Professors are always the weirdos; egghead university culture is always the bizarre thing against which the wholesome normality of college sports stands in all-American relief. Here’s the google-eyed weirdo peacenik photo that typically runs with articles about university professors. How much finer and firmer, how much more real, the football players racing out of the arena’s mist amid battle songs to start the fight on the field…
Yet football – routinely touted by idiots as the front porch of the university – is so much freakier than anything the professoriate could come up with. Football makes the American university not merely academic fraud central; it makes it a kind of endlessly looping Chien Andalou, with the first school out of the gate at the beginning of a new (cough) academic year the already notoriously disgusting University of Southern California.
USC has mainly been about the obvious stuff – cheating, impermissable benefits, blah blah. But now it’s Front Porch Surreal:
USC is finding itself in the media for all the wrong reasons this week. First, there’s the saga of Josh Shaw, who broke both his ankles this weekend by jumping off a balcony for an unknown reason [and lied about it]. And now senior Anthony Brown is accusing the team’s coach, Steve Sarkisian, of being a racist.
Sarkisian “treated me like a slave,” complains the player, who abruptly left the team; and, well, given the prominent and pretty plausible description of the university football landscape as a “plantation,” one can’t be too surprised at this latest grotesquerie.
But I mean. It’s not just USC. Richie Incognito? Out there in the clean-living heartland of Nebraska? They’ve still got their beloved torturer’s bio up on their university website. No professor can compete with University of Nebraska Weird. The University of Nebraska should audition for kink.com.
August 30th, 2014 at 11:44AM
limited gene pool out here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/upshot/where-people-in-each-state-were-born.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1#Nebraska
August 30th, 2014 at 12:07PM
About ten years ago, when Bobby Bowden was still coaching football at Florida State, he urged all his players to give their guns to the coaches during the course of the practice. I’m guessing, due to the fact I never felt compelled to pack a Glock during my Mechanics lecture, that Coach Bowden didn’t want his players putting guns up in their lockers, or leaving them in their cars.
Media play was that this was Bobby being Bobby, that, shucks, down in FL, college students always carry guns with them, after all, you never know when a ten point buck might cross your path. How deranged does a uni have to be that it recruits players whose lives are so disordered, they feel the need to carry high powered weapons with them to “school?” What kind of insanity is festering at high powered unis that people such as this are given scholarships over those that want nothing more than to study in peace? Is this what its come down to?
August 30th, 2014 at 12:27PM
This calls for a link to the South Park bit on “Stu-dent ath-o-leeets”:
http://southpark.cc.com/clips/387407/stu-dent-ath-o-leets
August 29th, 2015 at 3:52AM
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