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All for Football! All for Football! …

… is how they seem to sing it at Baylor University, a Christian school apparently, but far more committed to football (and basketball) than to anything spiritual… I mean, if you go by the sorts of things that happen there…

For instance, it’s a very violent place, which seems to UD (she’s no expert) rather at odds with the Christian ethos. One of their basketball players a few years ago “punched Texas Tech forward Jordan Barncastle … breaking Barncastle’s nose and causing both benches to clear.” Although concussed during a recent game, Baylor’s quarterback insisted it was nothing and that despite some fogginess and a headache he’d be back out there again right away because nothing’s more important than winning at football. And

In January, 2014, Tevin Elliott, a defensive end out of Mount Pleasant, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for twice assaulting a former Baylor student in 2012. During that trial, two other women testified that Elliott assaulted them. A fourth alleged victim was not called to testify.

And now everyone’s abuzz with the latest Baylor violence: Under the same coach as Elliott’s, another football player is going to jail for sexual assault on a Baylor student. And this player had already been “kicked off the Boise State football team after punching and choking his girlfriend.” It looks very much as though the Baylor coach knew about this violent past.

But hey. If there’s one thing you’ve learned reading this blog, it’s that plenty of American universities will open their arms to woman beaters if the guys can catch a football. And the schools will do all they can to lie and cover up and victim-blame (Baylor carried out a wretchedly inept internal investigation.) until the bad stuff their football players do goes away. Or maybe it doesn’t go away.

And… uh… this seems to be the Christian way. I mean… One of America’s leading Christian universities keeps doing it.

Baylor’s president is Ken Starr. That Ken Starr. Investigator extraordinaire.

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Read this if you can stomach it. Baylor is a sister school to Florida State University, with similar cooperation by local media and law enforcement. Absolutely disgusting.

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UD thanks dmf.

Margaret Soltan, August 21, 2015 9:23PM
Posted in: forms of religious experience, sport

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10 Responses to “All for Football! All for Football! …”

  1. charlie Says:

    Man, how can anyone talk about Baylor University athletic violence and not talk about former bball coach Dave Bliss’s handling of the murder of one his players by a teammate?

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baylor_University_basketball_scandal

    Baylor U, where you can’t dance, but you can beat the hell outta of each other….

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    charlie: I had no idea. Too much of this stuff …

  3. AYY Says:

    One other thing that I’ve learned from reading this blog is that there must be a lot of liberal “in jokes” that the rest of us can’t understand. They appear frequently as throwaway lines to obscure the meaning of what is often otherwise an informative post.

    Here for example there’s what appears to be a purely gratuitous reference to Ken Starr. I’m confused. Did he recruit the football players? Should he not have accepted the job of investigating Bill Clinton? Did he not investigate Bill Clinton thoroughly enough? Or is it something else altogether?

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    AYY: Baylor launched an internal investigation of this matter, and the investigation was apparently botched beyond belief. My reference to Starr meant to note the irony of a school whose president — famous for his investigative skills — presides over a worthless investigation.

  5. dmf Says:

    ah yeah those elitist liberals and their in-group argot of facts and history…

  6. charlie Says:

    AVY, oh I don’t know, maybe “liberals” have a refined sense of the absurd. Ken Starr made his bones investigating whether or not a US Pres lied about a blowjob. He then turns up running the preeminent American Baptist university, whose reputation is akin to a geared up Southern Gothic novel, replete with rape, murder, and cover-ups. Even Flannery O’Connor said you can’t make this into a book, it’s too ridiculous. Given all that, and Ken Starr’s less than robust delving into what the hell is going on at his own institution, how could anyone, of whatever political bent, not find the whole situation ludicrous?

  7. dmf Says:

    @charlie, sometimes i think US conservative =irony-challenged

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg

  8. charlie Says:

    @dmf, John Oliver = the best satire…..

  9. theprofessor Says:

    The irony is that a long-standing serial predator who preferred to pay up and relinquish his law license rather than face one of his victims in court is the hero of way too many liberal academics who profess to be worried about “rape culture.”

  10. Margaret Soltan Says:

    tp: He’s no hero of mine.

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