From Missouri’s unacceptable responses to multiple serious sexual-assault allegations in the last decade to Florida State’s head-in-the-sand approach to Jameis Winston, the go-to move has been to do nothing until the law forces your hand.
… If journalists at “Texas Monthly” had no trouble uncovering Ukwuachu’s past transgressions, a school whose president is former Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr has no excuse.
You’ve got it exactly backwards. He’s the highest paid person because he’s got the balls to risk everyone’s safety. That’s what we call Vision. Commitment. Grit. It’s worth millions.
And after all, the job of the fan base, as it well knows, is to sacrifice itself for the team.
You have to do the hard work of getting inside the culture of schools like Baylor and Louisville (the University of Louisville, a reliable scummy-sports-source on this blog, just recruited a guy — “domestic violence charge involving a gun” — even Texas Christian found too scary).
But it is hard work. Take Baylor. The larger culture of its hometown, Waco, heartland of homicidal Harley honeys, birthplace of branded breastaurant-bred Boss-Hoss boys, is mainly about open carry. That’s the burning social justice issue that fires up so many Baylor/Wacoites — now more than ever:
The day after a deadly confrontation between rival biker gangs in Waco, top Texas lawmakers defended a proposal to loosen the state’s handgun laws [to allow open carry].
What plenty of people in Waco and at Baylor seem to be, uh, shooting for is a campus/town where hotly recruited rapists and criminal biker gangs are placed in an open carry setting…
UD understands that this picture seems unfair to these Texans, whose self-image involves prayer for themselves and for the souls of recruited rapists who shall be redeemed in cleansing local waters. Same as these football programs. And so many others. It’s all about winning football games and redeeming souls.
So you’ve got Baylor’s famous president, Ken Starr, overseeing an internal investigation of his school’s rape-positive policies, and he’s already at a disadvantage, since his experience lies in investigating consensual sex (or, as a commenter at the Chronicle of Higher Education poetically puts it, “President Starr, you went after Bill Clinton for much less. What are you going to do about this ugly mess?”). And you’ve got all the hump-lovin’ folk of this great land, who understand the crucial synergy between sexual and on-field violence, as dramatized so succinctly here.
In this film’s most poignant moment, a father pleads: “Just give it to me straight Doc. Will my boy ever rape again?”
As long as schools like Baylor and Louisville exist, we can answer that question with a resounding Yes.
… is how they seem to sing it at Baylor University, a Christian school apparently, but far more committed to football (and basketball) than to anything spiritual… I mean, if you go by the sorts of things that happen there…
For instance, it’s a very violent place, which seems to UD (she’s no expert) rather at odds with the Christian ethos. One of their basketball players a few years ago “punched Texas Tech forward Jordan Barncastle … breaking Barncastle’s nose and causing both benches to clear.” Although concussed during a recent game, Baylor’s quarterback insisted it was nothing and that despite some fogginess and a headache he’d be back out there again right away because nothing’s more important than winning at football. And
In January, 2014, Tevin Elliott, a defensive end out of Mount Pleasant, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for twice assaulting a former Baylor student in 2012. During that trial, two other women testified that Elliott assaulted them. A fourth alleged victim was not called to testify.
And now everyone’s abuzz with the latest Baylor violence: Under the same coach as Elliott’s, another football player is going to jail for sexual assault on a Baylor student. And this player had already been “kicked off the Boise State football team after punching and choking his girlfriend.” It looks very much as though the Baylor coach knew about this violent past.
But hey. If there’s one thing you’ve learned reading this blog, it’s that plenty of American universities will open their arms to woman beaters if the guys can catch a football. And the schools will do all they can to lie and cover up and victim-blame (Baylor carried out a wretchedly inept internal investigation.) until the bad stuff their football players do goes away. Or maybe it doesn’t go away.
And… uh… this seems to be the Christian way. I mean… One of America’s leading Christian universities keeps doing it.
Baylor’s president is Ken Starr. That Ken Starr. Investigator extraordinaire.
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Read this if you can stomach it. Baylor is a sister school to Florida State University, with similar cooperation by local media and law enforcement. Absolutely disgusting.
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UD thanks dmf.
[Buried deep in Chris Borland’s message are ideas]… threatening to the NFL and our embattled national sport. It’s not just that [former pro player] Borland won’t play football anymore. He’s reluctant to even watch it, he now says, so disturbed is he by its inherent violence, the extreme measures that are required to stay on the field at the highest levels and the physical destruction he has witnessed to people he loves and admires — especially to their brains… [Football, he says, is] a dehumanizing spectacle that debases both the people who play it and the people who watch it….
[Borland is] the most dangerous man in football.
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Borland’s Wisconsin teammate Mike Taylor describes his pregame regimen before a bowl game against Stanford this way: “I’m just laying on the table before the game, buck naked, just taking shots of s— I don’t even know. Taking pills, putting straps on, putting Icy Hot on. People were coming in and looking at me like I’m a f—ing robot, like I’m dead.”
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[One Florida State University player] said it wasn’t the practices or the physical abuse that bothered him, but how the coaches force-fed him and his teammates. “They watch me clean the plate… ‘You let that settle and then go lift.’” That’s in addition to the supervised supplement-swallowing, the pills and powders of who the hell knows what.
“He looks down at me, this monster man, this beast, and now he’s got kid eyes,” [Derek, an FSU instructor, reports,] “and he says to me: ‘Mister Derek, sometimes I’m not hungry anymore.‘”
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Players’ cafeteria, University of Oregon.
Eight of the fifteen American university football teams that dominate the “most flagrant chaplaincies” list also dominate the “most team arrests” list.
“MOST FLAGRANT CHAPLAINCIES“:
Auburn University
University of Georgia
University of South Carolina
Mississippi State University
University of Alabama
University of Tennessee
Louisiana State University
University of Missouri
University of Washington
Georgia Tech
University of Illinois
Florida State University
University of Mississippi
University of Wisconsin
Clemson University
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MOST ARRESTS:
1) Washington State: 31
2) Florida: 24
T-3) Georgia: 22
T-3) Texas A&M: 22
5) Oklahoma: 21
T-6) Iowa State: 20
T-6) Missouri: 20
T-6) Ole Miss: 20
T-6) West Virginia: 20
T-10) Florida State: 19
T-10) Tennessee: 19
T-12) Alabama: 18
T-12) Iowa: 18
T-12) Kentucky: 18
T-15) LSU: 16
T-15) Marshall: 16
T-15) Oregon State: 16
T-15) Pittsburgh: 16
T-19) Arkansas: 14
T-19) Michigan: 14
T-19) Oklahoma State: 14
T-19) Purdue: 14
T-23) Auburn: 13
T-23) Colorado: 13
T-23) Kansas: 13
Harvard University (endowment $36-plus billion, but it’s got far more money than that if you count other assets) PLUS one of these guys:
In 1999 .. the 10 largest collegiate football programs brought in $229 million in revenue. By 2012, the same schools reported revenue of $762 million. “Profit margins had ballooned to hedge-fund levels.” … Overwhelmingly, the cash is reinvested in athletic programs. As a Texas sports official put it, “We eat what we kill.”
What an amazing school that would be… What an icon of the postmodern university… Unimaginably rich, it would hoard/eat its cash, so that little to no money would be put to academic use…
Imagine this school as a massive nubbed therapy ball stuffed with a trillion dollars. Fund managers and sundry money fetishists would be invited to squat on its nubs and bounce around …
… in a hard-hitting, no holds barred interview about his school.
TRIBUNE: What are your early impressions of what Andersen is doing with the football program?
RAY: He’s terrific, but he’s the first who would tell you, it’s what happens on the field that represents the success or lack of success in terms of wins and losses.
… A recent survey of police records show that Washington State University has the most football players [in the country] who have been arrested within the past five years.”
Background on Washington State’s terrific football program here.
Or, as the article’s headline has it:
Yes. Yes, it does. Which makes all the clucking certain universities do about the importance of student safety extremely amusing, doesn’t it? And then there’s the NC “Why should you exist?” AA.
The University of Nebraska went way out of its way to recruit Richie Incognito. Most of the SEC schools in particular seem to try really really hard to get some of the most violent of the young and concussed to be part of their campus.
The college athletics arms race includes increasingly intense competition for the biggest and nastiest out there; and of course only the biggest and nastiest make it to the professionals, where fighting isn’t simply something you do at bars near campus. It’s a way of life.
How does Nick Saban earn a zillion dollars a year? He recruits the biggest and nastiest to the University of Alabama.
Thirteen arrests, fifteen wins. They are almost at parity. Something for the school to – er – shoot for.
In February, [Norwood] Teague paid $750 for a limousine to transport nine donors and three staff while in Bloomington, Ind., during a Gophers men’s basketball game against Indiana. “Our priority was to keep the group together and multiple stops need to be made. The reserved vehicle provided more reliability than trying to find multiple cabs near the basketball arena following the game,” Teague’s report stated.
Your education taxes at work.
How to approach the delicate topic of football culture and the gifts it has given the American university? It’s not merely the obvious stuff – the pointless stupid scary violence that scads of sports heroes like Richie Incognito bring to campus (idle Google Newsing turns up the latest helmet-bashing-in-the-campus-locker-room, this one at the University of Delaware, where last February another player “was charged with assaulting three other students at a party.”).
This violence has turned professors into police:
Days after the incident, [an Oregon State student who got beaten by team members] said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.
The violence is hard-wired, of course, into the coaching of both university football and basketball, so that on a routine basis latter-day Bobby Knights are filmed and parodied (start at 1:15). The coaches are quickly replaced, sometimes by women, who are symbolically part of the clean-up routine cuz you know women just want to mother the team and would never be violent…
In fact, let’s pause there and think about the incredibly important role of women in big-time university sports. I don’t mean merely as tools of recruitment (several schools attract players via, er, dates with carefully selected female students), and objects of rape, assault, and harassment (see, most recently, the Norwood Teague unpleasantness at the University of Minnesota). And I don’t mean merely the importance of trotting out mom, post-assault, on Good Morning America. (Or, as Matt Hayes puts it, “GMA’s utterly repulsive decision to allow De’Andre Johnson on television to apologize for punching a woman in the face.”)
I mean, think about Donna Shalala’s tenure as president of Miami University. Her main role was as cover for a team that got in big on-field brawls and whose best buddy was Nevin Shapiro. She was like the Good Morning America mom times a hundred. They kept wheeling Shalala out to apply the back of her hand to her naughty charges, and this routine actually worked for a while.
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A local commentator asks incredulously where the University of Minnesota found the likes of Teague (the answer is that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a search firm). “Were the other finalists Bill Cosby and Donald Sterling?”
Donald Sterling, Zygi (“bad faith and evil motive”) Wilf, these are the guys who give professional basketball and football such a great name… And, as the commentator suggests, there’s not a lot of discernible difference between professional and big-time university football. Even in the matter of violence, there’s the NFL…
In the N.F.L., … fits of violence hardly blacklist players chasing roster spots. The day after punching [Geno] Smith, [Ikemefuna] Enemkpali latched on with the Buffalo Bills, whose new coach, Rex Ryan, has created a haven for wayward players…
(What a sweet, Victorian, girly way of putting it! A haven for wayward players! Like Ikemefuna’s teammate, the aforementioned Richie Incognito! The way Jane Addams created a haven for wayward girls! SWEET.)
… and there’s college ball, where getting kicked out for violence means the same thing it meant for Ikemefuna – you just find another team.
All of which is why, as UD has often recommended, universities with big-time football need football coaches, not academics, as presidents. (See Jim Tressel.) In a pinch, a politician will do. You could also go with a figurehead, a Queen Elizabeth to Nick Saban’s prime minister. But you’ll keep getting stories like the one coming out of the University of Minnesota as long as you take some guy – some random polite reflective well-meaning university denizen – and hand him the management of what is essentially a professional football team.
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The petri dish for university football culture is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their new field design is all about Vegas. A sample headline:
UNLV REBELS WILL BE PLAYING FOOTBALL ON ONE BIG CRAPS TABLE IN 2015
“The team’s field and uniforms now reek of the Strip — it’s glitz, gold, gambling and most importantly, its promise of future fortunes.”
This is a team with one of the worst records in university football. An appalling record. Very few people show up to their games. Season tickets sold last year: 3,890. In response, the university decided to build a $900 million, 55,000 seat stadium with an Adzillatron spanning the length of the field. Although they’ve cut back on that original plan, they’ll surely come up with something like it. And they’ve got yet another miracle coach who’s going to shock everybody with the greatest comeback story this side of Elvis.
Giving Donald Trump some competition.
They’re bringing Adzillatrons to high school football, not just college. A few stragglers haven’t yet gotten with the program.
[H]ere’s what high school football is not:
A $200,000 Jumbotron scoreboard, one with booming sound and full of advertisements, like the one they are proposing for Manatee High this season.
… [M]aybe people don’t want to be screamed at all the time. Maybe people don’t want to be sold something everywhere they go.
A teeny $200,000 Adzillatron! That’s mere practice for the $13 million Adzillatron you’ll get in college. You think a $200,000 screen is screaming at you? Hahahahaha.
