A local columnist points out that scandalous, money-hemorrhaging University of Hawaii athletics is only part of the story at comprehensively unbelievable UH.
In the aftermath of the Pumpkin Riots, Keene State’s president says:
While she recognized students were involved she pointed out that this sort of behavior happens all over the country and many of the rioters involved “had no affiliation” with Keene State students.
Although it’s obviously not true that college riots so violent towns have to call out SWAT teams and national guard troops happen all over the country, the president of Keene has to say this, because she runs a business-model party school founded largely on the provision of liquor. She also runs a school so broadly notorious for alcohol and riots that its riots draw participants from all over the state — which allows her to point out, self-righteously, that not all the rioters were Keene State students…
A student in the audience at this public discussion stood up:
“Keene State was part of the problem,” said John LaFord. “No more of this, ‘we weren’t involved, ‘ or ‘it was other people,’ who did this. We did this. …We were part of the problem and it’s about time we recognize what we did, what we’re doing and what we are all going to do to fix it.”
This naive lad doesn’t understand how business-model party schools work. The president needs to take him aside and explain the school’s business plan.
You don’t fix Keene State. You keep running the drunks as long as you can get away with it.
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UD thanks a reader for this update on the legendary legal journey of the highest-paid person at Washington State University, Mike Leach.
WSU: Good on ya!
The American University Hymn
All for Football, all for Football!
All our students’ ransomed dollars:
All our thoughts and words and doings,
All our days and all our hours.
Let our chancellor do its bidding,
Let our feet run in its ways;
Let our eyes see Football only,
Let our lips speak forth its praise.
Since our eyes were fixed on Football
We’ve lost sight of all beside;
So enchained my spirit’s vision,
Looking at the Deified.
Oh, what wonder! How amazing!
Football, glorious King of kings,
Deigns to call me His beloved,
Lets me rest beneath His wings.
Sing it to this tune: Ay Romania, Romania…
Ay! Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska —
Once there was a land, sweet and lovely.
Ay! Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska —
Once there was a school, sweet and fine.
To go there is a pleasure;
What your heart desires you can get:
Pelini’s $7.7 million buyout, aha … !
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UPDATE: Good stewards of public money in so many ways.
… which had a winning bid of $57,000.”
“Some of these cats came from 3,000 miles away to play here, to be a part of this, to be a part of all of this!” UAB tight end Tristan Henderson hollered at [UAB president Ray] Watts during his meeting with the team. “But you say numbers? That’s what you come here to say, numbers?”
University of Alabama Birmingham men don’t understand that the school can’t afford football. In order for them to understand why the school shut down the program, they would have to understand numbers.
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Professor Mondo found another good quotation (UD didn’t find it because she couldn’t bear to read the whole article):
“Now you’re telling me I’ve got two more years left to play and I’ve got to give up on football and settle for an education?”
Powering up the shaft at Kesher Israel.
I don’t think the now-notorious UVa gang rape story, as told to Rolling Stone magazine, is a hoax.
But, as I commented to one of my readers who thinks it might be, this blog has covered false rape claims before, and if this turns out to be one, it will certainly do that again.
And of course this blog will cover emergent skeptical takes on the Rolling Stone account. Like this one.
Wow. High roller. Only in Las Vegas.
Background here.
… case.
For reflections on whether this will mean downward pressure on law faculty salaries (UD can’t see how it could be otherwise), go here and read all of the posts on the page.
Read this Wikipedia page.
Although Derek Boogaard wasn’t connected to any universities (he was a high school dropout), UD has to say that his story haunts her more than any of the university player biographies she’s read.
No doubt we’re in for more hideous details surrounding the suicide of Ohio State football player Kosta Karageorge, but for sheer fulsome horror, for the capacity to touch on virtually all killing aspects of a violent, out-of-control sports culture, the blighted life of this hockey enforcer is hard to top.
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There’s something about the brief dry chronology of the Wiki page that makes Boogaard’s rapid collapse and death that much more stark… You feel the inevitability of it, I suppose, his brisk unstoppable march to ruin, with so much against the guy: He was naive and mildly learning disabled; he was a hulking kid who’d been bullied and emerged from that himself a bully (see also Richie Incognito, and probably many others punching away on the front lines of university and professional sports); his big break came when a professional agent happened to be at the rink when Boogaard had his first violent breakdown on the ice, practically killing some of the players around him… whereupon the agent, recognizing a monster when he saw one, recruited him; bloodthirsty fans made him a god of gore; he treated his pain from injuries and surgeries, as well as from the anxiety he (and apparently all enforcers) felt as he anticipated one game after another in which he knew his worshippers would demand blood, with the oxycodone that team support staff reportedly dispensed like candy; he became an addict; he drank and partied hard (he came from a rough Saskatchewan background in which he would have hit the bottle and partied hard anyway — so add that to his hockey stuff); and of course his concussed and pummeled brain was beginning to give way, so he didn’t really have much fight left in him on the rink. In fact, friends say he began to act rather like a blank-faced zombie toward the end.
The rest involves a couple of failed rehab efforts, and then, at age 28, death from a mix of alcohol and oxycodone after a long night at the bars with friends.
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UD senses the same pathos of the big sweet dim baby, transformed by agents and fans and drugs and money into a weird amalgam of a hulk and a husk, in the emerging story of Kosta Karageorge.
We don’t yet know for sure that concussions produced the physical and emotional problems that contributed to wrestler/football player Kosta Karageorge’s suicide at Ohio State University. But while we’re all thinking about the question, recall this 2012 New York Times story about an already accomplished young wrestler who decided he’d had one too many hits.
A charismatic athlete from Minnesota who was pegged by some wrestling experts as a future Olympic medalist, [Jake] Deitchler retired in January [at age 22] because of the cumulative effects of about a dozen concussions.
Deitchler sat out a year and a half before wrestling briefly last fall for the University of Minnesota, when symptoms like fogginess returned…
… Deitchler still has short-term memory lapses. But his symptoms are not as severe as two years ago, he said, when he drove his moped on the wrong side of a street near the University of Minnesota, and fell asleep at a youth meet where he was supposed to be coaching.
“His concussion problems were really bad, and I didn’t know what was going on,” said Brandon Paulson, Deitchler’s former coach and the co-director of PINnacle. “He was forgetting everything. He was forgetting to show up to practice. He was really messed up.”
… Deitchler deferred acceptance to Minnesota to train in Greco-Roman full time at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Though bothered by headaches, nausea and blurred vision, Deitchler kept wrestling. “I didn’t have necessarily short-term memory problems,” he said. “It wasn’t really affecting me too bad.”
Things worsened in 2009 after he enrolled at Minnesota. In the first month of practice, a senior trying to escape a hold drove his head into Deitchler’s chin. “I was just in a daze, and it didn’t go away,” he said. “It lasted months.”
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From an article this morning in the Washington Post:
One study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in January of this year, found that repeatedly-concussed teens are three times more likely to develop depression. A separate paper, published in PLoS One last spring, suggested that teens with a history of head injury are at “significantly greater odds” of attempting suicide and “engaging in numerous violent behaviors.”
… One study, published in Clinics in Sports Medicine in 2005, analyzed 71 athletes who had either contemplated or committed suicide over the last several decades. Nearly half were found to be football players. More than 60 of the athletes were men. And the median age was 22. One such player was a Duke lineman named Ted McNairy, who committed suicide years after playing. [The paper went on to say:] “Of the 1.5 million high school players in the United States, 250,000 have a concussion in a given season. … Concussions on the field are probably underreported, both because they can be subtle, and because of football’s ‘rub-dirt-on-it ethos.”
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From an article in The Daily Beast:
Should CTE be found, Karageorge will join Andre Waters, Ray Easterling, Dave Duerson, Terry Long, Junior Seau, Paul Oliver, Shane Dronett, and Jovan Belcher in an ever-growing list of athletes with CTE who took their own lives and were wracked by memory loss, disorientation, cognitive issues, mood and personality changes, and crushing depression.
And yes, this is the point where we mention that even the NFL admits that nearly three in 10 former players will develop some form of debilitating brain injury in their lifetimes as a result of playing football. Concussion-related illnesses are usually presumed to be an issue for older, retired players, but Karageorge’s death at age 22 would set that myth aflame.
Then again, you would hope that notion would have gone the way of the dodo bird after a 29-year-old soccer player was found to have CTE after his autopsy, and an Olympic wrestler retired at 22.
… The treatment of concussed players in college football made headlines earlier this season when the University of Michigan’s athletic director, David Brandon, resigned in large part over Head Coach Brady Hoke’s mind-boggling decision to send a clearly concussed quarterback back out onto the field.
Ohio State’s football coach, Urban Meyer, or Athletic Director Gene Smith must be made to pay a similar price should it be found that Karageorge was already suffering from some form of traumatic brain injury when he committed suicide, or if the school’s policy was in any way negligent.
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From a comment thread in the OSU newspaper:
How many of these sad stories must we have before universities [acknowledge] the contradiction between educating a brain while traumatizing it?