In a 2015 article with the amusing title Is the Era of Abusive College Coaches Finally Coming to an End? a Sports Illustrated writer totes up the butcher’s bill, to which we have most recently added University of Maryland football player Jordan McNair. “Our [false] conviction that hostility works is encouraged by a culture that makes legendary figures of [Bob] Knight and Steve Jobs,” says the writer, who goes to great lengths to argue that you catch more flies with honey. Maybe he should have held tight until the results of the last presidential election.

Meanwhile, they’re beating the shit out of high school football players too.

[P]ractices [at Grayson High School in Georgia] featured “full-force hitting in shorts.” Although no players were injured this year before the [team walkout over sadistic coaching], they were “concerned for their health heading into the season.”

One parent explained … that concerns have been raised about [the coach] since he took over the program in 2017 because of “multiple ambulance trips for heat-related issues” as well as broken bones and body cramps suffered during practices.

Once the coach is done with you, there’s avoiding anal rape by your teammates. (I’ve linked you to only the latest anal rape story. Google anal rape football and go to town.)

If you survive all that, it’s off to a homicidal fraternity in that big state school that recruited you. And get ready for your new best friend, Richie Incognito!

Concussions? Ha. Concussions are nothing.

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Oh. The whole does it work or doesn’t it controversy? Way off-point. Look closely, please. Some coaches love violence for itself, the way most human beings do. Look at the game to which coaches devote their lives.

Most human beings won’t kick or kill other people the way some coaches do; they’ll go to violent movies and football games and watch violent porn, etc. Life won’t afford them the opportunity to physically (and psychologically) brutalize actual human beings. Coaches get that opportunity.

Ah, the vitamin D deficiency panic. I remember it well, having been told a few years ago to start taking supplements right away or risk god knows what. I ignored the directive.

Think of all the pointless money and D‘ed up piss I could have passed since then!

And: Read and learn.

The larger picture.

Oh – and not to be a broken record, but if you want to be Vitamin D deficient, here’s a really good way to get there.

Both – to their despair – find themselves headline news this week. And why? Because no matter how much divides us, sexual strangeness, and a kind of desperate emotional lostness/loneliness, unites us.

We all have access to these things – I mean, being sexually strange; and feeling, in a restless, panicky way, lost and alone – though if we’re lucky in life and love we may seldom experience them.

Smith – until recently a powerful, highly paid coach at Ohio State; and Ronell – a powerful, highly paid professor at NYU, seem to have experienced these things more acutely than most other people; more importantly, their sense of their invulnerability to punishment seems to have allowed them to behave with total abandon. Ronell is tenured; Smith and the famed OSU head coach, Urban Meyer, have a very close personal relationship. Ronell was found guilty of sexually harassing one of her graduate students; she had, with unaccountable stupidity, written down everything culpable she had done in emails. Smith took dick pics of himself in the White House and on the OSU campus and sent them to friends; he ordered large numbers of sex toys to be delivered to his university office, and openly boasted of sexual encounters in the same office with various subordinates.

In both cases as well, powerful friends of these powerful people protected and defended them, which is another whole scandal. In a just-filed lawsuit, Ronell’s graduate student has credibly claimed that Ronell’s associates

launched a widespread disinformation campaign against [Nimrod] Reitman, falsely accused him of, among other things, having waged a ‘malicious campaign’ against Ronell and having a ‘malicious intent,’ thereby further ruining his hopes for any future career in academia.

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Of course there are differences between these two. Zach Smith appears to be a complete mess: Along with what I have already described, he has been arrested for drunk driving; and his ex-wife accuses him of extensive and extreme domestic violence. Ronell is far from a mess; what she is, rather, despite her revolutionary self-presentation, is that saddest of traditional figures: An older woman whose self-regard convinces her she remains attractive to men. Ronell was helped along by countercultural ideology; Smith was helped along by a hypermasculine, alcoholic, risk-taking sports culture.

But under these two current tragicomic figures from the American university lies the same old same old: self-destruction.

Our definitive, democratic game – with a play that lets everyone take part in running down the field.

Enjoy the instant replays.

Terrible picture.
Best I could do.
I can’t find any
spider that looks
anything like it.

Not a spider?

Oh – it’s very
small.

***********

Some variety of
orb-weaver??

The more you know, the more there is to like, right?

What’s not to like about sports programs at universities whose personnel lack the independence to make sound medical decisions about the physical condition of school athletes during grueling practices… Where said personnel fear “retribution” if they for instance take a student who seems in distress out of that day’s practice session…

“We are killing our players.”

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And if the coach don’t get you, your frat bros will!

On Fox & Friends on Thursday morning, Ainsley Earhardt proudly recalled the United States defeating “communist Japan.”

Until today’s article by Rebecca Tan, the Post‘s coverage was typical of mainstream Western journalism – burqa bans were pathetic and retrograde and after all almost no one in Europe wears the full veil. All reasonable people support freedom of religious expression, and that’s all the burqa is.

Yet the world of reality has been falling down hard around pro-burqers (if I may), and we begin to see more willingness to acknowledge that most Europeans are ignoring the tsk-tsking of the other side and going ahead and banning this grotesque garment.

[P]olicies governing head veils are likely to grow more prevalent … Countries having nationwide or partial bans are France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands. Spain and Italy have some local bans in cities or towns. Legislation is pending for local or national bans in Germany, Latvia, Finland, Switzerland and Luxembourg… [G]overnments in Europe now feel like they have license to take such steps because of the legal precedents set by their neighbours.

Blanketing (if I may) the continent, aren’t we? Most of the British would like to ban it, but the moral scolds running the place think the people’s naughtiness needs to be reined in by their betters. Closer to home, Canadians by a large margin want to ban it, but ditto on the moral scolds.

The Post writer still has a little trouble believing you’d ban burqas for reasons other than bigotry or cynical political calculation, but you can see she’s beginning to kind of try to perceive morally legitimate arguments in favor of the ban.

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One suggestion for Tan, by the way: Throughout the article, she talks about the number of “women” who wear the burqa. All writers who want to enter the fray on this one need to realize that girls are typically smothered under burqas at a very young age: ten, eleven. An age when there’s absolutely no choice involved in the matter.

UD has often wondered why pro-burqers routinely fail to mention this as they sneer about how psycho we are to care about the very very few women who wear the burqa. She has wondered why they don’t ask themselves: What’s it like to be in a supermarket or a post office or a classroom and see a little girl lost inside a burqa? If they would just ask themselves that question – put themselves in the position of Europeans who witness this sort of thing – they might have less trouble understanding the enormous and growing popularity across Europe and many other regions of burqa bans.

… Gone.

Dionne Koller, director of the University of Baltimore’s Center for Sport and the Law:

Was it criminal negligence? We need to hear more facts… I’m glad to hear the state’s attorney is monitoring this. We have a public university and we have the death of a student athlete. I would be sorry to see if the state’s attorney’s office just turned a blind eye. I’m not saying they should bring criminal charges, but this is certainly something they should be watching.

SOS says: Nice phrase: Some loudmouth in a windbreaker.

Headline, New York Magazine.

Point One: Some of us have been talking about it forever.

Point Two: People love violence, hon. NASCAR, NFL, WWE, stop me if you’ve heard this before.

*************

I like this dude who wears a MAKE FOOTBALL VIOLENT AGAIN hat.

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[W]hat (Maryland football coach D.J.) Durkin did? That’s college football. That’s sports… [T]o pretend that Maryland’s football culture is a unique football culture is to kid one’s self. The relative silence of college football coaches reeks of nervousness and self-preservation. They know it could happen to them too.

Remember UD‘s take on the matter. She giveth not much of a fuck what the NFL does. She expects it to be our most popular sports organization because it’s our most violent, and most everyone loves violence.

So what.

So we now know it turns many men into mental wrecks, some of whom kill themselves at rather early ages. It’s a commercial enterprise and that’s what it’s about and we know precisely now, with the science available, that that’s what it’s about, and a few players (chronicled on this blog) have looked at this fact and left the profession. The profession itself won’t do much of anything. It can’t. Nature of the beast.

This blog is about colleges full of nineteen year olds. Nineteen year olds just dying to get in the game.

… was a co-author with UD‘s father, Herbert Rapp, on a number of scientific papers way back when.

Found this clinging to the
brick wall of my house entry.