… Dominique Strauss-Kahn to help it over its, um, hump. Apparently DSK will advise FSU to move its campus to France, where “internationally acclaimed philosophers will defend your players.”

Their ability to be violent was a vital aspect of what made them who they are as a person and they are celebrated for being that kind of man. It is how they are taught to relate to one another. It is what we, as Americans, want them to be… What really makes us feel sick is the moral contradiction: the men who perform the acts we celebrate under the bright lights of a football stadium are the same men who perform other acts that we would denigrate and punish away from the spotlight. The thought that we are all complicit fuels our revulsion and consequently our denial.

The denial exists on multiple levels. You don’t want to admit that your demand for violence has produced amazing rates of chronic traumatic encephalopathy either, do you?

The hits just keep coming.

… stop punching women.”

It’s outrage-season at Florida State University, with professors tweeting and against a big bad world of people saying mean things about their school and their football team.

For the last ten years FSU has been dominated as an institution by one of the foulest football programs in America, featuring academic cheaters, abusers of women, and a rabid fan base that won’t hear one word against the program. Overseeing the foulness have been cynical coaches, presidents drawn from the football team or the corrupt state legislature, professors who for years have offered cheating-friendly online courses, trustees who are either ex-FSU football players or rich FSU football boosters, and a local law enforcement establishment happy to look the other way. As FSU football racks up more and more player assaults against women, even a sports-loving country has started laughing at the hopeless endless vileness of the enterprise that enables them.

Rather than, say, suspend the program and collectively ask itself where its university went, FSU has deepened the hilarity. Its president, a man who hasn’t exactly been morally punctilious when it comes to the team, has now drawn himself up to his full height and sternly lectured the lads on good and evil. (“FSU coach Jimbo Fisher has suspended both Cook and Johnson from the team – a nice touch after he refused to suspend Winston when he was under investigation – and has pledged to ‘do better.’ University president John Thrasher backed up his coach, saying that he has ‘no tolerance for the type of behavior alleged in these cases.’ Well, except for that one time when an alleged rapist played quarterback and led the ‘Noles to a 26-1 record over the last two years. Then, John Thrasher can find a way to build up tolerance.”) One of his players has entertained the country with his own Before and After: Filmed one day unhesitatingly smashing a woman in the face, he was filmed a few days later clutching his mother’s hand and gazing into the camera on Good Morning America.

And now FSU students and professors join the fun, registering shock and awe in the face of the world’s disgust with their long-running farce.

This is a runaway university. Maybe someone there has the sense to try to stop it before it crashes.

The [Jameis] Winston rape allegation coverage has changed this fan base. That year and half of constant negative publicity forced FSU fans to circle the wagons and become a unified force against those who would seek to discredit Winston, the program, or the University. They saw any attack on Winston as not just an attack to the individual player, but to the legacy of Florida State. With #FSUTwitter leading the way, they took on an “us against the world” mentality and embraced the evil empire role.

The most recent acts of violence against women by two FSU players has emboldened what was an already ill-tempered, constantly on-guard fan base.

… They still want to believe Jameis Winston is innocent and will likely defend Dalvin Cook until he’s either found innocent or some type of video shows up laying all doubt to rest of his guilt.

As easy as it would be for me to do so, I find it hard to blame them for that. Not for the acts of victim shaming or social media attacks by #FSUTwitter, which led me to comment that FSU has the worst fans in all of college football, but for the defense of a football team they hold near and dear to their hearts…

Unfortunately for Tallahassee and its citizens, FSU fans or not, it is our turn to take the brunt of a world that is quick to judge and slow to understand.

How quick we are to judge, how slow we are to understand, the confused minds of people like this writer. On one hand, a unified force of FSU fans together faces a hostile world. On the other hand, an ill-tempered and borderline-paranoid fan base, “the worst fans in all of college football,” lashes out at us. All or some?

And whichever it is, what precisely do we fail to understand?

The writer does not tell us. He simply tell us that FSU fans love their football team. Does he understand that you can love something unworthy of your love? Lots of football (and basketball) fans change allegiance when they’re so disgusted with a team that they can’t enjoy watching it anymore.

What am I failing to understand here? That there’s something virtuous about continuing to defend with angry belligerence a team that for ten years has been a scandal and a laughingstock? That there’s some atavistic FSU football-love that no one will ever truly be able to understand/explain/justify, but the rest of us have to honor it, and sympathize with the humiliation people who experience this love have to undergo?

FSU football is and has long been a contemptible program. If you can continue to love – passionately love – something this contemptible, there’s something wrong with you.

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.

***************

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.

***************************

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.

**********************

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.