Or, as the article’s headline has it:
DOES COLLEGE FOOTBALL SUCCESS CORRELATE WITH CRIME?
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Overserved?
[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.
… [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.