That’s the part that always gets to UD. The University of Nebraska says to its student body Look who we got to play with you! Room with you! Study with you! Richie Incognito!
You’ve got all these American universities doing everything they possibly can to recruit legions of violent nutbags whom they immediately and without warning loose upon a clueless group of normal teenagers.
Clueless? Worse than that. These students are predisposed to worship the recruited players. Unless they grew up in Sayreville, they have no idea how twisted is the cult from which the recruited emerged. Like fools, they jostle each other to get near their heroes…
Victims, many of whom are fellow FSU students…
It doesn’t get any better than this. (For background on coacha inconsolata, go here and scroll down.)
A somber coach “Boom” rested on the pulpit. [University of Florida football coach Will] Muschamp had a cross to bear that wasn’t his own but instead a player’s. The weight grew heavy.
“[S]orry to inconvenience you guys, but with the situation Monday and the seriousness of it, I felt like it was a little insensitive to have a football press conference. I think it is today, too,” Muschamp said from the crease of his mouth.
His head drooped, his voice lowered.
“But we’ve got to move forward.”
Scandal fatigue with the NCAA began setting in a long time ago. The long wait for penalties in the USC case started it; the Penn State penalties, misconduct in the Miami case, and lack of action on UNC’s academic scandal were other major milestones.
The NFL’s recent history has gotten more people asking even harder questions about what the important scandals are in the sports world. College football has not been immune either. Jameis Winston, Treon Harris, Treyvon Paulk, Dorial Green-Beckham, and Devonte Fields are all part of the same trend, with more scrutiny on how teams handle allegations of assaults, especially violence against women. And less on who might be trying to make a buck here and there.
Go ahead and get rich off of university athletics! That’s a trifle here.
Just after featuring the rape-positive, bonkers-for-BB-guns school in a long article in the Sunday Magazine, they’re at it again in a whole new article, gnawing at FSU like a dog with a bone… Why can’t they leave FSU alone to live in the way the school has chosen to live?
Does the New York Times fly down to Sicily once a week to try to upset the delicate balance among the mafia, the courts, and the police? No! The newspaper recognizes and respects the right of Sicilians to live in their traditional fashion, under the ethos of omertà, etc. If, in just the same way, the heart of the FSU community has always depended on a complex synergy among football players, coaches, police, lawyers, boosters, and the leadership of the university – a synergy that keeps players on the field and out of jail by ignoring their crimes, plus makes everyone rich off a winning team – what business is that of some newspaper?
Tattle-tale reporters just can’t resist sharing details of the FSU way:
At least 13 football players have been implicated in a string of wild public shootouts with CO2-powered BB and pellet guns, causing thousands of dollars in property damage, endangering bystanders and eliciting a police response. Yet until the most recent case — a previously unreported shootout in June that caused such a commotion that a sheriff’s helicopter was called in to search for suspects — none of the episodes led to charges, even though elsewhere in Florida suspects as young as 12 have been arrested for doing the same things.
It’s like they think they’re better than the folks in Tallahassee or something…
Money from the Boosters has helped pay the salaries of high-ranking athletic officials and the university president, whose performance goals included enhancing “the partnership” between the Boosters and the athletic department.
And… And? … You got a problem with that? Everybody benefits! It’s not like we’re not gonna cut the president in on the deal. He’s the chief fucking academic officer! He, like, keeps the place all intellectual and all. Without that we lose our tax breaks.
… in the French university.
Aggregation in American university sports journalism.
Because there are so many stories, you might as well aggregate them.
…south,” and when your academic ranking is that secure, you can go ahead and cancel classes because of football games.
Editors at TSU’s newspaper are so excited that an upcoming
game will be aired on ESPN2. The only way for Texas State football to get this television exposure is to play on a Tuesday.
that they’re calling for the cancellation of all Wednesday classes. For the tv gods have spoken; they have decreed a Tuesday night game. The university must and will obey the gods.
UD has kind of run out of things to say about the University of Kentucky. Its academic ranking has tanked like crazy over the last few years; its run of drunk corrupt practically insane coaches is matched only by its run of criminally violent practically insane players… The school’s best friend is Big Coal; it hates the state’s greatest living writer but it sure do love its bourbon and Adzillatron…
It’s always illuminating to read the local press there. Reporters reflect the local mood, the local ethos. Let’s SOS through a recent representative piece.
The writer headlines the article UK arrest should concern Stoops, and concern is the operative term… Nothing to get alarmed about! Just concerned.
We begin not with the arrest. For that, we’ll have to wait for the third paragraph.
The beginning of the article is about what matters – UK football’s “swift” and “stunning” current winning streak. Lots of excited language about that starts the piece.
Ahem. Now:
Off the field, however, there have been some potholes…
A few bumps in the road is all… Sure, a player was just arrested for rape, but our visibly shaken coacha inconsolata said all that needed to be said about that:
Later in the day, [Coach] Stoops, who was visibly shaken, twice said that he “feels for all parties.”
Then there was the case of the misunderstood players:
[L]ast week, Wildcats freshmen Stanley Williams, Drew Barker, Dorian Baker and Tymere Dubose were charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, after an on-campus incident involving air-soft pellet guns.
It sounds as if the players were just shooting at each other in a playful game, but there was nothing playful about the ensuing campus-wide lockdown.
Playful lads! Boys will be boys. And coach is such a good coach! Why,
Entering this season, he had dismissed five players for violations of team rules.
I mean – haha – you might ask who the fuck recruited this lot. But let’s not go there! Let’s instead be really impressed that our coach “has built up some equity as an enforcer.” Because if there’s one thing an amateur university athletics coach is, it’s an enforcer.
The writer goes on to list several more forms of criminal mischief among yet other players, and then cautions:
Taken as a whole, these incidents show that maybe the Wildcats need some more oversight.
But basically this is the situation:
[T]he Wildcats are finally winning, finally thriving, finally happy…
He might as well be talking about Happy Valley, Pennsylvania! Happy, happy, thriving, winning – this is the reality at UK. Potholes we may have to negotiate here and there, but when all is said and done, these are our best days.
And don’t talk to me about students not going to the games…
Tis the lot of the university basketball or football coach to ever and always be disappointed… Nay, even at times disgusted. He looketh upon th’inconstant student fan and despairs. He looketh upon the arrested student athlete and despairs. He is (in a phrase UD coined) coacha inconsolata, a perpetually grieving figure who stands amid the wreckage of his dreams. What profiteth it that his salary is the highest not only at the university, but in the entire state, if he cannot bend his wayward charges to his will?
Michigan State University’s coaches are among the most inconsolable of them all. Izzo, gazing at the charred ruins of East Lansing, weeps at his wayward ones. MSU’s football coach, for his part, has abandonment issues. “The fans that left, that’s just not right,” he says of the huge numbers of students who walked out before the end of the last game (to say nothing of the students who bought tickets and didn’t show up at all, and the students who didn’t buy tickets).
Indeed the whole university is aflutter. Having spent all its money on stadiums and coaches and Adzillatrons, MSU is staring down the barrel of the end of its raison d’être if the little buggers won’t play along.
Sometimes a little phrase, a little sentence, slips by in the media stream and makes you sort of sit up a bit…
But anyway. Quarterback, sexual battery… Assault is of course a long UF tradition. Back in ’09, UD even wrote a song about it.
Let’s jump to how much the good people of Florida will now spend to get rid of the UF football coach!
Muschamp’s salary is nearly $3 million a year, but if he is fired without cause, his contract will net him $2 million for each year afterward through the 2017 season.
Charlie Weis. The now-fired Kansas football coach didn’t do much winning on the field in Lawrence (6-22) — but has any coach ever benefited more financially from not winning?
Kansas buyout. According to published reports, Kansas will have to pay Weis $5.625 million to fulfill his contractual buyout.
Notre Dame buyout. The Fighting Irish canned Weis in 2009 after he went 35-27 in South Bend over five years. According to a USA Today report, the total price of Notre Dame’s buyout (which is ongoing) of Weis will be $19 million.
Almost $25 million. By my figures, that means Charlie Weis will make $24.625 million over the course of his life for not working/getting fired.
Scales fall from another hedgie’s eyes.
For the first time in my life, I’m having to question whether Michigan truly is different from all those other large, state universities that let their hugely profitable football programs pretty much do what they want.
David Westin, principal, Witherbee Holdings, LLC, burst with pride when his university was run by the team of corporate board slummer Mary Sue Coleman and her hugely expensive/shady businessman/ coach-crush, Rich Rodriguez. This was fine, fine, quite in keeping with the ethos of the greatest of academic institutions… Michigan under Rich – UM had to lose him as fast as they got him, what with all the bad publicity, and losing him cost them millions and millions too – was light years away from, say, Alabama and, you know, all those other sleaze schools …
But now! Westin is shocked – shocked – to find concussing going on in here.
There’s a reason UD could only find one reference on this blog to UL. It’s incapable of making its bad behavior interesting or original or even quirky.
Its corrupt engineering professor was corrupt according to every well-established rule of corruption. He brought absolutely nothing new to the table.
Likewise, one of its linebackers has just been arrested for – get this – domestic abuse battery.
And yes, in answer to your next question, a surveillance camera saw it all.
Beats the shit out of his girlfriend in front of a camera! Wow. Tell me another.
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This, however, is truly new, and UD is loving the way guys all over the place are doing it. This new confessional prose genre – Football Batters Me and Batters Me and I Still Keep Coming Back – is a brilliant thing, it’s a girl thing that boys do, it’s lighting up my life. I am so not yet tired of these essays. Bring ’em on.
Talk about going cosmic. UD, loyal readers know, uses a phrase – going cosmic – to describe the polemical move in which you escape doing anything about a given problem by moving to so vast a level of abstraction about it as to allow pointless, perpetual, dithering.
Of course, pointless perpetual dithering is the Knight Commission’s middle name (UD has attended her share of Knight Commission gatherings, featuring pep talks by such luminaries as Penn State’s Tim Curley), so you’d expect the person who runs the show to say something like University coaches make so much money at a time of dire financial problems at universities that it makes you want to… to… to pose the question Why does college athletics exist?
Meanwhile, UM’s Potemkin president – some random dude with a PhD – does nothing. He’s still trying to absorb the fact that this is the way his academic institution treats the brains of its students:
[Concussed Michigan student] Shane Morris didn’t need a hero coming to his rescue. He needed someone who cared about him as a person, cared enough to pay attention to the damage he was suffering on the field. Shane Morris needed a Michigan Man on the sideline, but all he had was Brady Hoke and the stooges on Hoke’s staff.