An observer of events coming out of California University of Pennsylvania states the open secret behind a number of university football teams: Recruiters are looking for violent people.
Cal U’s team, which, under a coach who himself has a pending court date for letting his kid drive an unregistered car (You see the theme, right? Risk taking. The coach is so cool because he’s a risk taker.), is on its way toward becoming totally criminalized.
So what’s the deal?
No one on campus is talking.
[The coach] did not return calls for comment… Since the [recent] attack [by six of its players, an attack which left a man close to death], university officials have refused to comment about the football program’s mounting troubles; interim President Geraldine Jones has ordered a “top-to-bottom” review by an outside firm.
Members of the alumni association board and student government officers were told not to speak to the media about the situation.
The situation being a recruitment philosophy that involved admitting hugely notorious bullies to the school and the team… And let’s compound the scandal by ordering everyone to keep their trap shut… No comment, no comment… That’s so the way to go … A real winning strategy…
When carefully brewed football violence hits the fan at obscure schools like this one, it’s a perfect storm. Truly no one on campus knows what to do or say. By definition, you don’t accomplish this amazing outcome in your student body unless absolutely no one is in charge. All the usual suspects – trustees, presidents, faculty – knew some or all of what was going on, but (Italianization again – see post just below this one) they didn’t care. In fact, the last president is majorly pissed because when the six-on-one story broke the school forfeited one game.
When contacted at his Chester County home, [the former president,] who is suing the state system over his firing, declined to comment. In a Facebook posting, he criticized [the] decision to cancel the team’s Nov. 1 game against Gannon University.
The decision, his posting read, “helped bring this tragic story to the attention of the national news media.”
That’s such a yummy comment. Truly a tragic story, like, you know, King Lear or something… And if you’d only kept it quiet and gone on with business as usual, no one would have been the wiser!
Let us call it tragicomic, as Samuel Beckett subtitles Waiting for Godot. A campus landscape of Ubus…
Yes, this one’s got legs. This one we can sit back and watch as the plot staggers about and then explodes onto the national and international stage.