solves everything; that when you win all is forgiven.

I mean, they certainly seem to be saying that about themselves, Jersey guys, Jersey football fans. Win and who cares too much about the sort of people you recruited to do the winning. After all, as one of the guys notes, a grand transition is taking place right before their eyes:

“I think we’re going through the growing pains, going from being just an academic university to a big-time sports university. There are going to be growing pains.”

If we’re going to move Rutgers from being just an academic university to where it deserves to be, in the firmament of universities, there are going to be growing pains.

Or, as Coach Ulyanov was famous for saying: “If you want to make an omelet, you must be willing to break a few eggs.”

… courtesy of the players – or their teammates – themselves.

But don’t get too excited. It’s rather speculative at this point.

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If you’re interested in comparing this particular move from school to school, here’s last year’s best-known play:

Five football players from California University of Pennsylvania, who reportedly chanted “Football strong” as they left after brutally beating a 30-year-old man outside a popular off-campus restaurant, were arrested Thursday.

Numbers are a little shaky – UD seems to recall the U Cal number rose to eight suspended players, whereas so far the Rutgers team seems to have had five members – and of course it’s not fair to compare when one team has a numerical advantage.

But let’s say both teams had five members. The U Cal team did practically kill a guy, whereas it looks as though Rutgers was only able to break a guy’s jaw. Nor do I think Rutgers did a team shout-out of Football Strong or something like Football Strong.

But then again I don’t think the U Cal group filmed their play, while maybe we should give points to Rutgers if their guys did that.

Hard to hold back the excitement when you see crowds like this.

And to think that some taxpayers and students resent subsidizing university football!

Wait, what? The JerryDome is going to be half-empty for Alabama-Wisconsin on Saturday night? For the Alabama Crimson Tide?

Mary Willingham at Chapel Hill. An anonymous professor at Rutgers. An anonymous broken-jawed student at Rutgers.

Let’s call what’s happening at the American university what it is: A peasant revolt.

The once-stable hierarchy we’ve come know –

Coach
Players
Boosters
President
Professors
Students

– is being shaken to its foundations as sporadic uprisings escalate among the people. The Rutgers professor suddenly refuses to give a passing grade to a football player, and, when the coach strong-arms the professor, the professor continues to refuse to back down.

This was a coach who didn’t want to lose arguably the best player in what was an historically bad secondary for Rutgers a year ago, and wasn’t going to let a lowly professor take [Nadir] Barnwell away. He was going to use his rarefied status as the highly paid leader of King Football to make sure that no meager academic policy was going to get in the way of wins and losses.

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The problem is the “bloated sense [of] entitlement among players and coaches who … start to feel as if they can get away with just about anything. Being treated like campus gods can do that, a campus to which they are often only nominally tethered.”

We have all seen the disturbing footage of statues being forcibly taken down, and we rightly worry about the fate of other monuments dotting the homeland.

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It’s pointless to wallow in nostalgia for a time when students gratefully absorbed blows to their faces from good secondaries and professors regarded membership in bogus academic departments as their contribution to the team’s defensive line. The question is What Is To Be Done.

Begin by remembering this. Welcome to my little village! says poor Marie Antoinette. Wake up before it’s too late.

… Stats!

This critique of this argument makes the above point.

It’s a great point, which UD would in fact revise and extend, in this way:

“There are over three thousand four-year colleges and universities in America. That 129 maintain markets in sex slaves has not caused higher education to wither away.”

In other words this is America, dammit, and we’ve got so many colleges and universities doing so many different things, that it doesn’t matter what some small number of them does – the larger national project of higher education is not going to wither away because of it. Only an hysteric would think that twenty or so Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment Redux programs are going to threaten higher education!

… Porn.

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UD thanks C.

But hey. It’s Jersey.

Five current Rutgers football players, including the cornerback at the center of a university-led investigation into coach Kyle Flood, were charged Thursday with assaulting a group of individuals, including one student whose jaw was broken during the unprovoked attack.

… [Nadir Barnwell, one of the men charged,] is at the center of the investigation of [Rutgers football coach Kyle] Flood, with the university looking into whether the Rutgers football coach broke school policy by contacting a professor regarding Barnwell’s grades. The junior cornerback was declared academically ineligible in the spring, according to two school officials.

Flood defied academic support staff when he contacted the professor, two sources told NJ Advance Media.

And then there’s the Rutgers basketball program.

Lordy lordy. I have seen me some scuzzy programs, but Rutgers athletics lately takes the cake.

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“Coach Flood exemplifies our university’s standards and values both on and off the field,” Rutgers president Robert Barchi said in a statement.

That wasn’t long ago, right after he gave him a contract extension and a big raise. And, you know, what Barchi said is absolutely true. Putting its students in harm’s way via sadistic coaches and criminal players, and not giving a shit about academic integrity, is the Rutgers standard.

PS: They’re gonna have to pay over a million dollars to buy Flood out of his contract.

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I knew this was going to get funny.

Hands-on research in Criminal Justice majors.

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From a comment thread:

[H]alf our secondary just got arrested.

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Coach Flood Sings to His Favorite Player

I know I stand in line until you think you have the time
To talk some football with me
And if we find someplace to meet, I know that there’s a chance
You’ll end up beating on me

I practice every day to find some clever lines to say
To make the meaning come through
But then I think I’ll wait until the evening gets late and I’m alone with you
The time is right, your perfume fills my head, the stars get red and, oh, the night’s so blue
And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “I love you”

Meanwhile, the school has missed financial targets. A 2015 audit of athletic department finances reported that spending on equipment, uniforms and supplies came in 88 percent over budget in the 2014 fiscal year, while travel expenses were 57 percent over their mark. Meanwhile, revenue from ticket sales came in 21 percent under budget.

Overall, the school had planned to reduce its athletic subsidy by $3.5 million for the 2014 fiscal year, according to the audit. It ended up increasing it by $700,000.

La vie continue at wanna-be sports factory the University of Houston; this article about it even has the dude in charge of turning Houston into Clemson alerting us to the fact that sports are “truly the front porch of the institution.” So true, so true, which is why The Texas Tribune has done a long piece on how the school is spending itself into the gutter subsidizing games no one on campus wants to watch.

The quotation in my headline’s intriguing, isn’t it? Technically isn’t an athletic program. Yes, I see the point. It’s in the stadium and it’s used by the marching band, but it has nothing to do with athletics. It’s academic, see.

Along with all that money transferred from academics to athletics, UH has a new football coach who’s kind of the equivalent of this chick — he issues threatening language to students who might be considering not going to a football game (she issues threatening language to students who might be considering using terms like male and female). Poor students.