This was a couple of years ago. The student’s question went to the immense disparity in the president’s salary and various coaches’ salaries. Annoyed that the president blew off the student, Mr UD pressed the president on problems in the athletics program.

The president of the University of Maryland responded to Mr UD along these lines: There’s little I can do about the program, and the program can blow up at any time.

UD has always been rather astonished by the president’s honesty; because this of course is the fundamental truth of all big-time university sports programs. The jock school president – in the favorite words of the second-highest paid employee in the entire state of Maryland – is a pussy bitch and a bitch pussy and a pussy pussy and a bitch bitch pussy pussy pussy.

And the jock school’s big-time sports program can indeed blow up at any time. If you know even a little about how they’re run – and the people who run them – you know why these programs keep blowing up.

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Real men die for the University of Maryland football team, like 19-year-old Jordan McNair, who didn’t get much of a life, but at least lived it taunted as a pussy and tortured to death by a first-rate football power.

[S]ome number of Maryland football staff members probably belong in prison.

Which is to say that just as the university’s president anticipated, the program, having killed a player, has now blown up.

You need to go back to Rutgers’ celebrated basketball coach Mike Rice to get a sense of the sick sadism characteristic of the man we Maryland taxpayers each year pay $2.5 million. I mean, try reading through all of this without puking (puking by the way is something the UMD coach makes his players do … part of the school’s force-feed ’em til they’re monsters regime… ).

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A Deadspin report concludes:

One perfectly reasonable question is why Durkin, Court, and Robinson, at the very least, haven’t already been fired. Former Maryland football staff members say the current coaching environment of the program is intimidation-based; current and former players say these men routinely use intimidation and humiliation as motivational tactics; current and former players say they have a pattern of pushing teenagers past the point of complete physical exhaustion, in some cases to weed out and punish players they’ve targeted as unwanted. A pattern has been described that makes what happened to Jordan McNair a likelihood, if not an inevitability, but it says deeply troubling things about what Maryland’s athletic department deems as acceptable coaching behavior that Durkin’s tactics weren’t rejected long before now.

But we know why they weren’t rejected. It’s really not about “what Maryland’s athletic department deems as acceptable coaching behavior,” because Durkin and Court were after all hired at great expense to torture teenagers to the point where they can win football games. It’s about Maryland’s administration.

So look at what the president of the university said to Mr UD. He has no control over the program. His job is to resolutely look the other way, and to irritably say nothing to people who insist on questioning him about a program over which, officially at least, he has authority.

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It’s a mad mad mad mad world. Over in the shabby humanities buildings they’re committing seppuku if they fail even for a moment to use scrupulously sensitive, politically correct, language; in the sports palaces, they’re getting in front of 19-year-olds’ faces and spitting pussy and faggot and fucker and shit and bitch at them while making them run on a hot field until one of them actually dies from the abuse.

Far out.

But routine reality at many of America’s big-time sports universities.

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UPDATE: In response to another coach (Will Muschamp, South Carolina) passionately defending Durkin, since much of the reporting about his program is based on anonymous sources:

A player is dead, but Muschamp is more worried about attacking ESPN’s article and the staffer giving them information.

Glorious University of South Carolina.

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As usual, Deadspin has the most trenchant response to Muschamp.