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UD thanks dmf.
In the person of Norwood T. Teague
Minnesota has found its own Queeg
Although in this mutiny
Significant scrutiny
Only turned up a sexist old peeg.
From Punch and Judy to Waiting for Godot to Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, when the same thing happens over and over again, it often becomes hilarious. For instance, as she read through this article about multiple settled sexual harassment and gender discrimination suits, UD found herself laughing out loud.
[Virginia Commonwealth University] settled that complaint in July 2012 for $125,000 …
[The University of Minnesota] settled [that complaint] in April 2014 for $175,000 …
In 1995, [the University of Minnesota women’s volleyball coach] received a $300,000 settlement from the university after she filed a discrimination complaint about the school.
On and on it went, accompanied by equally hilarious efforts (see “he’s pining for the fiords”) by administrators to explain it away (“University of Minnesota spokesman Evan Lapiska said the school has received only the two complaints about [ex-Athletic Director Norwood] Teague. Asked about [a third complaint], Lapiska said it was filed against the U, not Teague.”).
Nothing to see here! Nothing to see! We don’t hire known harassers and then pay people in order to hush up their subsequent harassments just because we need a good coach/fund raiser to sustain the one hundred million dollar football franchise that runs our school! This is an intellectual institution, damn you, and these occasional glitches have nothing to do with the culture of the place…
“I view this as the action of one man who was overserved and a series of bad events happened,” University President Eric Kaler said at Friday’s news conference. “It doesn’t reflect the culture and the values of the university.”
[The University of Minnesota places] athletics and its financial interests ahead of everything else, including the mission of the institution and the safety of its employees from inappropriate contact.
Teague “resigned” Friday after revelations that he had groped and sent sexually graphic texts to athletic department employees.
Almost immediately afterward, Kaler began the process of attempting to distance the university from Teague — …largely because there are financial benefits to doing so.
… This is about abuse of power, in a system that has completely forgotten the mission of a public university — to educate students, not to generate revenue and contributions for athletic facilities.
At least Auburn and Clemson and Alabama are honest about being nothing but football teams. UD‘s contempt is reserved for Penn State, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Minnesota.
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UD thanks Carl.
You don’t want to be rude and exclude anyone… But on the other hand…
The Florida State University football team took two separate team pictures Sunday: one with starting running back Dalvin Cook, who’s facing assault charges… and one without.
Cook stands accused of punching a woman at a bar last month…
[T]wo versions of the team photos were taken because Florida State University coach Jimbo Fisher didn’t know how it would work out with Cook’s legal case.
You would think the financial mess the state is in would be enough to fill the time of any lawmaker but that’s apparently not the case. Amid today’s budget wrangling, Sen. Tom Whatley of Auburn proposed a resolution urging Auburn University to claim nine football national championships…
Hyuk. Yeah, y’all guessed it. This was written by a girl. Hyuk.
Another woman the University of Minnesota’s AD harassed (go here and here for background) tells all. The University of Minnesota’s very very powerful AD. So powerful that this woman told no one about his obscene and persistent come-ons – she was a journalist covering the teams and feared reporting him would damage her career.
Like the University of North Carolina, Minnesota is a once-reputable school now hopelessly associated in the public mind with academic fraud, vast expensive semi-empty stadiums, vast expensive coach buyouts and associated litigation, and, as with this latest story, totally out of control and vastly overcompensated athletic directors. (Note that Joel Maturi, Teague’s predecessor, was fired and then immediately given a vastly overcompensated pseudo-job in the president’s office. The student newspaper commented: “From buyouts of the likes of former Gopher football coach Tim Brewster to ongoing lawsuits involving personnel, the University has lost sight of what matters most: providing an affordable, quality education in service to the state of Minnesota.”)
The Gophers AD, Norwood Teague,
Got caught up in a bit of intrigue.
His request to go down
Drew an unfriendly frown
And now he is out of his league.
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UD thanks Roy.
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UD thanks John.
… [US Rep. George] Holding and the rest of North Carolina’s congressional delegation have said little about the UNC scandal, which experts say is the worst academic scandal they’ve seen in NCAA history.
Asked in early 2014 about the scandal, Holding declined to comment through a spokesperson.
… Holding said Wednesday that Congress is too broken to fix the issues in college sports that have landed the state’s flagship campus in a major academic scandal.
“Congress is broken, we have a lot on our plate,” Holding, a Raleigh Republican, said in a visit to The News & Observer’s offices. “If we can’t fix the things that are solidly within our jurisdiction I have a hard time believing that we can figure out how to fix college sports.”
Hey yeah y’all leave it be we’re too broken to take on anything as awesome as fixing college sports we’re just tryin’ to get the lilac trimmed on this here Capitol building…
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My opinion is that the [new Vikings] stadium is going quite a bit over budget in order to fulfill everything the team wants out of the building.
Sid Hartman, Minnesota Star Tribune.
I mean, by prevailing standards.
[Herbert] Gamboa and his fellow returning starting [University of Montana] linebackers, Kendrick Van Ackeren and Jeremiah Kose, were expected to be a strong point in the Griz defense against a vaunted NDSU team that has gone 58-3 in the past four seasons. Both Gamboa and Kose had scrapes with the law last week, though.
Kose, 22, was arrested last Wednesday on a failure to appear charge regarding three moving violations from last November. Kose participated in Tuesday’s practice and is expected to play against the Bison later this month…
Gamboa, 21, was arrested early Friday morning after witnesses saw him challenging other people to fight outside a Maurice Avenue house party at about 12:30 a.m.
He pleaded guilty Monday in Missoula Municipal Court to one disorderly conduct charge, a misdemeanor, and received a six-month deferred sentence.
Better put an armed guard on Van Ackeren.
UD loves to chronicle the intellectual life of her beloved country, as it plays out in our universities.
U President Vows to Push for Stadium Liquor Sales, for instance, is a headline that says so much about the preoccupations of our highest-ranked academic officers; and then there’s the University of Houston’s leader – Coach Herman – whose threatening language to UH students about their unwillingness to attend football games makes us all wonder what he plans to do if they continue to act like students rather than fans.
UD totally understands the coach’s desperate rhetoric: UH just spent $128 million on a new 40,000-seat stadium, and at best it’s half-filled on game day. Of that half, I’m figuring not many are students, and, well, the conceit here is that university football has something to do with university students. Like, the university is giving students this incredible experience – Adzillatrons shrieking ads at them, drunks with guns, I dunno, but IT’S TEXAS for god’s sake where up north a tad from Houston they spent sixty mill on a high school football stadium that has never been used because of structural flaws and no one seems to mind about that! Build another one!
So what’ll coach do? Bring in the Attorney General! But no – the AG’s a Baylor man, and anyways he’s gonna be (cough) a little too busy to deliver a spanking to the many thousands of Oppositional Defiant Disorder sufferers on the UH campus…
UD thinks the best idea is to perform pre-frontal lobotomies on the noncompliant students. Of course they would have to be sedated first because no one is going to want one. They’ve all read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the lobes are coach’s main enemy here, and the medical school is just sitting there.
UD proposes this tag: A half-empty stadium: Unacceptable. A half-empty brain: Acceptable.
The reality is that UH would only have to perform one, maybe two, for students to get the message.
… jockshops, as this blog routinely does. It’s another thing to see the inner workings, to get an intimate sense from deep within (kind of like that film UD saw when she was a tyke… Raquel Welch was in it… Takes you inside the human body… Ah yes here it is: Fantastic Voyage, 1966… ), of how universities almost entirely about football actually work.
Drawing your president from team players is a popular first move. If you can’t make a jock president, find a political hack who graduated from your school. Make sure the bulk of your trustees are ex-players or peeing their pants with excitement boosters. Direct almost your entire budget to football.
A state-of-the-art football stadium set [the University of Akron] back $62 million and has yet to return a dime. Attendance is literally the worst in the nation in UA’s division. During the six seasons since InfoCision Stadium opened, the team has 16 wins. That’s $3.9 million per win.
For example.
Within these broad parameters there’s room for improvisation, for a nimble ability to as it were catch the toss when new opportunities arise.
Take Florida’s Jacksonville University. The president, who played baseball for the school, is dealing with the aftermath of the school’s recent decision to give virtually all of its campus-wide “leadership” scholarships to football players. Calling them “leadership” was a smart move, since that removed any pesky academic component; directing them almost entirely away from the non-football-playing student body — “football players accounted for nearly 70 percent of all leadership scholarships available, and 90 percent of the award’s total purse” — was pure genius, the sort of thing you need when “low enrollment numbers at the school [made it hard to] bring in enough athletes to fill out both varsity and junior varsity teams.”
I’m not sure what went wrong there, by the way. Everybody agrees that big sports programs guarantee big enrollment boosts.
So well it’s tragic. Punishments have been forthcoming, they have to come up with another way to pay football players to come to their school, and they’re not going to be able to compete in some playoffs. On the bright side, though, Jacksonville University remains a school exclusively committed to the well-being of its football team.
University football players getting arrested happens all the time. UD really doesn’t know how these lads get their schoolwork done! What with practice sessions and game schedules and drugs and alcohol and guns and smashing people’s faces in… Once you get arrested for some of that, you’re looking at yet more study hall interruption.
But franchement UD has covered SOOOO many of these stories that she now ignores most of them. I mean, she scans the latest articles, in case there’s a new twist on the old tale…
And she’s not sure why, but the Antonio Allen thing at Indiana University has her laughing her ass off. She’s definitely paying attention to that one.
I guess it’s, first, because this dude seems to be one serious professional criminal. He sells a wide variety of serious drugs on the street. He has a serious gun. Because he’s obviously been at this for some time, Coacha Inconsolata (put the term in my search engine if you’re not familiar with it it) has a big problem. He can’t do the whole shocked shocked he was like a son to me I’m inconsolable this must be an aberration he’s young we all make mistakes thing because the player seems to be a veteran dealer. He’s been taped doing his thing.
So the coach makes two moves. One, he calls it an isolated incident. But
This is the third off-field incident involving an IU football player in the past three months. Defensive tackle Ralph Green III was arrested in April on charges of battery, public intoxication and disorderly conduct. Wide receiver Isaac Griffith was arrested last month on charges of driving while intoxicated.
Two: He uses the thing for a kumbaya moment. He’s gathered the lads together to use the arrest as a teaching and bonding moment. After one of coach’s post-arrest inspirational talks, the team’s quarterback says
I think that’s helped us grow. Just kind of, ‘Hey, we’re in this together. We’ve got to link arms.’
There’s a little of this motivational sludge in the aftermath of all bashing and dealing on all university football teams, but IU is laying it on hilariously thick.
Finally, the player himself is majorly into God. The only thing he said to reporters on leaving the courtroom the other day was “God is good,” which, given what’s just happened to him, seems in his case counterintuitive. And there’s this:
Earlier Tuesday, before his arrest, Allen posted a photo on Instagram of him being featured on the cover of a Big Ten 2015 preview magazine. The accompanying caption reads:
“If you knew (where) I came from and all the trouble I was in when I was younger you can see I did a 360 and I am BLESSED thank you GOD.”
God talk is the default move for all of these guys when the shit hits the fan, but UD has never before encountered one of them who broadcasts thanks to God for turning him totally around when he’s still cuddling his Colt and hawking coke.
All of the elements really came together and got crazy on this one. I had to laugh.
One of America’s most violent universities, with an incredible track record of student rioting, seems to recruit its star players with an eye toward that history and tradition.
A recently recruited BMOC – a potential quarterback for the football team, no less – has already showed his stuff on the streets of Greenwich. He’s accused of being part of a gang that beat up a guy standing on a corner waiting for an Uber ride. (Before you read details, please consider the mean streets from which the player came.)
The victim told police the three men had approached and asked for a cigarette. The victim told police he said no because he had only one left…
The Darien man got up and told the men he didn’t want to fight because he was with his girlfriend, police said. Stafford then pushed the man to the ground, and William Rosato kicked him in the head, police said.
The girlfriend tried to intervene but was pushed away by the men…
The victim was bleeding from his mouth and his right arm and had bruises on his face and legs, police said. The girlfriend also had a bruise on her face, police said.
Yeah. He and his friends kicked the shit out of both of them! And you thought beating up women was just a Florida State kind of thing.
When you’ve got U Mass’s track record, the problem is maintaining it. Every year you risk attracting non-violent people to your team. Every year you’ve got to go out of your way to find the sort of person who will fuck up a man and a woman standing on the street waiting for an Uber. It’s the U Mass Way.
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Over to you, Ed Blaguszewski.
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UD loves the hubba-hubba iconography of this police photo. Kind of like this.
Last week it was Florida State; this week it’s San Jose State. Both universities have dumped two football players in the same week because of violence, though at FSU they’re like totally into beating women up, while at SJSU it’s a combo play: One guy beat a woman up, and the other guy hit a fellow player in the head with a skateboard. So hard that the guy’s in the hospital with broken facial bones. It was “a reaction to some displeasure with how [the player he hit] was encouraging his teammate during the team’s workout earlier Tuesday.”
