… excitement chez UD.

Mr UD sleeps in
the shadow of UD‘s
humidifier (she’s
bronchitic).

… 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.

Excerpts:

Why is the liberal media parading all these dead, demented former [football] players around? People get dementia and die all the time. You don’t see them parading around dead insurance agents… We don’t need a bunch of benchwarmers trying to smear the game every time some player rapes a woman or beats his kid.

Pussy-free zone.

Your beautiful repetitions are the heart of poetry and song.

The football coach makes millions and keeps getting raises. Everyone else gets cut after cut. Eventually the school will be little more than its football team.

… you get a lot of milling.

About half of Republicans favor higher taxes on the rich…

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

Many pithy sentences, such as this one:

Running for office as an exercise in ego gratification may not be as good a thing as running as a serious candidate with good ideas, but it’s much better than running as a serious candidate with bad ideas.

And plenty of low-key humor (read the whole thing). Scathing Online Schoolmarm loves writing like this.

At Baylor University, things have certainly reached a pretty pass.

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

They’ve fallen down on the rape front at Rutgers athletics, but in every other way they’re maintaining the school’s distinction.

Since 2009, questionable behavior or oversight has prompted the resignations or firings of two men’s basketball coaches, a football coach and two athletic directors.

Last fall, several current and former football players were arrested and charged with armed robbery and other crimes.

… In 2013-14, the athletic department had a $36 million deficit that had to be subsidized by university discretionary funds and student fees. That was the highest subsidy among 230 schools surveyed by USA Today.

Hubba hubba!

These speeches, I bet, are largely just a string of anecdotes by Clinton.

Figure around fifteen minutes at the beginning for greetings, jokes, thank yous. That leaves forty-five minutes worth of speech. Which (if my math is correct, which it never is) means Hillary Clinton told four to five anecdotes at roughly $55,000 apiece.

Hillary: A Story of Wall Street

Will you share the transcripts of the speeches you gave to Goldman Sachs?

I would prefer not to.

Rick Pitino’s raise this year will be in the millions.

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

And turning your athletics dormitories into whorehouses for recruits, players, and the fathers of players, will, uh, continue to be viable:

If missing the tournament this year is the only penalty, more schools will take the chance.

What point does this Washington Post writer think he’s making when – in the voice of Hillary Clinton saying what she should have said about the now-notorious Goldman Sachs speeches – he has her say this?

And the money? Yeah, it’s hard to turn down that kind of money [$675,000 for three speeches]. So I go, I talk for an hour about the complex challenges America faces in an ever-changing world, blah blah blah, do the grip-and-grin and get a six-figure check. You would too, if you could.

I know it’s an article of faith on Wall Street that everyone is gnawingly infinitely grotesquely life-destroyingly greedy. Another word for people who are gnawingly infinitely grotesquely life-destroyingly greedy is psychopaths, and indeed large numbers of Wall Street people are psychopaths or almost-psychopaths. “[Goldman Sachs wants to hire] people who think ‘I’m greedy, I want to be a billionaire.’ That was viewed as a really good thing.”

If a deeply disreputable bank offered to fly you first class to some location where you were wined and dined and then asked to mouth cynical bullshit about a country whose problems are actually worth taking seriously… And then if that bank pressed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars into your hands for doing that, for mouthing that bullshit … And then if the bank flew you back first class to the destination of your choice… Would you do it?

Franchement, you couldn’t pay me to swim with vampire squids. Their destructive greed and arrogance disgusts me (and inspires Andy Borowitz), and, as the current presidential campaign suggests, I’m not alone.

You will never catch Bernie Sanders standing in a room as a paid guest of a bank under investigation for ripping billions off pensioners and investors, addressing the audience in the first-person plural.

When mainstream political pundits, like this Washington Post guy, assume we’re all as psychopathically greedy as – well, as he is… And as this observer is… When he makes the same claim that all apologists for America’s culture of wealth inequality make (The rest of us have no considered moral position on this behavior and in fact are simply jealous; every one of us would behave the way psychopathically greedy people behave if we had the opportunity.), he might as well be giving money to the Sanders campaign. Because all he does is make decent Americans angrier.

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

There is something disgusting about the spectacle of someone who was already wealthy far beyond the imagining of ordinary Americans continuing to accept what she claims were unsuccessful attempts to bribe her, even as she was on the eve of launching a presidential campaign supposedly dedicated to protecting the interests of those ordinary Americans against the depredations of the very masters of the universe funneling millions of dollars into her personal bank account.

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

Notes on greed.

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

A bargain at twice the price!

Clinton actually undercharged Goldman Sachs, since she was paid $9,000 less than her average fee.

Friends & Family rate.

… unless it’s inside a university-issued football helmet!

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

UD‘s loving the CTE headlines leading up to the Super Bowl. Her favorite so far:

[Ken] Stabler’s Brain Damage Intrudes on Super Bowl Fun

In the same, er, vein:

Ken Stabler’s CTE Diagnosis Put[s] Damper on Super Bowl Glitz

There’s also:

NFL’s New CTE-Tainted Reality

This tainting glitz-dampening fun-intrusion risks making this year’s Super Bowl a kind of Masque of the Red Death, the field crashed by a guy in a red suit and a facemask.

Updated version of the party crashing.

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

Despite His Own Concussions, [Merril] Hoge Thinks Football Critics Go Too Far

Kind of a black knight thing going on there.

The notorious John Thrasher, head of one of America’s most corrupt universities, has endorsed him.