… is a time-honored effect of big-time sports recruiting on the university level, of course… You’re after the most aggressive person you can find, and you don’t much care whether he’s aggressive off the field as well as on…
I mean, University of Oregon, naturally… And naturally an occasional victim will write to the campus newspaper…
I am angry with the culture that appears to exist in our athletic department that prioritizes winning over safety of our students. I cannot fathom how our basketball coach recruited someone who was in the middle of a suspension for another sexual assault to come to Eugene.
But this woman – who was allegedly raped by Oregon basketball players – needs to understand that the occasionally raped or killed university student is pretty much the cost of doing business if you want to win games. With time, she can perhaps be made to see that she has, in her own way, made a huge contribution to her school’s winning efforts…
But it takes a football-crazed state like Texas to bring the recruiting of perilously violent people to high school.
The Dallas Independent School District is run by people who illegally (of course – the local rags mention this part as scandalous, but really…) recruit violent people to their secondary schools… And one of these illegally recruited guys killed another illegally recruited guy.
What’s especially impressive about this story is that it took the murder of a teenager by another teenager to spark the investigation that led to the oh so shocking revelation about not just the illegal recruiting but all sorts of other violations among top ISD people.
UD would call the whole thing depraved beyond belief if it weren’t Texas, where what you call it is business as usual. If a few kids have to lay down their lives for football, big deal.
[Jonathan] Turner led the Madison Trojans to the 2013 and 2014 Class 3A state championships and was selected to the all-tournament team this year. But while his classmates were celebrating the last day of the school year on Friday, he was in the Dallas County jail, where he’s being held in lieu of $250,000 bond. He’s accused of killing [Troy] Causey during a fight over a video game.
After the killing, Causey’s mother, Tammy Simpson, said that Burley improperly recruited her son while he was at a residential facility for young offenders on an assault charge. [An IDS administrator] arranged for Causey to attend [a local school] even though he lived in Richardson ISD, she said.
The investigation found that Causey and Turner were not eligible to play for those teams, sources said.
June 8th, 2014 at 2:47PM
i check this blog every day. its the best window into the perversion of academics by the pursuit of athletic glory.
but here we do have to ask if other recruited students in other fields might also be pointed to as “entitled”, etc. and to as having acted on their entitlement violently.
i SUSPECT that recruited football players are more inclined to rape than recruited mathematicians, linguists, violinists, etc.
but are they?
June 8th, 2014 at 3:16PM
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FBC_IOWA_PLAYER_CITED_IAOL-?SITE=IASPT&SECTION=STATE&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
June 8th, 2014 at 4:53PM
Years ago a pro football player got a settlement from an opposing team after a federal court allowed him to sue when one of the opposing players hit him illegally and seriously injured him. The basis for the decision was that he consented to being hit according to the rules, but not outside the rules.
I’m wondering if the same principle would apply here. Could the players who were hit say that any liability waivers they signed were based on the assumption that they would be hit only by eligible players, so the School District isn’t off the hook for anything caused by a player who was known to be ineligible, but played anyway? If so, this could end up costing the District some serious money. In that case someone might very well end up on the hot seat.
June 8th, 2014 at 9:11PM
John: Thank you for the kind words about my blog! On the question you raise: It’s certainly true that high profile, hotly recruited football and basketball players who assault people are liable to get more press attention than mathematicians who assault. But it’s also true that in the years of writing this blog I’ve seldom come across university students outside of the frats or the high profile sports teams who get into enough trouble to make the newspapers.
June 8th, 2014 at 9:44PM
John, I used to live cheek to jowl with CalTech, which is swarming with STEM folks. No, we didn’t have problems with rioting students, who needed to be dispersed by teargas after games, the school didn’t have to pay millions of dollars a year to clean up the campus after being trashed by tailgaters, I never knew if they had Greek franchises, not much violence to speak of. I’m taking a chance, but CalTech didn’t have to worry about their mathematicians, physicists, chemists and the few liberal arts types getting involved in raping anyone….