The next student athlete to speak
Is defensive lineman Tydreke:
“Coach told us ‘Test learning disabled.
All courses not AFAM are tabled.
And oh by the way you’re all freaks.'”

———
UD thanks Dave.

With all of the bad publicity it’s been getting, football is endangered on the American university campus. Though it seems impossible that the sport might, at some schools, be discontinued or cut back, the prudent university president and board of trustees might want to do some thinking about contingencies.

In light of the strong national and international coverage the latest massive NASCAR brawl involving Jeff Gordon, Brad Keselowski, and their crews has been getting, it’s time to consider replacing football at our universities with the largest spectator sport in America. Here are some of NASCAR’s advantages over football.

1. It has much more of the violence that students at big football schools demand, but because the sport is so openly and variously violent (crashes, fights on the track, fights in the pit, fights in the audience, cars crashing into spectators, cars exploding, drivers killed), the violence tends to stay at the venue site rather than spilling out into adjacent neighborhoods. There’s a principle of containment at work at NASCAR events, with the event set up in such a way as to honor and satisfy the demand for violence, so universities can expect a welcome reduction in post-game student rioting.

2. Unlike football, NASCAR is already an academic field at several universities. Auburn not only graduates many NASCAR engineers, but has such close ties to the sport that an Auburn-emblazoned NASCAR vehicle is active on the circuit. The University of North Carolina, much in the news lately for its football program, boasts that its “NC Motorsports and Automotive Research Center … is located in the heart of NASCAR country and is the first stop for employers hiring interns and entry level engineers. We’re within 50 miles of 90% of the NASCAR Sprint Cup teams and 5 miles from Charlotte Motor Speedway, just past the checkered flag.”

3. By sponsoring professional university teams rather than attempting the ill-fated student-athlete route, universities will not only avoid NCAA-entanglement, but will be free to use the entire torso plus limbs of their players for school and corporate advertising. It’s hard to think of a more iconic American image than that of Gordon immediately post-brawl, bleeding from the lip and displaying on his arms and chest ads for Bosch, Siemens, Pepsi, Panasonic, and Champion. Around Gordon’s collar, onto which blood dripped, was an ad for the American Association of Retired Persons.

4. NASCAR is a very human contest, without the anonymous armored-gladiator feel of post-concussion era football. Students can see racers’ faces and watch their flesh bleed freely. In all ways, NASCAR is a closer, more sensory experience than distant sanitized high-tech football. There’s the smell of fuel, the smoking wheels, the splash of water in the pit, the shrieking cries of downed drivers. Student attendance at university football games has been drastically down lately, and there has been much anxious speculation as to why; but if you simply put the game up against NASCAR the answer is obvious.

Compared to NASCAR, football is boring.

An observer of events coming out of California University of Pennsylvania states the open secret behind a number of university football teams: Recruiters are looking for violent people.

Cal U’s team, which, under a coach who himself has a pending court date for letting his kid drive an unregistered car (You see the theme, right? Risk taking. The coach is so cool because he’s a risk taker.), is on its way toward becoming totally criminalized.

So what’s the deal?

No one on campus is talking.

[The coach] did not return calls for comment… Since the [recent] attack [by six of its players, an attack which left a man close to death], university officials have refused to comment about the football program’s mounting troubles; interim President Geraldine Jones has ordered a “top-to-bottom” review by an outside firm.

Members of the alumni association board and student government officers were told not to speak to the media about the situation.

The situation being a recruitment philosophy that involved admitting hugely notorious bullies to the school and the team… And let’s compound the scandal by ordering everyone to keep their trap shut… No comment, no comment… That’s so the way to go … A real winning strategy…

When carefully brewed football violence hits the fan at obscure schools like this one, it’s a perfect storm. Truly no one on campus knows what to do or say. By definition, you don’t accomplish this amazing outcome in your student body unless absolutely no one is in charge. All the usual suspects – trustees, presidents, faculty – knew some or all of what was going on, but (Italianization again – see post just below this one) they didn’t care. In fact, the last president is majorly pissed because when the six-on-one story broke the school forfeited one game.

When contacted at his Chester County home, [the former president,] who is suing the state system over his firing, declined to comment. In a Facebook posting, he criticized [the] decision to cancel the team’s Nov. 1 game against Gannon University.

The decision, his posting read, “helped bring this tragic story to the attention of the national news media.”

That’s such a yummy comment. Truly a tragic story, like, you know, King Lear or something… And if you’d only kept it quiet and gone on with business as usual, no one would have been the wiser!

Let us call it tragicomic, as Samuel Beckett subtitles Waiting for Godot. A campus landscape of Ubus…

Yes, this one’s got legs. This one we can sit back and watch as the plot staggers about and then explodes onto the national and international stage.

The French are worried about the Italianization of French life, as Adam Gopnik notes in a New Yorker article about Dominique Strauss Kahn:

[M]any in Paris [anxiously note the] “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…

We Americans aren’t worried, but there’s plenty of evidence that we’re Italianizing right along with the French:

[No one really cares about the University of North Carolina scandal because] any college sports scandal after Penn State [seems] like business as usual. Nothing ever can approach the horror and depravity of a sainted coach knowingly allowing a child rapist to use a storied football program to help him cultivate victims, exemplifying the awful depths to which a school would go to protect images, all in the name of a game. When the epitome of rectitude is revealed to be rotten to its core, there’s no going back to a pristine, previous time. No-show classes and fraudulent term papers can never resonate the same way again after the searing testimony from violently scarred children, who were failed by coaches, administrators, campus police and the cult of worshipful, willfully blind fans.

… So we can only get so angry, anymore, even for something seemingly so big and so important. We know too much. We have seen too much.

Another example of the emerging Italian attitude in America:

It is not so much that UNC has been giving away grades and sending its athletes to the “easy grade” courses, because that goes on at every campus that needs to keep its athletes academically eligible… If this is not an important issue in our society then let the band play on and the circus continue …

Americans have become so accustomed to depravity at their big-time sports universities that they no longer rise to any occasion that falls short of horror.

Lament on Chapel Hill

Time was when we couldn’t be prouder
Of Professor… er… Ms Deborah Crowder.
Her work with Nyang’oro
Was rapid and thorough
And no one was able to out her.

Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston is being accused of point-shaving in the Florida State game against Louisville this year to help a high-school friend win money. TMZ reports that the quarterback is said to have purposefully tanked during the Seminoles’ first half against Louisville on Oct. 30. Florida State was losing 21-7 at the half, but the team came back to win. Winston was previously accused of raping a fellow student and stealing crab legs. He was recently suspended for half a game for chanting “fuck her right in the pussy” in public on campus.

(UD thanks Dave.)

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

Oh. And if you’re wondering why this university just keeps on keeping on with Jameis Winston, here’s a quick rundown of the business interests and community involvements of the school’s board of trustees, starting with Allan Bense and moving alphabetically.

Golf Courses
Being an FSU Fan
Golf Courses
Seminole Boosters Club, FSU Athletic Board, Captain of the FSU Football Team Back In The Day
FSU Booster Club
Florida Sports Foundation
Seminole Boosters Club
Seminole Boosters Club
Orange Bowl Committee
Stumbled across one of the few female trustees here. No sports involvement listed.
Two final guys list no sports involvement.

So according to UD‘s count, that leaves three trustees out of twelve who might – I say might – have some vestigial sense of what a university is. But one of the three is a woman so forget her. That leaves two, one of whom is a professor at FSU, so forget him.

I’m afraid that leaves you, Brent W. Sembler.

“Government during this period was based mostly on precedent, and the court had become little more than a centre for highly ritualized ceremonies,” we are told, and the internal governance of one modern American university (and probably many others) turns out to share just this form.

Professor Julius Nyang’oro, the Big Thinker behind the highly ritualized system of fake classes at UNC, was never, for twenty years, reviewed or cycled out as department chair because, we are told, the leadership of the university “thought that would be awkward.” Above all, UNC honors precedent (I’m sure the fake class ritual in one form or other long preceded the Nyang’oro dynasty), ritual (there were no actual classes, to be sure; but there were intricate and abundant ceremonial classes), and the absolute power of a closed aristocratic court.

For everyone else, the UNC dynasty provided that other court, a sweaty arena where the commoners played.

… is the amount Penn State (well, the citizenry of Pennsylvania) has paid out (so far) because of the Sandusky scandal. It’s a figure the University of North Carolina scandal will almost certainly surpass, now that the first of thousands of athletes screwed by that school has sued.

The class action possibilities here make the ongoing class action against Professor Chancellor President Donald Trump of Trump University look paltry by comparison.

[Mike McAdoo is] suing the university in federal court, saying UNC broke its promise to give him an education in return for playing sports. His lawsuit is a class-action suit that the other 3,100 students who enrolled in the fake classes — nearly half of whom are athletes — could easily join.

“From selection of a major to selection of courses, the UNC football program controlled football student-athletes’ academic track, with the sole purpose of ensuring that football student-athletes were eligible to participate in athletics, rather than actually educating them,” says his lawsuit …

“UNC has reaped substantial profits from football student-athletes’ performance for the school, but it has not provided them a legitimate education in return. As such, UNC has breached its contract with Plaintiff and Class members, in violation of North Carolina common law,” wrote his attorney, Jeremi Duru, who is also a professor of law at the Washington College of Law.

Have to agree with you there.

This should sell a lot of tickets! Every eye in the country is on the California University of Pennsylvania football gang, which has scraped together enough members out on bond to field a game tomorrow against little Mercyhurst University, and is currently preparing by reviewing video (“Mr. DiLucente said he believes there is a video of the incident but has not seen it.”) of its most recent play.

Go and watch U Cal make them squeal! Football Strong!

This obscure institution has now scored an in-depth article in Newsweek. And all because of its football team! Sports truly is the university’s front cell.

To understand big-time university sports, you have to go beyond the headlines. UD spends a lot of time reading the local booster press at pitiably sports-obsessed places like Indiana University so that she can understand the deep structure of a significant part of this country’s grotesque (the recent failures of Penn State and the University of North Carolina to, uh, control their narratives has contributed immeasurably to our recognition of just how grotesque) university system. So take this latest piece out of Bloomington, which announces its grasp of reality in its headline. Let us see how that reality is evoked.

The background here is that everyone in Bloomington has decided to be upset because some mysterious critical mass of team criminality has flicked some switch in their collective mind. Should they fire the coach? Would that be with cause or without cause? What’s the deal with recruiting anyhow? Have we tarnished our grand reputation? Und so weiter.

Start with coacha inconsolata (background on that term here).

[The] mess in Bloomington [has occurred under Coach Tom Crean’s] watch … [He’s a] grown man unable to keep his teenage players from chasing the night — no matter how hard he tries.

This great and good man has tried and tried and tried. Let’s not talk about how the same man avidly recruited these players.

Next: Lugubrious nostalgia for The Earlier Better Coach, The True Great and Good Man. Unfortunately for this writer, that role at Indiana is played by notorious Bobby Knight, the most frighteningly demento university basketball coach ever. So let’s see how we handle that prose-wise, in our reality-based account of things.

Bob Knight may be long gone, and though he didn’t live a life of sainthood in Bloomington, he drafted … [the] “It’s Indiana” blueprint. It’s a privilege to wear the candy stripes. And with it comes responsibility, higher standards, round-the-clock commitments. It’s not easy. It’s not always fun. But it’s what’s expected.

I mean, which of us is a saint? Which of us hasn’t experienced a rage so intense we’ve thrown a chair at referees during a basketball game and then because of our general aspect of insane obscene violence been thrown out of the game? A game we’re coaching? And this is the man who drafted the blueprint that for some reason players aren’t following. What’s wrong with them? Can’t they follow an example?

Now to the defense of the players themselves.

Troy Williams and Stanford Robinson… when they weren’t failing drug tests, were putting in the work and getting better.

So it’s another mixed bag, like Bobby Knight: Putting in the work, chair-tossing, drugging… Throw it all in together and you get a storied team!

There are two final elements of all booster journalism:

1. Biblical quotations.

“He talked about how we are our brothers’ keeper.” The athletic director describes the coach’s recent pep talk.

2. Always calling the players “kids” and invoking an inspiring future with them.

The kids … will forge onward this season.

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

To review: These are the basic elements of university sports booster journalism:

* Coacha inconsolata

* Players are children; the coach is their hapless adorable bumbling dad

* Great times lie ahead

* Nostalgic reminder of our grand tradition

* Biblical quotation reminds us God is on our side

* Gotta take the good with the bad, balance the failed drug tests with the work ethic

The only thing missing here is the otherwise very popular Comparative Approach. We’re pretty scummy, but Florida State is so much scummier. Scathing Online Schoolmarm recommends the writer revise and extend his remarks to include the Comparative Approach. Then he will have written a comprehensive account of Reality in Bloomington.

Uh, no. Enrollment at California University of Pennsylvania has fallen off. It’s led by a clueless interim president and seems to have no plans to find a permanent one, clueless or not. It has allowed its football coach to assemble a team one third of which is in trouble with the law.

Last week, six players ganged up on a man, beat him close to death, and shouted “Football Strong!” while doing it.

So the eyes of the world are upon Cal U of PA. Even in the context of naughty football teams all over the United States, the crowded jail cell that is Cal U football stands out.

The interim president has spent forty years at Cal U of PA. Her entire career. She’s been in various academic and administrative positions there. How can she not have noticed the rather curious recruiting philosophy on the team? The let’s-go-all-out-and-not-even-give-a-shadow-of-a-shit-about-rap-sheets recruiting philosophy? Each one of the twenty-seven current naughty players has a public record, and many of their deeds have been chronicled in the press. Cal U is only a big story now because of the lusty teamwork behind this latest assault, and because, in the wake of the assault, a local news outlet had a reporter actually sit down and do the math on Cal U’s Big Men on Campus.

UD looks forward to details on the classes these guys have been taking. She’s going to guess they’re all clustered in Criminal Justice. If she’s right, we’re in for some fun.

“When universities and school boards have to start paying out substantial settlements, the debate will change,” says Daniel Okrent, who has written histories of both baseball and Prohibition.

But no, that can’t be true. Maybe school boards. Universities all over this country are happily bankrupting themselves to offer their students a game they don’t want to see, with players toward whom they feel contempt and fear. Many universities consider multimillion dollar payouts to abusive coaches, public relations firms, lawyers, and student victims of sexual and physical assault nothing more than the price of doing business. They regularly pay huge sums to clean up epic tailgating trash on campus, and their equally regular post-student-riot costs – riots of course stretch deep into the local community – are astronomical.

Universities have worked into the football and basketball equation totally ruined academic reputations, as well as the pesky business of constantly being at the receiving end of national ridicule on late-night comedy shows. It’s nothing to them to buy up huge swathes of tickets to their own games, since students aren’t going to the games and you need to keep your tickets-bought statistics up or you’ll get in trouble with the NCAA and other groups.

Universities are places where the president makes $500,000 and the coach makes five million. Coach earns his salary by carving out scholarship admission for concussed violence-prone 300-pound steroidal applicants.

(26 CAL U FOOTBALL PLAYERS HAVE BEEN IN TROUBLE WITH THE LAW

That’s a third of the roster.

We’re only counting the last three years.

More than half of the team currently has active charges.

“Out on bail but still on the field.” Corey Ford, one of the U Cal players arrested for assault last week, has in a separate case pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. He was in Washington DC, New Year’s day, drunk and driving on the wrong side of the road. He hit a bicyclist and left him in a coma.

Oh, it was also a hit and run.

Who is the coach at Cal U? Why is this person the coach at Cal U?

Here he is, and he’s got quite the pedigree. A protege of one of the sleaziest coaches out there, the notorious Rich Rodriguez. Oh, and his academic specialty seems prophetic: master’s degree from one of America’s sleaziest football factories – West Virginia University – in — wait for it — safety management.)

Substantial settlements for brain damaged players? So what. A drop in the bucket.

And after all, what is college but a place to send your kid to get and give brain damage?

… is where we’ve gotten at a lot of our institutions of higher learning in this country, and it’s a way-strange situation.

Of course we pay much more attention to cheaters staging games in full stadiums. Everyone’s gassing on about the University of North Carolina what a shocker a fine institution bites the dust blahblah… But you could argue that it’s the critical mass of shitkickers like the University of Hawaii and Ball State, with their own scandals, their massive sports budgets, and their microscopic bleacher sections that should draw a bit of attention.

But then Ball State doesn’t even pay attention to itself. It’s in the business of hiding how much it makes students pay to subsidize the empty stadiums.

Even with income from concession sales; NCAA allocations; $1,050,000 in guarantees paid out by Army and Iowa for road football games; private gifts; paid parking; school general funds and other sources, there remains an $11.6 million budget shortfall.

Hidden fees collected from students will make up that deficit, funding 65 percent of the budget adopted this summer by the board of trustees.

UD loves the wizened philosophical approach the Ball State spokesperson takes:

“Human fascination with organized sports reaches back centuries to the days of the Coliseum and the first Olympics,” Ball State spokeswoman Joan Todd said. “It is not a situation we created…”

UD loves that – the profound informed approach, so characteristic of a university setting… It’s like… I don’t know, put pornography in that sentence and it’ll work too – Our university didn’t create the age-old human fascination with pornography, but robbing our students blind in its pursuit is an obvious academic imperative…

As always, though, you have to go to Hawaii for the shittiest shitkicking out there. Truly no one attends their games; every week brings a new coach (hell, a new university president), a new buyout, a new scandal, a bigger deficit. Why aren’t people noticing Hawaii? It’s a far ickier story than UNC, even by university athletics standards.