… when a bunch of people on the University of Kentucky football team were merely locking down the campus and calling out police helicopters because of their pellet gun play…

But these guys (three of them) were just getting started. After that, there was the bar fight. Then there was the Eastern Kentucky University assault after the bar fight.

At least UK has a classy basketball program.

Vanderbilt might not be a football school, but over the last four years, football has had a huge impact on the university.

So true.

Vanderbilt might not be a football school yet.

But like Penn State, new home of former Vanderbilt football coach James Franklin, it’s raping its way there.

This blog has followed Colorado State’s inexorable march to a brand new unaffordable football stadium. Ominously, the only member of the board of trustees voting against the thing was its treasurer, “over concerns [about] the University’s increasing debt.” The rest of the crew said haha what the hell. Sure, it might fuck up the academic side of the school but since when does CSU have an academic side?

Idiotically optimistic revenue projections for the thing – projections cited by the trustees – came from the same firm that’s managing the project, which the chair of CSU economics department points out is a conflict of interest.

“ICON Group … is the one that produced the report saying that the stadium will pay for itself, and that is a conflict of interest,” [Steven] Shulman said.

He said if revenues are insufficient to pay debt payments for the new stadium, he believes the money will be taken out of the academic side of the University.

But anyway. No getting between a boy and his favorite sport.

UD‘s GWU is apparently the perfect simulacrum.

Not a very newsworthy story.

A (cough) remarkably strong commitment to athletics has drawn the attention of the world to Penn State University; but the same public university system (Correction: Not the same. UD thanks a reader for pointing this out.) boasts another campus – California University of Pennsylvania (motto: Building Character) – whose long-term president (they finally dumped him after two decades, and in response he’s suing) took over that school’s football program.

Just that one guy ran the operation … And that guy was president of the whole dealie… And he turned the team into one of the winningest criminal conspiracies this side of Palermo.

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Not long ago, six of the lads got together and shouted Football Strong! after they beat some guy almost to death.

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You get a sense of the ex-president’s mentality when you read that he called the cancellation of a recent game – it seemed an appropriate gesture, given the fallout from the Football Strong! incident, and given the revelation that in the last two years not thirty, not forty, but forty-three players were in trouble with the law – “tragic.”

Auburn University. As always, the standard-bearer.

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Ranked Best University for Adzillatrons.

The beautiful ongoing saga of Florida State’s Jesus, and America’s next hero.

Follow our lead!

But wait. Many of these guys attended or graduated from some of our better universities. Ray Rice, Rutgers. Aaron Hernandez, University of Florida. Richie Incognito, University of Nebraska. Adrian Peterson, Oklahoma. Our internationally acclaimed higher education system has taken these and so many other NFL players in and educated them.

Sure, once they’re retired at 29 or whatever, and once the brain damage they got playing for these universities (Motto: A mind is a terrible thing to waste; so we use it, use it, use it!) starts up, they won’t make big NFL money. But they’re college-educated! They went to storied schools like the University of North Carolina!

Bankrupt? Financial stress? They’re not even carrying college loans!

Well.

Anyway.

The guy could be on his way to a lucrative sideline: Expert witness willing to testify that university athletes who rape unconscious women are innocent of the rape if the athletes are really drunk when they do it.

Forensic psychologist Dr. James Walker testified Friday that [Brandon] Vandenburg could have been so drunk that he had no idea what he was doing, The Tennessean reports.

“He was so intoxicated he was not his normal self,” Walker said. “He was doing things he would not normally have done.”

(A defense team also tried what George Huguely’s lawyer called the “stupid drunk” defense in Huguely’s case. That one was murder. He was a University of Virginia lacrosse player.)

So: Next up for Walker: Former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner. Same MO: Rape an unconscious woman. Apparently they’d both been at a party. She seems to have been very drunk. Let’s assume he was too. Get Walker on the stand!

Guilty on all counts.

A very postmodern trial. People have been raping women for a long time, but today some juries can watch the rape, because the postmodern rapists record it.

Of course the guys on trial had every right to do whatever they could to try to stay out of jail, but UD would like to say for the record that it was probably a bad idea for one of them to walk into court brandishing an American flag lapel pin, and for the other one to talk about having no memory of the event while preparing to go to church the next morning. It was probably a bad idea for their defense lawyers to blame events on Vanderbilt University, which turns out to be so utterly dissolute a location that anyone there – even patriotic, churchgoing lads – would rape an unconscious woman. It was probably a bad idea for their defense to rig up a doctor to claim that the alcohol did it, not the football player.

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I know. When you’ve got a recording of the rape, there aren’t any good ideas. Point taken.

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Oh. As you gear up for the trial of the two other former Vanderbilt football players accused of raping this woman, don’t forget: Their coach now coaches at Penn State.

You cannot make this shit up.

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From one of the jurors:

He said the “defense did an incredible job, they were essentially given unwinnable cases and turned it essentially into the longest, hardest-fought legal battle.” He said he did not believe Batey’s testimony that Batey did not remember anything because he was drunk.

“I think Cory Batey’s testimony probably did more harm than good… His intoxication defense came a little bit late and was pretty lackluster when he got on the stand. He had clearly been coached… “

Wow. Talk about multi-tasking.

Didn’t Irving Berlin write a song about this?

I got the church in the mornin
And the rape at night….

… background, the film The Hunting Ground begins to generate commentary.

Along with institutions like Harvard, Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “The Hunting Ground” takes on the fraternity system — in particular, Sigma Alpha Epsilon — and even throws down a challenge of a sort for the National Football League with a not-so-subtle suggestion that teams should think twice about drafting one of the top college prospects, Jameis Winston.

Mr. Winston, the Florida State University quarterback, is the focus of one of the film’s more incendiary segments. The Heisman Trophy winner in 2013, he was accused in 2012 of sexual assault by a female student. He has asserted his innocence, did not face criminal charges and was recently cleared of violating Florida State’s student code of conduct by the university. He is widely expected to be among the first several players chosen in this spring’s N.F.L. draft. But “The Hunting Ground,” directed by Kirby Dick, makes a mockery of Florida State’s investigation, and Mr. Winston’s accuser, Erica Kinsman, speaks publicly about the case for the first time in the film, at length.

… which singled out mixed metaphors in prose. Mixed metaphors tend to mix up your reader. Here’s an example, taken from a review of The Hunting Ground, a film about sexual assault on American college campuses.

Given that the film levels a withering j’accuse against a complex skein of heterogeneous institutions and organizations, it will have a harder road ahead inspiring organizational reform in the same way The Invisible War did, but there’s no doubt it will get audiences debating and talking when it goes on release via RADiUS in March and when it is broadcast later this year on CNN.

Let’s highlight some of the figurative language in here.

‘Given that the film levels a withering j’accuse against a complex skein of heterogeneous institutions and organizations, it will have a harder road ahead inspiring organizational reform in the same way [the film] The Invisible War did, but there’s no doubt it will get audiences debating and talking when it goes on release via RADiUS in March and when it is broadcast later this year on CNN.’

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The j’accuse bit is a rather overheated cliche, but let that go. The real problems in this sentence begin with skein. When we see skein, we see literal lengths of knotted yarn and figurative knotty complexities. Do we need “complex” in front of skein? Scathing Online Schoolmarm thinks not. It mucks up a sentence that already has too many words. And skein itself is maybe not the right word for what she means. She means to describe the network of universities in this country – and they are a network, not a skein. Skein suggests a somewhat fragile, random unit of things, whereas universities are more sturdy, meaningful, interconnected phenomena.

Now the writer puts the skein on the road. The skein “will have a harder road ahead.” I suppose we could at this point imagine something like tumbleweed… But really, the writer does our efforts to figure out her meaning no favors when she jams all of this at-odds figurative language into her sentence. Write simply, and don’t unspool too many skeins.