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“Between this guy, Richie Incognito, Dominic Raiola, Alfonzo Dennard, and probably a lot of others who escape me at the moment, Nebraska sure knows how to keep it classy.”

The heartland! The heartland! It doesn’t get more all-American than Nebraska – a state that, along with Missouri, UD (an evil coastal Jew married to Euro-trash) routinely forgets exists.

My headline quotes a commenter on an article about Lawrence Phillips, the latest proud son of that state’s university’s storied football team. Now that Phillips has murdered his cellmate, the University of Nebraska enjoys the same spate of publicity it did when its beloved Richie Incognito ran into some trouble.

The article’s a bit vague on the wonderful Nebraska coaching that brought Phillips to that school and kept him there –

Phillips was a superstar running back at Nebraska who was controversially allowed to keep playing for the Cornhuskers even after multiple run-ins with the law.

– but here’s a detail from another source:

[Coach Tom] Osborne reinstated Phillips in the same season the star dragged his girlfriend by the hair down a staircase.

Same sex marriage in Nebraska? Goodness me, no! But drag your girlfriend down the staircase by the hair and … instant football star!

And talk about coacha inconsolata. Get a load of the headline on an article about Osborne:

Lawrence Phillips Tragedy Continues to Haunt Former Nebraska Coach

Wow.

When asked about keeping Phillips on the team, the coach recently said that as a coach

“You take hits.”

Hit me again! That’s it, hit me again! What do I expect? I’m a coach! I can take it…

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

UD thanks the many readers who sent her updates about Phillips’ amazing career, and the totally amazing University of Nebraska.

Margaret Soltan, April 16, 2015 6:35AM
Posted in: sport

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8 Responses to ““Between this guy, Richie Incognito, Dominic Raiola, Alfonzo Dennard, and probably a lot of others who escape me at the moment, Nebraska sure knows how to keep it classy.””

  1. charlie Says:

    Euro trash! You must be talking about those unwashed masses on the continent, not us Scots-Irish…..

  2. Jack/OH Says:

    Heartland?! Well, yeah, there’s the Norman Rockwell angle, which is astonishingly real in parts. There’s also crystal meth and heroin out the wazoo, soul-curdling boredom and conformity, and once-thriving but now obsolete cities living on transfer payments.

    No stretch of the moral imagination is needed here to recognize when people and institutions go bonkers.

    charlie, we’re the guys who don’t have Waylon and Merle in the record collection. But, yeah, we’ve been picked on by the Crown–real or metaphoric.

  3. Anon Says:

    “You take hits”?

    No, his girlfriends take hits.
    Students at his university take hits.
    His cellmates take hits

    But, you, his coach? You don’t take hits.
    You collect checks. Massive checks. Checks supported by taxpayers who fund donations and tuitions in multiple ways. Checks that often make you the most well-paid university employee. Checks that would embarrass any person with a shred of dignity and integrity.

  4. charlie Says:

    “There’s also crystal meth and heroin out the wazoo, soul-curdling boredom and conformity, and once-thriving but now obsolete cities living on transfer payments.”

    Man, I miss Sacramento…..

  5. theprofessor Says:

    Nebraska certainly enabled Phillips and Incognito, but the former grew up in California and the latter in New Jersey, about as far away from the heartland as you can get. I suspect that their entitlement and self-control problems pre-dated their arrival on the prairie.

    My guess is that a visibly-Jewish Jew (i.e., wearing a yarmulke or carrying a sign that says “I am a Jew”) would have less to worry about walking around Columbia, Missouri, Ames, Iowa, Lincoln, Nebraska, or Minneapolis, Minnesota, than, say, Berkeley, California.

  6. Margaret Soltan Says:

    tp: Yes – it’s precisely the strangeness of a heartland community priding itself on heartland values deciding to make heroes of people like these (Nebraska continues to promote Incognito on its athletics website) that interests me. No one stopped the school’s cynical coaches from recruiting known disasters. Which is to say that it’s apparently a heartland value to care more about football than the welfare of your community.

    You may be right about the relative public ease of a Jew in Berkeley vs. Minneapolis. Certainly a visible Jew is unlikely to have a great day walking around parts of very cosmopolitan Paris.

  7. charlie Says:

    @UD, theprofessor, the greatest danger Jews face might just be other Jews:

    jonathanturley.org/2014/10/22/ultra-orthodox-jews-attack…

  8. University Diaries » ‘The heartland! The heartland! It doesn’t get more all-American than Nebraska – a state that, along with Missouri, UD (an evil coastal Jew married to Euro-trash) routinely forgets exists.’ Says:

    […] is the first sentence of a 2015 UD post about super-perverted Nebraska, a state routinely forgotten until its university’s football […]

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