… paying the almost $200,000 a year salary of a football coach who thinks it’s appropriate to say this at a public university:

[W]e’re going to make sure [players] understand that Jesus Christ should be in the center of our huddle…

UD thinks you can attract people like this to your campus for a lot less than $200,000 a year.

Anyway, like so many people in and around university football, he has apparently embarrassed the school enough to be asked to take his gospel of Jesus the Cerebral Hemorrhage Enthusiast elsewhere.

… descriptions of American football, remember: This is the game that dominates this country’s universities:

One thinks of ex-Denver Bronco John Moffitt, who quit [football] midway through this past season not because of a toxic locker room or for fear of concussions, but because playing in the NFL was getting in the way of living a fulfilling life. [Jonathan] Martin’s catalogue [of reasons to leave football] suggests that, whether or not the treatment he received was a stark exception, a workplace where the currency is misplaced bravado and casual cruelty is inseparable from professional football.

And hello? Does anyone think our big football schools, their teams coached by plenty of ex-NFL people, are any different?

Time to build a $173 million basketball arena!

… at the University of Nebraska, where he continues to be lionized online. You’d think that university would rouse itself to remove their we love richie page – not only because he was a vile bully while at Nebraska, but because he’s now an international object of contempt. (They let him play there for two years before – under the pressure of his incredible behavior – letting him go. But if you Google his name and the word Nebraska, you find that the university cannot bring itself to take down his official hagiography.)

(A walk down memory lane with Nebraska’s “little puppy” and his similarly “intense” fellow Husker, Dominic Raiola.)

And here’s Richie today:

It’s tempting to say something far-reaching and wide-ranging about The Game and how its structure and mores retard human development. It’s tempting to indict the league and the Dolphins for continuing a tradition of slipshod treatment of mental-health issues through their lack of follow-up after [Jonathan] Martin was treated for depression last spring. It’s more than tempting to take one last run at excoriating Incognito for his seemingly sociopathic behavior and its ability to flow seamlessly through the daily routines of NFL life.

… Incognito was the “team” guy, right? Member of the Leadership Council, bell cow for the offensive line, self-appointed hardener of the soft, he comes across in the report as a terribly divisive man whose bizarre and disgusting behavior cost the team a starting offensive lineman and subjected it to a phenomenal amount of unwanted scrutiny.

… [Jonathan] Martin’s feelings of inadequacy seemed to stem in large part from his academic success. An upper-middle-class black man with a run of good schools in his background, he was looked upon skeptically, as someone who might commit the unforgivable offense (in Incognito’s world) of having more than one thought running through his head at any given time. Martin wrote, “I mostly blame the soft schools I went to, which fostered within me a feeling that I’m a huge p—y, as I never got into fights.”

Martin’s upbringing stifled him, rendered him speechless amid the hypersexual, hypervulgar, hyperracial world of the Dolphins’ locker room, and it underscored a point worth considering: Education is not always a valued commodity in the NFL. It can be looked upon with derision, as a sign that its owner lacks a certain desperation needed to succeed. Martin might be the first person to express shame at having a Stanford education.

Nebraska will never truly repudiate its Jim Jones, the Dolphins “team guy” who brought to a university everything that “retards human development.”

As this professor quickly discovered, Nebraska, like Sandusky’s Penn State, is a cult. It continues its masochistic worship of mad sons of bitches. It is a university dedicated to blitzing the capacity to think.

Only in America.

Commentary on the release of the Richie Incognito investigation’s results.

What did you think you were watching all these years? What did you think football was?

… The report over and over again mentions the workplace, and what is appropriate in the workplace. Well, what do these men do for work, at their workplace? “Not an ordinary workplace,” as the report’s conclusion, doesn’t quite cover it. The employees slam into people running at them, over and over again. Sometimes they slam into someone’s upper body, and sometimes they go for the legs. In their free time, when they’re not slamming into others, they train, so that they can weigh more, with more muscle and less body fat, for the next time they slam into others.

Of course UD has no objection to American football. People like freak shows. Let them have them. Just get it out of our universities.

… Ohio State.

What? Sweet winsome university football a commercial enterprise?

So the National Labor Relations Board hearings on the Northwestern University football team’s proposal to form a union have just gotten under way, and we already have our first howler.

Here it is, from the mouth of Northwestern’s vice president for university relations, Alan K. Cubbage: “We do not regard, and have never regarded, our football program as a commercial enterprise.” OK, Alan, but you may be the only ones who don’t. How, exactly, is an entity that sells tickets to its events — not to mention the national TV rights to broadcast those events — not engaging in commerce?

… that they really cannot think of anything besides athletics for their universities to do.

I know you have trouble believing this; you will point to the existence of professors and administrators on all public university campuses. You will point to the baseline definitional truth – unmissable even to the most doltish – of universities as places of learning.

But the mere existence of professors and administrators at any campus of, say, the University of Hawaii system, proves nothing. You need to look at the fact that schools like UH do virtually nothing, decade after decade, but throw money down a sports hole. It is clear that no one in the state can think of anything else a university might be for.

Except for kickbacks from contractors.

Those are the two things:

1. Staff makes money via bribes.

2. Football games are staged.

Here’s the latest:

[The chancellor] cleared the department of a nearly $15 million deficit last summer and gave the department three years to balance its $30 million budget or face cutting sports offerings.

Dat’s right. He just up and used funds, available to educate people, to erase the athletics department’s fifteen million dollar deficit.

Since then, they’ve lost all their games, no one attends the games, they already have another two million dollar deficit, and UH is going to raise the student athletics fee.

One observer, complaining about the ten million dollars in athletics bailout money from Hawaii taxpayers the university looks likely to get, notes that even in this grim situation there is something for which to be thankful:

[N]o one was present when the ceiling in a classroom on the third floor of Moore Hall collapsed inward due to a leaking pipe.

UD presumes no one was present because, well, physical campuswise… no one’s ever present… There’s no there there as ol’ Gertie put it…

Again, UD would suggest that states like Hawaii actually cannot conceptualize university. And there’s no cure for that.

UD laughed so much reading that, her stress incontinence problem almost acted up.

[T]he fiasco over locker-room bullying between the Miami Dolphins’ Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito reminded everyone this season how eccentric football now is culturally — not because of a hidden health problem, but just in its explicit, inherent violence. The battle fought in the press between the players’ “sources” unveiled football as a dark, subterranean hive of old-school warrior values and character-building sadism. Taunts and racial imprecations were openly justified, the way military floggings once were: as salutary hide-tougheners.

It’s funny to watch jock schools like Colorado and Chapel Hill hyperventilate about their integrity when football, in all its dark subterranean hiviness, is such an important part of their institutions.

This blog has duly chronicled several sadistic university football coaches (basketball too, of course, but we don’t want this post to get too long) – men who, with each new revelation of their treatment of players, get fired and then passed off to a new school.

Maybe football should be spun out and – in accordance with its actual nature – made just one more non-academic bloodsport:

It is interesting how the increasingly popular spectacle of mixed martial arts (MMA) competition so quickly secured a perimeter of social acceptance for itself. MMA is not only violent; it is violence. But the risks are blatant enough for us not to pity the competitors. (Their locker rooms are probably pretty crude places, too.) Football players, by contrast, are not supposed to be pure, uncivilized instruments of brutality. They are supposed to be technicians, strategists, artists whose work involves only a limited element of cruelty.

Moreover, they are nurtured in a system of universities as “student-athletes,” and a corrupt, increasingly bizarre system at that. The game grew out of educational establishments in the first place. No one is trying to integrate MMA with the curriculum at Notre Dame or Harvard; MMA was invented too late for that.

Think of this observation when you read (as you often read) commentators arguing that the solution to the problem of corrupt university football is to make football an academic major. As the game gets more and more purely violent, its claims to intellectuality, disciplinarity, grow.

Down she swoops, from the emerital ether, to speak the truth to the new management team at this year’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Scandal-management-wise Chapel Hill has done the thing, the thing that every jock school does when the shit truly hits the fan – it has dumped its previous management and put in a team of deer-in-the-headlight innocents who can say

Well we weren’t here for the long Nyang’oro Nightmare so we don’t really know what’s going on but we’re pure-hearted people doing our best in a bad situation, etc etc etc.

UD applauds the move, it’s a fine move, it’s an obvious move.

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

But, as Orwell wrote:

‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’

You can bring in the deer to try to control the present, but it’s the pesky past …

Madeline Levine swooped in from the past, and (so far at least) the deer have not been able to herd her.

“During the year that I served as interim dean I was made aware of the serious academic deficiencies that some of our newly recruited athletes would have to overcome if they were ever to succeed at UNC,” Levine wrote. “From what I was told … I thought it highly probable that one of these students was functionally illiterate.”

She wrote that she went to the university provost, who was then Bernadette Gray-Little, now chancellor at the University of Kansas.

She said she was “told what I already knew – that the decision had been made to grant special admission to this student and there was nothing to be done about it by then. That was true, but I still feel guilty that I let the matter drop and did not publicly express my dismay.”

One likes Levine’s continued guilt – it sounds right, it sounds real. One believes Levine.

Levine … accused the university of resisting efforts to get to the bottom of a long-running academic fraud scandal that is drawing sustained national attention since it made The New York Times’ front page on New Year’s Day. She said Dean took the wrong tack two weeks ago in publicly lambasting whistle-blower Mary Willingham, a former learning specialist in the athletes’ tutoring program. Willingham said her research found that more than half of 183 athletes specially tested for learning deficiencies over an eight-year period could not read at a high-school level.

“Mary Willingham was courageous in speaking out about her experience as a reading specialist and academic counselor for such students,” Levine wrote. “It is appalling that the highest officials at UNC – before it became clear that attacking a whistle-blower is not a smart PR move – mounted a concerted public attack on the accuracy of Ms. Willingham’s statistical analysis and, by implication, against her personally, while steadfastly refusing to engage with the core issue that concerns her: the exploitation of student-athletes and the concomitant abuse of the academic values by which a great university should live.”

… university near you.

Makes them sound so righteous, doesn’t it? Getting all vigorously defensive in the name of our students…

Of course, when it came to educating them (the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is a university) we were utterly vigorless… We went out of our way to choose department chairs who took defenseless students and defrauded them…

But that’s because the students were so vigorous! Panting on the track every morning getting ready for that day’s concussion tackle …

A lot of people – and, more to the point, a lot of money – depended on these guys to defend UNC’s honor on the field. Now we’re doing right by the guys in keeping away from the press details of their abuse.

… point out that despite the outrageously bad graduation rate of revenue athletes at Florida State University, many of whom are minority —

Of all the teams that played in the bowl series, Florida State’s has the lowest graduation rate. Sixty-five of the 94 students on the team—69 percent—are black. Based on an analysis of the past four cohorts of black male athletes at Florida State, only 24 of those 65 are predicted to graduate within six years.

— the overall black student graduation rate at Florida State is excellent.

The six year graduation rate is 72.7 and 74.1 for Black and White students, respectively.

*************
UD thanks her readers.

From a review of a new documentary about one of America’s most bizarre locales.

After [Penn State’s Jerry] Sandusky was convicted on 45 counts of child abuse, Penn State was treated as a national pariah, hit with a $60 million fine and forced to forfeit 13 years of football victories, based on the premise that it had put athletic accomplishment above ethical conduct. As if that were somehow unique among American universities! Here’s the parallel: People in Happy Valley tried to blame Penn State’s problem on Jerry Sandusky, and people in America tried to blame college football’s problems on Penn State…

… I’m not claiming there’s some obvious solution to the hive-mind, groupthink, blame-the-media mentality we see in “Happy Valley,” which seems like a constitutive element of human psychology that’s not limited to Penn State or college football or America.

… [N]obody in Happy Valley wanted to hear anything bad about the demigods who ran their beloved football program, until it became necessary to pull down their idols and cast them out of the temple.