To a screen near you.

This writer is talking about the big-time stuff, football, basketball. He thinks paying the players would make matters even more sordid. He sets the scene:

[P]ractically all of the dozens of football players [at the University of Southern California] with whom I interacted [as a tutor] resented their schoolwork, or to be specific, the requirement of it. They viewed it as a particularly onerous element of the raw deal that was playing collegiate-level professional sports for free. Without quite saying it, they viewed amateurism as a farce, a predatory bargain struck long before any of them had nailed their first slow-moving quarterback. They could live with the exploitation, it seemed, but certain things fell beneath their dignity, compulsory study being one of them.

However:

[T]he tragedy at the heart of college sports is college sports. Paying the players would only ensure the continuation of athletic programs as currently constructed. Everything would remain as it is, with the freakishly lucrative enterprises that are Division I college football and basketball nestled awkwardly within our higher education system. Payment would, in fact, give the system needed space to grow, protect it with a thin veneer of legitimacy, and free everyone from the constraints that have lately burdened the good time of college athletics.

Constraints here means the need for universities to find ways to pretend that these guys are in some sense students.

The pretense works fine as long as the university is itself, tout court, a pretense – the University of Alabama, Clemson, Baylor.

The pretense is always falling apart at Blanche DuBois schools, schools that continue to flatter themselves that they’re universities (Penn State, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill). At UNC they have spot checks to make sure professors are meeting their classes – – along, of course, with spot checks to make sure athletes are attending them. It’s one big pre-school program.

The best-known so far is Jim (“In the morning he would read the Bible with another coach. Then, in the afternoon, he would go out and cheat kids.”) Tressel, but in today’s New York Times Joe Nocera identifies a rival for top seed.

[Baylor University president] Ken Starr was as complicit in the two-year-long silence [about a football player/rapist)] as anybody in the Baylor athletic department, which makes his current “anguish” seem like little more than P.R. posturing…

But it’s at moments of crises like this one when people discover how a university, and its president, prioritizes athletics. Baylor, a Baptist school that professes to adhere to Christian principles, appears to have “sheltered” a “perpetrator,” to use Starr’s own words, because this particular perp might be able to help the team win a few games.

But at least there’s a humongous new movie all about what our college football players experience in school, and then experience again when they graduate to the pros.

As you watch the trailer, think of all the university (hell, high school) coaches we’ve covered on this blog who let their players continue playing while they’re still reeling from a hit.

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“[I]t will sure be fun to watch the NFL attempt to bury or explain this film away come December.”

As for the NCAA, UD is sure they’ll maintain an – er – studious silence.

A Texas sports journalist puts the rape scandal at Baylor in perspective for us. (UD‘s comments appear in brackets.)

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So am I calling Art [Briles, Baylor football coach,] a liar?

On that leave ’em laughing note, we know heads will roll over all this. And we know Art will be watching from a Waco safe place, high above it all. [Hilarious to think that the official head of a football factory has any power. The God who stands above it all directing and watching is the coach. UD read somewhere – can’t find the link – that a sacrificial woman from somewhere in the administration has been selected to suffer for her Art.] [Good one, UD.]

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Remember: This guy is writing about a place that was founded as a university.

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Oh. And here’s a great blast from the past. In a recent tussle with his league over their team ranking system (it placed Texas Christian, the place Briles found Baylor’s most famous rapist, over Baylor), Briles said

[The league is] obligated to us because we’re helping the Big 12’s image in the nation.

Totally, Art, and keep up the good work.

The arrest is the first for an Arkansas player since defensive end Tevin Beanum was arrested in late February for DWI.

Yeah, this here’s a real shocker. Why, I can barely ‘member last time someone on that team got himself arrested… Was it… way back in April? Nah. Even farther back than that… I know! No wonder I had such trouble ‘membering. It was February!…

… and their incoming students need. Before the University of Montana administration took them down, the following signs greeted this fall’s students:

Montana Hunting Season OPEN. Female Students The Prey.

Get Drunk. Get Raped. The Players Are Ready.

Baylor University… will [eventually] deliver a big check to a woman raped by one of its scholarship football players.

And along with a check, you get a book!

… at the University of Illinois, where one after another, in the space of a few days, the chancellor, the provost, and now the football coach have all been fired or resigned. People are calling for the school to fire the athletic director.

Predictably, the coach thingie is about how twisted big-time American university football is. UD can’t get enough of the fact that the high-profile normal people on campus (football players, frat boys, coaches) almost always, when the shit hits the fan, turn out to be absolute pervs next to whom the weirdo humanities types are the actual mainstream. It’s the players who are often enduring a sick masochistic family relationship with their sadistic coach daddy.

Before the Illinois athletic director could no longer deny the sadism going on in his program, he dismissed player complaints about the coach by saying this:

“The feedback I get from players and our players’ families is that our coaches genuinely care for them and treat them like their own children,” Thomas said May 11.

How to unpack all the ugly in this statement? Since when do you treat adult males like children? But of course dominating and infantilizing and then intimidating players is the name of the game in much college football coaching. Like the sickest father ever, you embrace them and then scare the shit out of them if they disobey you. Daddy Dearest. Coach would make his own son play injured; he’d terrify his kid by telling him he’s gonna lose his scholarship if he doesn’t do what he tells him to do. He’s verbally abusive.

I mean, sure. There are fathers like this. It’s called child abuse.

This coach had already been accused of abuse.

Beckman was the subject of a lawsuit, later dismissed on a technicality, alleging the same kind of disregard for player injuries that would get him run out of Champaign.

But no. Oh no. We’re being pussies, aren’t we? Have you noticed how long the pussy list is getting? How many names the bruisers who love bigtime university and professional football now have to keep track of in order to dismiss them with contempt? Most recently there’s the name Chris Borland; and, at Illinois, there’s Simon Cvijanovic, who didn’t appreciate the unrelenting viciousness of the coach. There are many others; and the university officials whose job it is to keep their massively indebted football programs alive will no doubt want to encourage the frat boys and others as they cry pussy.

UD has covered so many of these coaches – highest public salary in the state, private jets, country clubs, worshipped by all, and physically and psychologically beating the shit out of their players.

And do you think a guy like this is going to let the university deprive him of a penny?

He will not receive the $3.1 million remaining on the last two years of his original five-year contract or the $743,000 called for if his contract had been bought out, the university said.

If he doesn’t sue, UD will be astonished.

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Update: Here we go.

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UD thanks Wendy.

The question at Auburn is whether there’s a first university. I guess certain parties at Auburn would like to think so; but when one quarter of your trustees played football for the school, and when until very recently the school was run by the legendary Bobby Lowder… And so many academic scandals UD has lost count… I mean… really?

So now there’s this breaking story about the jock major du jour at Auburn – public administration. How legit poli sci professors at the school tried to shut it down, and how the athletics department kept that from happening, in part by offering to pay for the major. The Wall Street Journal seems the main source for the story – they quote from various emails in which athletics personnel worry themselves sick about the intellectual well-being of their players if the major is punted – but it’s all over the place now…

What UD finds moving about Auburn is its tragic endless search for a home – a warm permanent curricular roof over the team’s head. Not long ago, under their legendary chair of sociology, Thomas Petee, a man who, like North Carolina’s legendary Julius Nyang’oro, was able to chair a program, teach regular classes, and teach AT THE SAME TIME hundreds of independent study classes per semester, Auburn athletes en masse took soc. That scam got blown and they reeled over to public administration, which is now also well on its way to oblivion.

What next?

Athletes at Auburn are like passengers on the listing Titanic, grasping desperately at one side of the ship for survival and, water rising, racing desperately to the other side.

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See, what people don’t realize is that when the athletics department chooses a major for the lads it’s not just a matter of looking for gut courses. You need an entire organization – you need please-mister-quarterback-let-me-touch-you professors, downtrodden and manipulable tutors, mercenary administrators (remember: athletics has huge money to spend on selected departments and majors), etc., etc. You have to set up a whole world for this to work, and you have to watch out for people who (cough) might be inclined to leak incriminating emails about what you’re doing. I’m sure that, even as I write, everyone at Auburn – trustees, deans, students, boosters – is working overtime to create this new world.

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UD thanks Derek and Andrew.

The soaring oratory of Maurice Clarett. As UD readers know, UD has long recommended exactly the same thing for the B-School Boys (see her ever-popular category Beware the B-School Boys) — charismatic ex-cons drawn from the same crowd as their audience. Andy “Enron” Fastow is one example, but America’s prisons are packed with ciceronian swindlers.

Together, these two lad-categories (football hero/captain of industry) make up much of our national mythology, and therefore America’s institutions continue to deal gently with them, which is why remarkable numbers of them keep raping women and financial systems.

UD is a big believer in the power of testifying. She thinks Business Ethics courses are bullshit, but she thinks Madoff on the hustings would be marv.

… acquitted of a misdemeanor battery charge. A jury quickly agreed that he did not punch a woman as he and teammates were leaving a bar.

Of course, this is what big-time football brings to the university, house of reason. It brings the adorable primitivism of humanity’s infancy. Like fraternities, to which it is symbiotically attached, it brings “shirtless kids covered in paint, shivering in the November weather as they cheer their team on,” as one pundit excitedly puts it. The same writer goes on to say:

If you want your students to become loyal, giving alumni, you must turn them into members of a tribe. You must make them fall in love with their school, and believe that they and all the other alums are united in a family. Your temple of reason cannot rise to the heavens unless it is grounded in irrational love.

Tribalism: The core of any great university. I think that’s what we’re all after, isn’t it? Students come to us already members of high school cliques and neighborhood gangs; our purpose is to strengthen those cultic tendencies.

But it’s not just tribal, magical thinking we’re after. Let’s say it straight out – it’s ultimately stupidity we want to convey:

[T]wo schools [Kansas and Notre Dame] [are] now paying Weis nearly $23 million not to coach.

… entire culture here.”‘

… over many years, so how can we be surprised that not long ago “six football players were named as suspects in sexual assault cases”? The number actually charged was only two, and the trial of one of them starts today.

This trial is not to be confused with the Vanderbilt trials, which are ongoing.

Backing our football team
Faltering never …