Florida State University has a decade of cheating scandals, sports scandals, sports-related financial scandals, and football player assaults behind it. (For a reasonably full list, scroll down to the “Controversies” list on this page.) Its board of trustees is made up of a guy who used to be captain of the football team plus a bunch of football boosters. Its president is an inarticulate political hack who, like the notorious Gordon Gee, answers to the football coach. Its coach, like FSU coaches before him, seems able to get FSU to admit any person who plays superior football, regardless of criminal record. Many FSU fans consistently defend and demand the reinstatement of players who break the law in outrageous and frightening ways.

The ongoing pathetic hashtag campaign, initiated by an FSU professor who seems not to have been able to get off his ass before this to protest conditions at his school, will probably make matters worse for bottom-of-the-sports-schools-barrel FSU. The campaign notes the obvious and irrelevant fact that you can discover other activities going on at FSU besides football. Et alors?

They don’t call it the front porch of the university for nothing, babe.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t lecture UD about how you’ll never see ten thousand screaming fans in a John Milton seminar so shut up about our sports program, and then, when you’re cornered, say FSU has John Milton seminars so shut up about our sports program. It’s your fault that the only thing anyone notices about your school is sports, and that your best-known professor is Dale Olsen, who, you recall, served under football player/FSU President Wetherell.

UD doesn’t think you should feel bad about any of this, or seek to distort it via tweets. Become who you are! said Nietzsche. Own it.

If Cook pleads out in the battery case or gets convicted, Fisher’s choice should be easy. But it probably won’t be because Cook is really, really good.

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Did Florida State (along with Florida, Clemson and the dozens and dozens of other schools who recruited Cook) have any trepidation about bringing someone onto their campus who was arrested twice as a juvenile — once in connection with a robbery and the other in connection with firing a weapon and possessing a weapon at an event on school property?

Take Aaron here. It’s not really her fault, because she played football for Miami University, and you know how sturm und drang that place is.

No? Type UNIVERSITY MIAMI in my search engine and settle in for a long read.

Anyway, the, er, culture of UM being what it is, no one should be surprised that Aaron left there all hopped up and ready for a hankie-heavy coaching career. She cried while confessing that she whispered mean things to a reporter about the quarterback of a team she coached… She couldn’t help herself! She’s high-strung!

And now she’s gone and beaten up a boy because he took her beach chair. She tried to keep it out of the news by promising to kill him and his family if he told anyone, but despite this effort at protecting her team’s name (she coaches for the Buffalo Bills), she got in trouble anyway.

The good news for Aaron is that this other chick, Richie Incognito, plays for the Bills and can give her anger-management advice at this difficult time.

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At least Richie Incognito, whose behavior was nauseating enough, picked on people his own size.

Um. No.

Florida State running back Dalvin Cook, who was arrested and charged Friday after punching a woman in the face outside a bar in June … was charged with criminal mischief last October for his participation in a BB-gun fight in June 2014 that damaged several vehicles. And on July 25, 2014, the City of Tallahassee Animal Services cited Cook for the mistreatment of three pit bull puppies.

Quench your thirst for sadism against animals by clicking here for details!

And don’t worry, FSU fans. There’s still hope.

[Cook was] the Seminoles’ leading rusher last season, so [Coach Jimbo Fisher] will likely let the entire legal process play out before making a final decision [about letting him play].

It is disgusting and appalling how far Fisher is behind these issues. While the coach has no control over the conduct of his players once they are on the team, he certainly has control of who comes into the program… Fisher has brought in questionable characters since taking over the Florida State program as head coach in 2010… Incredibly, some fans are actually signing a petition on Change.org to put Johnson back on the team. On the afternoon of July 11, a sad group of 3,611 have supported the petition…

Apparently this local columnist believes that “Winning doesn’t trump players abusing women,” and he’s issuing a warning to FSU about it. Basically he’s saying that, sure, one or two woman batterers in the space of a couple of seasons is fine with fans as long as those are winning seasons; but two in two days… plus Jameis Winston… well, FSU had better watch out because…

Because what? FSU fans will never reach the too-much-thuggishness level. Look at the history of that school. Thugs galore. Do you notice any effect? If anything, thugs on the team excite the fans to ever greater orgasm. Hit ‘er hard and hit ‘er again! Show the world that we’re gonna win! Every time one of these guys coldcocks a woman, a fan-generated petition appears demanding that she go to jail and he be given the keys to the city or whatever. These petitions attract thousands of signatures.

The columnist consults an expert in men who punch women in bars.

“This is really antisocial, criminal behavior that isn’t normal. This is way out of bounds,” said Jacksonville attorney Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a Title IX and women’s advocate. “It makes you wonder what kind of environment you have that allows these kids to think that’s OK.

“If a team thinks it can act with impunity and the most powerful man in Tallahassee [Coach Jimbo Fisher] will support them, then you’re probably going to get more of it.”

This is what enhances the sexual excitement. The most powerful players for the most powerful man in Tallahassee! How do you display that power? You do what you want. You get away with it. It’s like your local drug god in Oaxaca. It’s not enough that everyone knows he runs the city. He has to show that he and his team run the city. The special masochistic thrill at the display of your captive status in regard to the most powerful man in town is the most exciting thing you’re ever going to feel in your life. The FSU community is clearly demanding regular punishment, and Jimbo’s more than willing to give it to them.

Every FSU fan adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

To paraphrase Sylvia Plath. Hogshead-Makar says it “isn’t normal,” but we’re being awfully judgmental there. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, said Terence, and UD thinks we do well to start with that if we seek to understand the reality on the ground in places like Tallahassee. Hell, in places all over America, as our homegrown Mussolini swaggers across the continent gathering presidential votes. You don’t have to watch a Chevy go airborne and plow into fans to know that that’s why they came to the track.

Read Crash and learn. You won’t be surprised when the next FSU player crashes into a woman.

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Spare a thought, by the way, for the players. Powerful, yes, but not as powerful as the coach. In fact, they’re playing out their own Story of O:

One of [my FSU colleague] Derek’s better-adjusted athletes 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,” the player told Derek. “‘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 tells me, “and he says to me: ‘Mister Derek, sometimes I’m not hungry anymore.'”

[It’s not that Florida State University] needs to protect its image with the national media. Because let’s face it, that ship has sailed.

No, Florida State needs to protect its image with its own fans.

First part of this is certainly true. FSU can kiss any thought of rehabilitating its national image goodbye. It’s been disgusting for too long.

Second part I’m not sure is true. I’m going to go ahead and predict that at this late date, given the loyalty of its fan base, there’s actually nothing FSU football can do that will alienate these people. Nothing.

Assume that at some point one of their players kills rather than simply mutilates a woman. I’m going to predict this would have no impact on ticket sales.

Longtime readers know that University Diaries likes to follow the Italianization (background on this term here) of the American university, its step-by-step degradation to the point of no return… The big-time sports schools are the leading edge here, of course; and within that category alcohol-sodden big-time sports schools are the real winners. U President Vows Push for Stadium Liquor Sales is, when you think about it, a really remarkable headline… the university president as booze pusher… spending his time pushing booze for his students through the legislature… the university president as alcohol salesman… on the august occasion of his retirement, we scroll through the president’s achievements… got the state to allow our students to drink in the stands…

So here’s a recent Dignity Watch item: The chancellor of one university boasts that his university, unlike a neighboring university, doesn’t – yet – generate revenue by fucking up its students.

Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp hasn’t held back lately taking shots at the Longhorns, which for years ruled the state of Texas in college sports.

Sharp had a cutting response to the news two days ago that the Longhorns will begin selling alcohol at football games.

Through a tweet from Gabe Bock of TexAgs radio, Sharp said, “Our athletic program has not reached the point where we require the numbing effects of alcohol.”

And that’s A&M saying that! Texas A&M!

Whether it’s national disgrace University of Oklahoma or national disgrace Florida State, the crucial step in creating a totally shitty university is appointing as president a used-up political hack. Once you’ve given David “We can’t control the marketplace” Boren and John “I want FSU to have a chiropractic school” Thrasher their pointless sinecures, the sky’s the limit. Coaches and boosters and – er – fraternities – are free to run the school right into the ground.

FSU faculty begged the trustees not to appoint Thrasher; one professor called him, with remarkably accurate foresight, the “scary” rather than the “safe” choice. It’s scary to appoint passive stupid people to run things; active, clever, bad people step in and run them instead. It’s scary to attend a school where everyone has to hide from the football team. It’s scary to realize how quickly a campus can become a criminal syndicate.

First it was Jameis Winston. Then it was De’Andre Johnson. And now Dalvin Cook! Poor Coacha Inconsolata (put that phrase in my search engine for background on this poignant human type) Jimbo is in full more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger mode. How could he have known that yet another of his football players was, um, problematic?

Well, how about he could have known because…

Wait. Lemme start that sentence again. Jimbo Fisher (2015 salary: $5 million) did know, because Cook already had a hell of a record for someone of his tender years.

Cook was suspended by FSU on Friday after the state attorney in Tallahassee issued a warrant for the player’s arrest after a 21-year-old woman accused him of punching her in the face several times during an argument outside a bar last month.

… Cook was arrested as a juvenile and charged with robbery in 2009. Prosecutors later opted to drop the case. Cook was also arrested and charged with firing a weapon and possessing a weapon at an event on school property in 2010, according to FDLE records. The third-degree felony charge was later dropped or abandoned.

… Since arriving on campus, Cook has been charged with criminal mischief following an incident in June 2014 when he was one of several players (see Jameis Winston) involved in a BB-gun shooting incident that caused minor property damage.

Bottom line: The political hack running FSU, and the coach running the political hack, do not care if their students are placed in direct danger by the bullies they put on the team. They. Do. Not. Care.

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FSU: Proudly scummy for decades.

If you’re keeping score.

But let’s be fair and look at the larger picture.

This is a question worth pondering. When not only Florida State, but several other university and of course professional football teams generate so much abuse of women, it’s worth asking whether they are in fact in some sense requiring it.

Of course the question as posed is meant to be amusing, provocative, whatever. But let’s take it seriously for a moment.

The article from which I got the question is titled

What is the Deal With FSU and Their Recruitment of Psycho Quarterbacks?

with the plural meant to refer to FSU’s Jameis Winston… So there’s this “psycho” theme (think also, for instance, of Nebraska’s big hero, Richie Incognito) and this abuse of women theme, that runs through the sport, sometimes with video accompaniment, sometimes not.

UD suggests that the arms race in professional university sports (as UD calls it) involves a dramatic escalation not only of coaching salaries and Adzillatrons, but increasing pressure to locate bigger, scarier, and more volatile players.

The appeal of massive crazy easily set-off dudes on the field is obvious – they intimidate opponents, excite fans, etc., etc. But as Incognito’s sad college career attests, it’s increasingly dangerous to put hopped-up essentially professional football player-sized students on a campus with plain old students. This kind of classroom incident will, I think, become more common:

Around midnight on April 12, 2014, Oregon State student Michael Davis said he and a friend had been arguing with some football players about cutting in line at a bar and he had fallen to the ground with one of them while fending off a punch. As Davis stood up, tight end Tyler Perry ran up and punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground, the police report states.

According to the report, Davis said a friend who played football told him that he “shouldn’t call the cops. We won’t have a starting lineup next year.” Another person involved in the incident said he “knew the males to be OSU football players so did not really want them in any trouble.”

Days after the incident, Davis 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.

Yes. Professors protecting students from the team.

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Writing about professional football, one observer notes:

We idolize players of a game that champions aggression and violence. Their lifestyles of opulence and celebrity are dependent on their ability to run fast, throw far and hit very hard. They are so dependent on this lifestyle that they no longer have the ability to control the aggression for which they are revered.

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To make the university situation even more perilous, football players tend, as at Oregon State, to move in packs (the police in Florida are currently interviewing five or six players who entered the bar with De’Andre Johnson). Like the bikers at Twin Peaks, they’re a band of brothers, and they’ll all beat you up.

Keep in mind, finally, that the trend in America is not only toward guns on campus, but, in some places, open carry.

Talk about an arms race on campus.

Feast your mind on the academic future.

Some of what its sponsor says tells you just how amazing things are at America’s sports factories.

“If this altercation had occurred between him and another guy I believe the legal system would have taken care of it. He may have been suspended for a while but would have been right back on the team,” she said.

True, true. A routine incident, a total non-event, the sort of thing that happens every weekend at jock schools – a fight between a player and another guy… this would have been nothing. Nothing at all. How many times has UD covered a story in which a big bruiser, a fancy recruit, damn near killed another guy? Big deal. You recruit Richie Incognito you gotta figure stuff like that’s gonna happen. But oh no let ’em hit some woman and boooo fucking hoooo…

…and he won’t be the last. But he is certainly one of the first professors to complain that the “final straw” (one of his cascade of cliches) in the matter of American university big-time sports is the doubling of prices for faculty tickets. Not the crime, not the slime, not the one-and-done time, not the president-as-athletic-department-mime (gimme a break – trying to keep up the … rhyme…) — no, the ugly rot at the core of campus football and basketball turns out to be his university having “more than doubled the price of faculty and staff season … tickets.”

In setting out his critique of university sports at places like his school, the notorious University of Texas, Cherwitz offers the classic bad writer’s combination of pretentiousness and – as we already noted – cliche. Oh – plus pointless quotation marks.

I cannot speak to what may be the legitimate concerns and response of donors. However, I know that most of my faculty and staff colleagues with whom I have talked opted not to renew their season tickets. It now was clear to us that the Athletics Department no longer considers faculty and staff to be members of the “family” and “community” – the very people who educate and serve student athletes. Instead, we became another one of the institution’s many “corporate customers.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm trusts that given his love of sports, Cherwitz’s boycott will be of short duration. She’s sure that will be true of other faculty members as well.

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UD thanks a reader for sending her the opinion piece.

[A recruit to Brigham Young U’s football team who was recently shot] could have been specifically targeted stemming from charges made last February.

That’s when [he] was arrested for allegedly raping a woman at knifepoint after he had arranged for foot-fetish services from her.

Well, you take the comparative approach. Let’s say you’re comparing the University of Oklahoma and Florida State.

In the case of Oklahoma, the video of one of the most prominent students on campus punching the lights out of a woman remains private, and after a suspension the student has been put back on the football team; in the case of FSU, the video of a similarly prominent student punching the lights out of a woman is public, and he has been dismissed from the team.

Those who’ve seen both videos are able to offer a more detailed comparison.

Some are saying the Mixon tape is worse than the DeAndre Johnson tape, but I disagree. I thought the Johnson video was more graphic. The picture is more up-close from Tallahassee, and Mixon’s response appears more instinctual, which cuts him a little slack, for what that’s worth.

So, okay. You can choose a school where the assault was instinctual, versus a school where the assault was premeditated… You can choose a school where students who do this to women are put back on the team, or a school where students who do this to women are kept off the team… Hm… Hm…

An Orlando Sentinel columnist puts the matter in terms of the great currency of any university: knowledge.

[FSU] kicked [De’Andre Johnson] off the team Monday after video was released of him punching a woman in a bar. Somewhere, Ray Rice was having elevator flashbacks and Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon was grateful he plays for a school that still knows how to protect football stars who slug women.

The Sentinel writer even puts it in terms of one of the university’s disciplines: philosophy.

If a female … falls after getting hit by a football player and nobody sees the video, is it really that big of a deal?

Not at Oklahoma.

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If you’re a parent thinking through this decision with your daughter, maybe you should tend toward FSU. The batterer there gave the act a moment or two of thought, which would maybe have given your daughter a little time to defend herself… And actually Mixon is one of two woman batterers brought back onto the Oklahoma team – they obviously like their hard-hitting players, er, seasoned…

On the other hand, if tradition matters to you, you’ll find Oklahoma standing firmly and proudly in the past. One writer looks back on

… the days when athletes battering women was just another one of the dirty little secrets of big-time sports — right along with academic fraud, failed drug tests and severe head trauma.

But at Oklahoma, it’s still like that!

Still — Decisions, decisions…