… at the University of Illinois, where one after another, in the space of a few days, the chancellor, the provost, and now the football coach have all been fired or resigned. People are calling for the school to fire the athletic director.
Predictably, the coach thingie is about how twisted big-time American university football is. UD can’t get enough of the fact that the high-profile normal people on campus (football players, frat boys, coaches) almost always, when the shit hits the fan, turn out to be absolute pervs next to whom the weirdo humanities types are the actual mainstream. It’s the players who are often enduring a sick masochistic family relationship with their sadistic coach daddy.
Before the Illinois athletic director could no longer deny the sadism going on in his program, he dismissed player complaints about the coach by saying this:
“The feedback I get from players and our players’ families is that our coaches genuinely care for them and treat them like their own children,” Thomas said May 11.
How to unpack all the ugly in this statement? Since when do you treat adult males like children? But of course dominating and infantilizing and then intimidating players is the name of the game in much college football coaching. Like the sickest father ever, you embrace them and then scare the shit out of them if they disobey you. Daddy Dearest. Coach would make his own son play injured; he’d terrify his kid by telling him he’s gonna lose his scholarship if he doesn’t do what he tells him to do. He’s verbally abusive.
I mean, sure. There are fathers like this. It’s called child abuse.
This coach had already been accused of abuse.
Beckman was the subject of a lawsuit, later dismissed on a technicality, alleging the same kind of disregard for player injuries that would get him run out of Champaign.
But no. Oh no. We’re being pussies, aren’t we? Have you noticed how long the pussy list is getting? How many names the bruisers who love bigtime university and professional football now have to keep track of in order to dismiss them with contempt? Most recently there’s the name Chris Borland; and, at Illinois, there’s Simon Cvijanovic, who didn’t appreciate the unrelenting viciousness of the coach. There are many others; and the university officials whose job it is to keep their massively indebted football programs alive will no doubt want to encourage the frat boys and others as they cry pussy.
UD has covered so many of these coaches – highest public salary in the state, private jets, country clubs, worshipped by all, and physically and psychologically beating the shit out of their players.
And do you think a guy like this is going to let the university deprive him of a penny?
He will not receive the $3.1 million remaining on the last two years of his original five-year contract or the $743,000 called for if his contract had been bought out, the university said.
If he doesn’t sue, UD will be astonished.
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Update: Here we go.
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UD thanks Wendy.