Five months and one day after Jordan McNair collapsed at a Maryland football practice, D.J. Durkin, the head coach who oversaw the system whose failure led to the offensive lineman’s death, was reinstated to his job. That decision was made over the reported protests of university president Wallace Loh, who didn’t mention Durkin’s name at a Tuesday press conference and was told he’d be fired if he didn’t follow the regents’ recommendations…
[One of the football program’s trainers] allegedly used homophobic slurs and threw everything from food to weights to vomit at players, while other unnamed coaches forced them to watch graphic videos of “serial killers, drills entering eyeballs, and bloody scenes with animals eating animals.”
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Chicago Trib:
[For the University of Maryland,] being guided by the memory of a 19-year-old whose death was wholly and completely preventable means that the football coach who oversaw a program built on — among other things — demeaning players should be welcomed back. So here comes the inconceivable: DJ Durkin, back on the sidelines…
[T]he University of Maryland — in its entirety — is delusional…
“Greetings, mothers of prospective Maryland football players. Come in. Have a seat. Let me flip on this video of animals disemboweling each other, just to get you in the right frame of mind. Oh, sorry, is there puke in that trash can? Allow me to fling it across the room. That should do it. Would you like a candy bar? No? I insist. Seriously. Eat this &$%@#! candy bar!!!!!!!! Or else!!!!!!!!!”
… That DJ Durkin remains the football coach at the University of Maryland defies common sense and common decency. That Damon Evans remains his boss as the athletic director means Maryland has installed a leader who is defined more by his mistakes than his successes. And the entire university system has exposed itself.
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It’s all chaos, degradation, and continued danger, and the whole world is watching. Take a look at today’s Google News page for the University of Maryland.
A Forbes writer gets it right: Unless you’re Clemson and Baylor and Nebraska and the other total-football-and-nothing-else schools, you’re eventually going to find yourself deep in the same sort of shit Maryland’s in right now.
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The hot mess in all its glory.
Two things almost for sure:
1. Durkin will go.
2. This entire episode will end up costing the university at least ten million dollars, plus endless further costs arising from multiple lawsuits.
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Headline on this one: IN AN AGE OF REFORM, MARYLAND SAYS IT’S FINE WITH SLIME
President Loh …. advocated that Durkin be dismissed. Instead it’s the president who’s leaving. The coach, beggaring belief, gets to stay. Unknown is whether he can find anyone willing to play for him, now or ever again.
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The Maryland head football coach, who in the very best-case scenario, was so incompetent at overseeing a program that he allowed it to turn into one so toxic and so physically dangerous to players that it killed one, but who was so competent at instilling a culture of “fear” that players and subordinates were too afraid to speak up with their concerns, was reinstated on Tuesday, along with everyone else who bears responsibility for Jordan McNair’s death.
… As for why the board of regents appears so committed to Durkin, well, look no further than his contract. The coach is in the third year of a six-year contract that pays him about $2.5 million annually. If he were to be bought out, it would cost the school $5 million. If he were to be fired without cause, it would cost 65 percent of his remaining salary, or, again, about $5 million. If he were to be fired with cause, there would likely be an expensive and protracted legal battle. It is no wonder, that at just about every program, a football coach has more job security than a university president: He makes more money.
Maryland football does not turn a profit. It had run, for years, at a multi-million-dollar deficit, but believed that moving to the Big Ten would make it the money-printing machine it always believed it could be. But so far, by all reports, it’s barely breaking even, and has committed to years of serious expenses paying off its fancy new football facilities. The board of regents appears to believe the program cannot afford to take the hit of paying off Durkin to leave, and the likely accompanying loss in donations from insane boosters, on top of the inevitable lawsuit from McNair’s family. The regents announced yesterday, in so many words, that doing the right thing would cost too much money.
One does wonder how many more articles like this one Oxford’s leadership will read before it decides it’s tired of the publicity.
It’s not the sort of location you want to visit often; but it’s important to remind ourselves of the bizarre fate of the academy’s iconic homeland.
Most recently, the Athens Bar Association released the following desperate statement:
“The prevalence of lawlessness in [our universities], due largely to the total indifference of the state, not only humiliates and devalues public higher education in our country,” but is an affront to the state itself …
Because of the country’s absurd asylum law, under which police can’t enter universities, campuses have become graffiti-ridden organized crime hotspots. “[D]elirious or half-dead addicts” abound. Violent anarchism against professors and students is also a biggie:
On Wednesday morning, professors and students of the School of Philosophy gathered at the entrance of the campus in order to prevent [anarchists] from entering the premises. Nevertheless, the anarchists entered forcefully and took over classroom 516 again, just as they had done the previous two Wednesdays.
Greek universities have been sordid and comatose for many years. Soon they’ll just be dead.
How dare anyone insinuate that the niqab is restrictive and oppressive. What nonsense!
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The racist political ads the article goes on to describe are disgusting. But they have nothing to do with clothing commercials using the hideous niqab as a way to make an obvious point about preferring self-expression to self-erasure.
… and will certainly appoint, as next president, a go along to get along good ol’ boy. Paging John Thrasher!
College Park is happier than a trash can full of vomit.
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“[S]everal [football] players, including starters, walked out of [a] meeting with” the reinstated coach.
Bad, scary coach stays and university president goes. Datz the way it is, kids.
She plays one-minute-per-move games against cold brilliant robots on this site, and will only play random boards because when you get a good random board you get all sorts of amazingly high point possibilities – imagine a seven-letter word spanning two triple-word scores…
However. I may be on the spectrum, but I have nothing on this dude, who seems to me well into idiot savant territory.
When your university’s long-term president, in his valedictory speech, prominently cites as one of the institution’s pressing future needs closing certain bars, you have a problem. When his ultimate-aspiration summation alludes to mayhem at the hospitals, rage among the neighbors, shootings into crowds, and appalling tailgate conditions, you really do need to ask yourself if the University of South Carolina is a university, or is instead what UD calls a unibrewery.
It’s truly a witches’ brew: Capitalists in the bars hauling in the cash from students; unibreweries afraid to do much because they’re in competition for students with other unibreweries; a larger culture of massive alcohol addiction; guns guns guns guns guns. Mix briskly and stand back.
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UD thanks Professor Mondo.
… a group features a
famous visitor to RB,
Justice Kavanaugh.
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UD thanks her sister for the picture.
You do want to know? Okay, read these two pages (scroll down).
And now for an update, from a student writing in CMU’s campus newspaper.
[Virtually no spectators showing up for football games] is not exclusively a CMU problem. It’s the exact same problem that many other trivial Mid-American Conference schools face.
… The reported attendance at the CMU-WMU game was 10,097 people. By hand, I counted 255 people on the east side of the stadium at the end of the first quarter.
UD‘s very fond of a statement from CMU’s 2014 athletic director.
“Does it matter if you have no one at your game, or 15,000, or 110,000?” Heeke asked. “Does that somehow deem [sic] that you shouldn’t play football at this school because you can’t reach 15,000? [Like a lot of schools, CMU fudges like mad to pretend to the NCAA that it meets the minimal attendance standard.] If the school makes the decision to play football, why should it matter? It’s their decision how they want to manage the game and what they think their expectation is and what makes it a viable program.”
Does it matter that CMU paid this guy – Heeke – $300,000 a year when he made that statement? Does it matter that a public university runs an expensive and totally invisible football program? Does it matter that it has no one at its games? No! If the good people of Michigan, if CMU students and their parents, want to fund a bunch of guys (most of whom aren’t real CMU students) throwing a ball around in a huge pricey stadium GO FOR IT. We all know the state of Michigan’s so rich it doesn’t know what to do with its money.
… at the Sea Witch Festival. Costume parade, dog parade, bonfires, the works. She will blog compulsively from there.
Click through the artworks here to see one of our Fangors, for sale next month at the New York Bonhams auction.
…world…
But it wouldn’t be nothing – nothing! – without a woman or a girl to abuse.
There’s Oxford professor in good standing Tariq Ramadan, lying through his teeth as long as he possibly could about his apparent rapes and now ah shit okay I did those two… But they were begging for it… There’s Yale professor in good standing Michael Simons who okay yes I was a bad boy but I’m suing you for a trillion dollars for taking away my named chair…
Behind every great man is a great man; Ramadan has his powerful male supporters; and then there’s Robert “Two Chairs” Alpern.
