… Spend any time reading about big-time university football and basketball and it’s like a thesaurus full of adjectives for morally vile. Some schools are so disgusting they’ve been given whole new names: not the U of L (for the University of Louisville, with its pimpy basketball coach) but the U of Smell. Almost all the Texas football schools exhaust the efforts of sports writers to come up with new ways to say absolutely rock bottom gagworthy – rape-besotted, self-righteous Baylor; Southern “Slush Fund” Methodist; Texas “Pain Slut” Tech… You’d think a university, rather than say a fleabag hotel, would aim for a modicum of dignity, a veneer of seriousness, a hint of higher things…

Every now and then a derelict university tosses into the scrimmage a gridiron hero who’s so flagrantly mentally disturbed that any location other than a football school or the NFL would pass on him. Norman Bates turns out to have one hell of a throwing arm, so you hush up his – teehee – little indiscretions; the university’s president is wheeled out to say he’s a fine lad with the waywardness of youth, and the students sell t-shirts representing him as Jesus the Christ.

Norman typically implodes after his short stint (it’s not as though he’s attending school) at Football U, and, if he’s Mister Texas A&M Johnny Manziel, he’s in the professional leagues for the full onset of dementia. Who knows why he waits for the professional leagues, where tens of millions of dollars are at stake, to wig out? Maybe he holds it a little bit together in order to be able to go pro; but maybe the pressure of going pro is too much or something.

Anyway every now and then the conspiracy of silence at these sorts of schools suffers a security breach. Seems things were so bad at Manziel’s Texas A&M that some of his fellow players transferred out in disgust. One of them gave an interview and everyone’s talking about it. So let’s see what the guy said…

Former A&M quarterback Kyle Allen says he transferred to Houston last month largely because he disliked the culture of the A&M football program — a culture that Allen says goes back to Manziel thinking the rules didn’t apply to him.

“I think the culture was a big part of it, and I think that stems from Johnny’s era there — the way that they let Johnny and [others] act there,” Allen told CBS. “They [could] do that and still win games because they had Johnny . . . and five offensive linemen playing in the NFL right now…

A lot of people were riding off that, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want and win on Saturday,'”…

UD sympathizes. It’s a delicate balancing act for coaches. On the one hand, you want the guys to act like insane fucking assholes, because that way they feel strong and invincible and able to win games. On the other hand, you don’t want their rapes and batterings to exceed a certain manageable number. Say one or two a semester. The difficulty of this subtle calculus is reflected in the coach’s sky-high salary.

I mean, it’s easy for a student journalist to say this:

I defended Manziel to the end of the Earth as a fun-loving, work hard-play hard future franchise quarterback and therefore I was part of the problem. He seemed fun and loving, but he was really just sick.

It’s far harder for the multimillionaire coach whose salary depended on keeping Johnny on the field to say this. And anyway the coach has a time-honored option: I did everything I could for Johnny. I loved him like a son. I think the discipline of the team and the games and the university family kept it together for Johnny; I think we were the best thing that could have happened to him.