Start them when they’re young. If you treat high school football players with kid gloves, they’re not going to know what to do when they get to Rutgers University and Coach Rice slams basketballs into their genitals and calls them faggots.

What’s also key – and what some high schools forget – is “to get students to bully other students, especially if those students’ parents have made complaints to coaches.” Make a note of it.

There’s a direct line from what allegedly occurred in Sayreville to Tallahassee, Florida, where an all-too cozy relationship between the university and the local police hindered any possible investigation into the sexual-assault allegation against quarterback Jameis Winston, to bullying in the Miami Dolphins locker room, to Steubenville, Ohio, and to Penn State University.

… Jason Christopher Hartley, a veteran who served in Iraq and the author of Just Another Soldier, saw hazing in the military and says the only way to begin the process of eradicating this kind of behavior is a total reboot.

“It starts at boot camp or whatever the boot camp equivalent in football is. You have to inculcate them and make it clear that you won’t allow this fucked up behavior,” he said, “You can’t do it afterwards. You can’t have a cult that has this kind of shit and then bolt on a new morality and ethics and expect it to work. It can’t. Human nature disallows that. It has to start from day one.”

The University of Hawaii-Manoa has a $31 million deficit and growing. Its big athletics program is a morgue, a wasteland, a joke. Its latest interim chancellor (you haven’t seen administrative turnover until you’ve seen Hawaii) has a statement to make:

Some have suggested cuts to the athletic budget and system administrators’ salaries, but [Robert] Bley-Vroman said the deficit requires more structural solutions. “There are big forces here, and they have to do with the society’s view of education and who’s going to pay for it.”

Yes, it’s a big, big… cosmic problem, and until we as a nation reconceptualize the entire ground of university education as such, cutting the athletics budget is pointless.

… Sayreville thing), allow UD to reiterate her position.

This is a blog about universities and the problems with them. UD‘s interest in football (which under normal conditions would have to grow to become cursory) is restricted to what it’s doing to our universities.

UD (as you know if you read this blog) calls football The Freak Show That Ate the American University.

As for football outside the university: UD recognizes that millions of Americans need regular, massive, violent, pissed to the gills spectacles. She’s had little to say about the NFL, the tax exempt non-profit organization to which the nation has given the job of mounting the spectacles. Similarly, she’s had little on this blog to say about NASCAR. If universities began fielding NASCAR teams, she’d begin talking about it.

That there is a world of blood-lust outside the university is unremarkable. That universities – outposts of civil reasoning – are sometimes little more than football camps is quite remarkable. The university, as institution, starts out so high that its transformation into a football camp represents a resounding fall into the gutter.

We all know the schools that have really let themselves go – Penn State, Rutgers, Alabama, University of North Carolina, University of Georgia, Auburn, University of Miami, etc. – and we all know the obvious stuff covered by journalists: systemic cheating, sometimes orchestrated by professors; systemic corruption by money; high rates of player crime; budget-busting payouts of fired coaches. This blog covers that stuff, but also tries to evoke the daily, on-the-ground scummy environment that football camp university students and professors endure.

I don’t mean simply, for instance, the humiliation of being threatened all the time by coaches and high ranking administrators who are angry with you because you don’t go to games, or because you leave games early. How many emails per day does a typical University of Alabama student get from the school’s enraged multimillionaire coach harassing her about her non-attendance? How bad is she willing to be made to feel because she is focused on university studies? How often must she be made to defend her preference for reading over watching steroid poppers break each others’ skulls?

I also mean the literal filth of the university football camp. I mean the University of Georgia’s long struggle with post-tailgate trash all over campus (trash that includes human waste). I mean North Carolina State’s similar problem, concisely expressed by a campus journalist: “[W]hen the students get drunk, they don’t really care what goes where.”

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

Why are university students en masse refusing to go to football games? Everyone’s worried about it. Michigan State’s AD says it’s “embarrassing,” but he doesn’t think it’s embarrassing that a coach putting on shows no one wants to go to makes three million dollars a year. One sports writer calls the non-compliant University of Miami student fans “pathetic,” but he doesn’t ask himself whether rational people might prefer not to be identified with a pathetically corrupt program. Florida A&M is all upset that no one goes to their football games. Does it occur to them that people would prefer not to have to think about manslaughter when they see a marching band?

Coming to a university near you.

This is in a defense of the sport, by the way.

The core of the defense?

If you don’t let us beat the shit out of each other on the field, we’ll get frustrated and come and kill all of you.

Football: Just the thing for a university setting.

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.

Perfect spot for him.

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.