Likes games. Knew she would. Know what I mean?

Know what I mean?

[T]he students “regret” what happened, but would not have harmed the referee unless they were told to by their coach.

It is funny, and UD has long known that one reason many readers come back to University Diaries again and again is that this blog distills the best and only the best academic achievements of our highest-profile, most awesome scholar/athletes.

Things are hotting up on and off the field between longtime foes Texas Christian University and Baylor, with TCU’s coach boasting that his assaulting players are making far better moves than Baylor’s raping player.

[The coach’s] reference to Baylor during his press conference [about two players who allegedly beat a group of TCU students] did nothing but stoke the rivalry between the two traditional rivals who are both in the top five of this week’s Associated Press poll and are about 90 miles apart.

“… [W]e’ll find out what the facts are. It’ll all come out. I just hope when they all come out, you report it just as strongly as what you’ve done here because it’s not even close to what happened south of here.”

[The coach] was clearly referring to the Baylor situation where [player] Sam Ukwuachu was convicted of sexually assaulting a former Baylor soccer player.

The Battle of the Coaches is on! What will Baylor’s coach say in response? Stay tuned.

… is one of UD‘s favorite headlines, and the claim had at least a spliff of plausibility: Back in 2012 members of the Texas Christian University football team ran a sufficiently notorious drug market that one recruit “declin[ed] a scholarship offer because of the drug culture.”

UD looks forward to more great TCU headlines in the aftermath of the sort of incident so common on big sports campuses that eventually it won’t even be covered by journalists: A couple of football players got angry and drunk and beat the shit out of some students. Eventually all students who choose to attend big sports schools will understand and accept that getting the shit beaten out of you by football or basketball players is simply a risk you run.

Until that day, we at University Diaries can … I don’t want to say enjoy, but there’s definitely something intriguing in the details of these incidents.

The theme of this one is familiar from the story of the University of Idaho Vandals who were caught shoplifting in the bookstore because players are

1. “visible on [security] video and identifiable” and because

2. at the time “the store was open only to members of the football team.”

Similarly, in the TCU case, not only did security cameras apparently catch every punch, one of the players left his cell phone behind. As the police examined it, it flashed the full name of the player.

What’s amazing is what goes on before university athletes go to jail.

I have seen, while serving as departmental chair and on [the University of Texas] Faculty Council executive and budget advisory committees, four presidents at UT Austin, at least as many provosts, and many faculty committees wasting time on athletics that could be better spent on academics.

Run by mad substitute football coach Norries Wilson [“Wilson … proceeded to go around the [press conference] room calling on individual reporters one at a time like a school teacher. The first person he called on worked for Penn State athletics and was simply at the press conference to record quotes, so he didn’t have a question. Later, [Norries] called on a photographer who was only filming, so she also didn’t have a question…. [A] reporter referred to the Rutgers head coach as ‘Flood.’ Wilson interrupted the question and demanded the reporter call him ‘Coach Flood.'”], Rutgers University now does little more than express for the nation the institution-wide surreality of big-time university sports (“The New Brunswick jail can probably field a terrific football team.”), exactly the way Donald Trump expresses for us the surreality of presidential campaigns.

Rutgers’ putative president wants nothing to do with an athletics program that has anyway, like so many such programs, almost fully spun off from whatever leftovers in New Brunswick people are calling a “university” (see details on the total divorce between universities and their big sports programs here), and the fall of the Rutgers second-in-command (really first, but let’s go with the fiction that presidents run sports factories) COACH Flood, leaves us with the Alexander Haig-like (“I’m in control here.”) figure of third-in-command Norries. All sportsdom this morning talks of his wacko press conference, and there’s no one left at Rutgers to send in the vaudeville hook.

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One difference between Trump and Rutgers: Trump is really rich…

Oh but Rutgers is well on its way, given all those big-time football bucks…

The program is a financial disgrace. Since 2003-04, it has racked up $287 million in deficits. The university’s financial plan for sports calls for $183 million in additional deficits through 2022 — despite new revenue from the Big Ten Conference.

These deficits have been funded with subsidies from student fees (students have no say about that, of course) and university general funds.

The one hundred percent guaranteed A course in Dance Appreciation that football player Nadir Barnwell failed despite the coach’s direct intervention with the professor is all the rage at Rutgers.

The Dance Appreciation class Barnwell failed is a popular one on campus, with four sections this semester and a dozen more offered online through the university’s Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Sixteen sections! A dozen online!

The key factor in a grade is attendance, according to the online postings about the class.

What does attendance mean if you’re taking it online? If Barnwell took it online, how did he fail the course? Did the tutor whose job it is to take his classes for him fail to click on CLICK HERE? That’s a pretty poor excuse for a tutor.

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Had Barnwell stayed in the course long enough to pick up on the everything is dance thing, he’d have had a clear path to an A: His tutor could have submitted a paper titled The Home Invasion Hornpipe.

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A commenter describes the real point of the course:

Basically the class helps support the dance program. Instead of buying books, you buy tickets to the Mason Gross dance concerts and have to go watch, plus write a one-page reaction paper. I think it was like 50 bucks overall.

Assuming this is correct, UD proposes renaming the course Dance Program Appreciation.

As for the players, as one explains, “We’re really a tight team. You’re going to defend your brothers. I’m going to do anything for those guys I’m out there playing with.” Which sounds wonderful until you see it play out in a bar when one of them gets in a fight and the others rush in to play defense. Or when some on-campus criminal mastermind organizes them into an armed home invasion team. They’re a violent lot, the Rutgers football guys, and very group-oriented. There’s no I in RUTGERS FOOTBALL.

Coach Flood will do anything for the guys. He even sets up little teas with faculty members to swap ideas on how best to educate them.

[One] get-together lasted about 50 minutes … and resulted in [a] part-time prof agreeing to assign [one player] extra work that could improve his grade because she felt “implicitly intimidated” and “uncomfortable,” given Flood’s status.

Flood gets along just as well with full-time faculty.

[A faculty rep] believes Flood’s decision to lean on a part-time professor who earns around $4,800 per class and enjoys little job protection wasn’t an accident. “A tenured professor like me would have told him go to hell.”

Yes, go to hell highest paid public employee in New Jersey! (And don’t forget those bonuses for, uh, successful get-togethers with professors!) Go to hell most powerful man on campus who with one word can rouse hordes of fans to ruin my life! Tenured Rutgers Faculty to Flood: Go To Hell!

Ah but they’re weary now, weary… (Headline: RUTGERS COMMUNITY WEARY…)

They need to bring back Ray Rice, pride of Rutgers, to slap a little sense into them…

Beloved Leader!

… dumpster fire.

Dumpster Fire

Football’s a burning thing
And it makes a fiery ring.
Bound by wild desire
We fell into a dumpster fire.

We fell into a burning dumpster fire,
We went down, down, down as the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns,
The dumpster fire, the dumpster fire.

… a concrete initiative.

… we’ve got a hell of a classy match-up in a few days: Rutgers v. Penn State. American university football at its prettiest.

At Rutgers University, it’s OFFense, DEFense, and SUSpense, as eager fans wait to see who’s been suspended today.

It’s just the very very beginning of the season, and Rutgers has already tossed SEVEN players, which UD thinks (she is not sure) is a new world record.

Today’s guy – something about a big fight outside the Rutgers stadium after a game – brings this hour’s total to lucky seven.

The team’s indiscretions have gone from a list to a mnemonic device:

[P]ossible violation of impermissible contact stemming from an email [the coach] allegedly sent to a faculty member regarding the academic status of a player … the arrests of six players who have since been dismissed from the program over the last 10 days… [the suspension of a player because of a fight]…

Say that five times fast!