Growing? As the Rugrats would put it, Nike University is all growed up. Take a look around at the place. The New York Times says that the University of Oregon’s palais des sports (whose walls do not – yet – say RAPE YOUR ENEMIES, but do say EAT YOUR ENEMIES) is “enough to make an NFL team jealous.” To me, that doesn’t sound like a growing sports culture. It sounds like an accomplished sports culture.

The University of Oregon is, in the particular case, a basketball culture which seems to be fostering a troubling rape culture. Aggression above all.

When your football team boasts Richie Incognito and… so many others…

Incognito was suspended (twice) at Nebraska, and you know it’s not easy to get suspended at Nebraska, where character-building coach Tom Osborne let a cornerback play while awaiting trial for second-degree murder. Osborne also retained a defensive lineman who was arrested eight times, convicted four times, and left the heartland accused of multiple sexual assaults, before his induction into Nebraska’s Hall of Fame in 2006. Not to mention Nebraska’s current leader of young men, Bo Pelini, who is still apologizing for an epic carpet-bombing of F-words, an attempt to say exactly what he thought of Nebraska’s fans.

… The Incognito rap sheet includes a note that his peers voted him the NFL’s second-dirtiest player. No. 1 in a Sporting News poll last year was another Nebraska worthy, Ndamukong Suh.

… it’s maybe hard to get worked up about the team currently – allegedly – harboring a linebacker who’s a very professional bicycle thief… I mean, a linebacker who’s part of a very professional bicycle theft ring, made up of himself and fellow hometown-boy-made-good (they met in high school) Lucas Keifer. Both are two of the university’s finest – Keifer is a long-distance runner. So both of these heartlanders are excellent runners… Maybe they should have fled the scene of their theft on one of the bikes – that’d be faster than running, even given their terrific running ability…

I’m not sure why the nation never focuses its attention on teams like Nebraska’s. People seem more comfortable thinking about thugs in Florida or New Jersey schools. Americans are very sentimental about the heartland. But actually Nebraska is one of the most disgusting teams out there. And that’s saying a lot.

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UD thanks Dirk.

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Here’s the local press, featuring the writing style Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls coacha inconsolata:

Here is a problem Husker football Coach Bo Pelini certainly doesn’t need or didn’t count on this off season…

Poor Bo! Poor put-upon Bo! Only months removed from the revelation of his own shitheadery/paranoia, Bo must now suffer the slings and arrows of his highly recruited bicycle thief. Dear God! What can we say at this point of this great and good man?

How about… BO‘DIED BUT UNBO‘D…

… which people will be rereading when Penn State’s latest Dear Leader, James Franklin, implodes, taking already-imploded Penn State with him.

Already trailing moronic sexism and the Vanderbilt scandal, James Franklin

feels very much like a modern football coach. He is a walking TED talk. His is the language of a pitchman rather than a professor. He readily admits to being a perfectionist, and he says things like this about coaches, according to Blue-White Illustrated’s Nate Bauer: “They’re control freaks, they’re maniacs, and I’m one of them.”

And that’s the issue: I have no idea if, given the contours of this system, it is possible to be all these things and still maintain one’s ethical framework. I have no idea if a college football coach can be both a control freak and a model citizen, and I don’t think anyone else knows, either. This is, after all, the subtext of the debate Penn State people been waging amongst themselves for the past three years: Was the Paterno mythos inherently flawed? (Hell, you might say that this is the central question inherent to the existence of college football itself.) And this is the same question that lingers now, as the James Franklin era takes hold.

Is the Kim Jong-un mythos inherently flawed? Not if you revel in total control by maniacs. Weinreb cites a recent interview with a Franklin fanatic:

A few weeks ago, Penn State played its spring football game, and Harrisburg Patriot-News columnist David Jones conducted some interviews with fans, and during one of them, he expressed to a young man his thoughts that Penn State would have been better off hiring someone else. The young man was incredulous; the young man said, Have you seen the way this guy recruits? And Jones said yes, and Jones said he worried that Franklin, for all his seeming good will, might cause Penn State trouble at some point down the line. And the response he got weighed heavily on me for days after I read it.

“Yeah, I know,” the young man said. “But I don’t care.”

Here at University Diaries, we never tire of quoting that thing beloved of university football boosters: Give the sport more money because it’s the university’s front porch.

Too true. Every outlet from the New York Times on down today features astoundingly violent (coaches and players) Rutgers University, and you obviously can’t put a price on publicity like this. It’s one thing to become a national laughingstock because of your mad sadistic basketball coach (who can forget the SNL sketch?). You’re moving to a whole other level when you recruit a quarterback who a few nights ago allegedly inflicted permanent brain damage on someone. Someone he seems to have left to die on the streets. Someone currently fighting for his life.

The quarterback, who’s from Minnesota, was named “Minnesota’s Mr Football in 2011.” Too right.

… campus in the country to start doing some marketing. If you read through these posts about Rutgers, you’ll discover that the school subsidizes its athletics program to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, so the place should be receptive to revenue-generating ideas.

Now that their quarterback-to-be has been arrested for beating a guy possibly to death (the guy is still alive, but in critical condition, having apparently been kicked twice in the head while down, etc.), Rutgers, with its notoriously violent coaches and players, would be a fool not to take advantage of the cachet its name now carries.

What UD is getting at is that the school should market a muscle car, or boxing gloves, or some sort of weapon (not a gun, because the Ruger is a gun, and that sounds too much like Rutger), and call it The Rutger. The name Rutgers is at the moment synonymous in the public mind with brutality; if Rutgers wants to make money, it’s going to have to strike while the iron is hot. There’s always another school (feast your eyes) vying for most sports-related assaults, rapes… And though Rutgers has a little breathing room here, given the sheer volume of violent incidents it has maintained over the last couple of years, you can’t let your guard down.

Get behind the wheel of a Rutger and own the road, baby.

… win-hungry pigs.”

The University of Oregon gang rape case rocks on.

Yawn. Donnan not high profile enough? Try Tommy Tuberville. Rich Rodriguez. Just one of many ways in which big-time sports bring good things to the American university.

… and at the University of Oregon… well… let’s see what it looks like on that ol’ gilded entry at the moment:

The mess in Eugene continues to dogpile …

The mess in Eugene? The mess in Eugene? What shit’s piling up on that shiny front porch?

And I mean shiny. The University of Nike, with a brand new $78 million football palace complete with slogans like EAT YOUR ENEMIES on every wall! It was all looking so good, so front porchy, and now… Has the University of Oregon crapped its pants?

Well, as is the case at most big-time sports factories (what’s that smell behind the fine old lacebark elms of Chapel Hill?), UO recruits student athletes in a rather cavalier fashion. Among the three basketball players who seem to have gang raped a woman the other night is a player thrown out of his last college because of a suspected rape; but the UO basketball coach called that rape investigation “not of a serious nature” and recruited the guy, and now – heck – he’s part of the purported rape threesome… Career rapist? Well, when the world makes it easy for you…

As always, the job of stating the absolutely precise opposite of the truth goes to this distinguished university’s president:

[T]he university takes allegations of misconduct very seriously.

If that were true, you wouldn’t recruit the people you do. You take allegations of physical prowess seriously.

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UD thanks a reader.

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PS: Couldn’t be better timed, too, what with the federal government looking into sexual assaults on university campuses and all…

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Update: That old front porch again. The New York Times, opening paragraph:

The University of Oregon has come under intense scrutiny this week after three men’s basketball players — including one who transferred from Providence after being accused of sexual assault there — were investigated by the Eugene police in connection with rape allegations by an Oregon student.

… than a morally sick school just sitting there getting sicker and sicker.

Each line of this bland account of FAMU’s violent, deficit-ridden sports program should be read carefully. Note first that the reporter fails to mention the murderous FAMU band, a number of whose members will go to jail for hazing manslaughter.

While wondering why

Interim athletic director Michael Smith … detailed a deficit of $4.2 million in 2008 growing to a $7.8 million accumulated loss through this year.

the Tallahassee Democrat reporter doesn’t ask whether people might be so disgusted to be associated with a sick sports program that they won’t go to their games. He simply quotes the budget guy at FAMU saying the deficit must be because they’re losing games or something… Then he quotes some trustees.

Trustees noted that the vast majority of college athletics programs operate in the red…

Lala everybody’s doing it. Of course, at FAMU, the red is literal… Profusely flowing in fact…

It continues. Here’s one of the trustees, touting athletics less than three years after FAMU marching band hazers beat a fellow student to death.

“Athletics do a lot more for your school than just athletics. It creates an environment that energizes the community,” he said.

And here’s the new president:

“Athletics, I agree, is an integral part of an education. Its impact on the economic growth and economic development in this town and in Florida is extremely important,” she said. “We have to understand the level of commitment the institution has to athletics.”

You can’t have an education without sports, you see. And after all our sports program helps local businesses.

Delusional University of North Carolina kicks out the only truth-teller on campus. Big sigh of relief from the president on down. Who cares if the A section of the New York Times notes how

In April 2013, [Mary Willingham] received an integrity award from the Drake Group, which advocates for reform in college athletics. Two months later, she received her first negative performance review and was relocated to a basement office where she was given primarily clerical duties.

Big deal. Liberal media elites. If they understood the money at stake in our sports program, they’d shut their trap. When it becomes too expensive to continue to be a university, you shut down, hire Julius Nyang’oro, and fire Mary Willingham. Simple calculation, apparently over the heads of the folks at the New York Times.

As for Willingham’s desire (see this post’s title) that professors take back their universities… Well, I’ll just refer you – yet again – to this.

The athletic director draws inspiration from the fact that his team played so well after having been arrested.

Half the Eastern New Mexico State University baseball team was arrested (fight, campus parking lot) and then, having been bonded out of jail, they played a winning game that same day.

“A lot of teams in that situation where they saw several of their players get arrested two hours previously could have folded right there at that point,” said [Jeff] Geiser.

How many teams can come back right away from mass arrest to play a winning game? Not many, baby. But our guys were totally not fazed.

East Tennessee State football signee Shawn Prevo has been arrested on a charge of aggravated domestic assault.

… Prevo went into his 19-year-old brother’s room Friday and asked for a cigarette. According to police, when Prevo was told to leave, he grabbed his brother by the throat, slammed him on the bed and struck him in the chest and stomach with a closed fist.

Thrilling on and off the field.

And he hasn’t even taken the field yet.

Florida State University. You stay classy.

… to understand!

UD tries to understand. She sees, for instance, that the University of Idaho is being punished because its big-time athletes have failed to meet even the teeny weeny weeny weeny academic standards set by the NCAA.

So far she has no trouble understanding. You recruit a bunch of unpaid playing-field laborers, if you will, and you do your best to make them happy and to overlook their mischief and all… And the last thing you care about, given how much cash is riding on their bodies, is their minds. We all understand this. We don’t need to study the remarkable academic rise and fall of University of North Carolina professor Julius Nyang’oro to understand it. It is structural to the enterprise.

What UD‘s having trouble understanding is the content of UI’s (losing) appeal of the NCAA decision.

The NCAA requires extraordinary mitigating circumstances in order to grant a waiver for penalties assessed for low APR scores.

The University of Idaho’s athletics department included the following extraordinary mitigating circumstances in its appeal:

Upheaval among the intercollegiate athletic conferences
A loss of almost $1 million in revenue – the majority from television and conference revenue
Significant behavioral issues within the football program

“I thought we made a compelling case regarding the extraordinary circumstances that began in June 2010,” said (Athletic Director Rob) Spear. “At the end of the day, we accept the penalties and have used this adversity to make our athletic program stronger.”

So help UD out here. The reason you should waive our penalties is that not only was our football team out of control academically, it was out of control behaviorally. You should show mercy because our very expensive athletics program really, really lacked institutional control. We recruited questionable people who unsurprisingly produced “significant behavioral issues.” Plus we fucked up and lost a lot of money.

Do these seem to you grounds for an appeal? Presumably UI spent a lot of time and money coming up with their case for appeal. Does that seem to you to have been a reasonable use of time and money? UD‘s trying to understand.

I mean. The University of Texas considers itself a very respectable academic institution, ja? So here’s an article, plus comments on the article, in its campus newspaper.

Perhaps the most important line in the opinion piece is this:

Turner will likely turn pro after one year.

Turner is Myles Turner, a hot basketball prospect. UT’s trying to get him. UT, with the U for university.

Now the author of this opinion piece, a UT student, doesn’t even bother pretending that Turner will do anything academic while he’s at UT. He will play basketball for a season and leave. Indeed, pretty much everyone who writes about Turner agrees with this. So UT, like several other universities, is pissing itself blue at the prospect that this guy will visit campus for a few months, dribble the ball, and leave. This is the most important issue, the most riveting thing, on this American university campus at the moment. Will he or won’t he dribble the ball?

The opinion piece writer argues that Turner would actually be wise to go to another school, because despite what you’ve been told about Texas and sports, the school doesn’t really care much about basketball. The school only really cares about football. There are schools that care more about basketball, and Turner should go to one of those.

Again, note that in his arguments (he has others) against Turner coming to Texas, the student doesn’t say This guy, this Myles Turner, he might get a better education, even if only for a few months, at a better school… Because, you know, UT is a school, and … No. This guy will get nothing that UT or any other school has to offer. Too obvious even to put this down in words.

Now read through the comments on the article from other UT students. Most of the commenters are very angry because the author, Evan Berkowitz, has dissented from the piss yourself blue with excitement position that all true UT people must assume on the question of recruiting Turner. Some say Berkowitz is a faggot Jew who should shut the fuck up. Others seem embarrassed by their fellow students’ anti-semitism.

How to explain any aspect of this to anyone with even a vestigial brain?