UD, as constant readers know, loves the rhetoric sports writers bring to these, um, unfortunate events.

Boise State Backfield Takes Another Hit with Recruit’s Arrest

The Boise State football team’s gaping hole at tailback grew a little larger Wednesday.

February signee Raymond Sheard was arrested Tuesday at Arlington (Texas) High on drug and gun charges. He won’t join the team, a Boise State official said Wednesday.

The Broncos need to replace the nation’s second-most productive running back in NFL-bound Jay Ajayi. They lost expected contributor Charles Bertoli last week when he decided to pursue other interests.

That leaves sophomore Jeremy McNichols, senior Jack Fields, junior Devan Demas and redshirt freshman Cory Young as the only scholarship running backs in the program. None has rushed for 200 yards in a season.

It’s all about the game! Throw a lot of players’ names and positions at me and drop the whole … what was it? Did our coach recruit a 19-year old about whom the good news is that “[An additional] charge of tampering with an ID number (serial number on gun removed) was dropped”? Poor coacha inconsolata! Can’t expect him to do due diligence… Of course, if the guy hadn’t been caught he’d have brought his special outlook on life here to Boise… You’d think an apology or something from the coach might be in order… An expression of regret…? Nah! “Guys have to step up, and that’s exactly what they did,” he said. Forward march.

This article about Boise State University captures – in a truly unsettling way – the sordid, delusional nature of the American jock school.

The main point of the piece is the financial hemorrhaging of the sports program. No surprise there. Fewer and fewer people go to university games, so ticket sales at many schools are in the toilet.

But along the way, the writer notes that Boise – a not very impressive university, which might want to spend a bit on its educational offerings – is building a $22 million dollar football stadium. That the stadium will be named after a coach who presided over a program so filthy that even the NCAA noticed is in no way awkward, assures Boise’s president. The people who gave the money liked the guy (now coaching for another school), and they get to call the shots.

In fact the article is full of blithe reassurances from the Blanche DuBois running Boise: The fans will be back; the stadium’s name, honoring a miscreant, is way cool; athletics is going to be a big moneymaker any day now. So it goes.

It’s not just that it will finally address the scourge of “lugging stacks of books across campus.”

In the words of its one of its faculty members, “People shouldn’t be discriminated for where they chose to live.”

A strange professor there has died.

Tom Trusky had obsessions — among them, the work of outsider artist James Charles Castle, about whom he wrote a biography. Here’s an announcement of a recent Castle retrospective. His work has become extremely pricey.

Boise State assumed Trusky – a man of exceedingly modest ways – left nothing of value. It was very wrong. He left the university a gift.

[T]he contents of his U.S. Bank safe-deposit box …left Trusky associates reeling. Named as his personal representative in his will, [his friend Cort] Conley was staggered to open the box and find a dozen books by acclaimed artist-bookmaker James Castle.

“I knew he had some of Castle’s work, but when I went through it, I was blown away by how many drawings he had,” [another friend] said. “I don’t think you can buy a Castle drawing today for less than $5,000.”

Greg Kucera, who sells Castle’s work at his Seattle gallery, says individual drawings have sold there for $5,000 to $20,000. The books in Trusky’s safe deposit box collectively contain hundreds of drawings…

His will stipulates that their recipient can never sell the books, which BSU almost lost to the Portland Art Museum by waiting until the final day to meet a legal deadline for accepting them.

Two of his students speak in the article’s comment thread.

Professor Trusky’s most valuable legacy to the university lives in the hearts and minds of his students. No one demanded more–or excited us more–in exposing us to the written word, with all its beauty and power.

My enduring image of him: seeing him careening through a turn at 10th and Grove on his bike, hands crossed behind his back.

Idaho is mainly in the news lately for the collapse of its statewide ob/gyn facilities; but the Western Theocratic Territory commands attention for many other reasons. Heerespfarrer Yenor, for instance, inspires that state’s Christian nationalists from his academic appointment at Boise State, an actual university (though largely a jockshop), and this startles the Guardian newspaper.

I mean, the Guardian‘s startled that a respectable academic institition lends its reputation to a man whose howls about liberty, women, free thought, and other abominations I will not share here because obscenity laws forbid it.

Nobody’s startled by the bad boys hiding out in the brush outside of Boise, but, well, a professor.

The Boise State football team dismissed senior linebacker Kameron Miles on Wednesday following his arrest on a domestic battery charge.

He is the seventh player to be dismissed from the team, or to leave facing suspension, since the start of the 2016 calendar year.

BSU’s coach is clearly worth every penny of his $1.3 million salary. If I were a BSU student, I’d be eager to give more of my tuition and student fees to a man with such a terrific eye for recruits.

… is how they seem to sing it at Baylor University, a Christian school apparently, but far more committed to football (and basketball) than to anything spiritual… I mean, if you go by the sorts of things that happen there…

For instance, it’s a very violent place, which seems to UD (she’s no expert) rather at odds with the Christian ethos. One of their basketball players a few years ago “punched Texas Tech forward Jordan Barncastle … breaking Barncastle’s nose and causing both benches to clear.” Although concussed during a recent game, Baylor’s quarterback insisted it was nothing and that despite some fogginess and a headache he’d be back out there again right away because nothing’s more important than winning at football. And

In January, 2014, Tevin Elliott, a defensive end out of Mount Pleasant, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for twice assaulting a former Baylor student in 2012. During that trial, two other women testified that Elliott assaulted them. A fourth alleged victim was not called to testify.

And now everyone’s abuzz with the latest Baylor violence: Under the same coach as Elliott’s, another football player is going to jail for sexual assault on a Baylor student. And this player had already been “kicked off the Boise State football team after punching and choking his girlfriend.” It looks very much as though the Baylor coach knew about this violent past.

But hey. If there’s one thing you’ve learned reading this blog, it’s that plenty of American universities will open their arms to woman beaters if the guys can catch a football. And the schools will do all they can to lie and cover up and victim-blame (Baylor carried out a wretchedly inept internal investigation.) until the bad stuff their football players do goes away. Or maybe it doesn’t go away.

And… uh… this seems to be the Christian way. I mean… One of America’s leading Christian universities keeps doing it.

Baylor’s president is Ken Starr. That Ken Starr. Investigator extraordinaire.

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Read this if you can stomach it. Baylor is a sister school to Florida State University, with similar cooperation by local media and law enforcement. Absolutely disgusting.

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UD thanks dmf.

We want our rights! And we don’t care how! We want our revolution… NOW.

Income inequality hits the American university! Sports slaves at Syracuse and Boise State are moving their slow thighs, and what rough beast slouches toward Alabam’ to be born?

Why do they have the friends at the top? Why do they have the jobs at the top?

Boise State’s president rages against the NCAA big boys muscling out mid-major programs like Boise State by making it more and more expensive for schools to compete. In a spectacular instance of the pot calling the kettle black, President Bob Kustra attacks “programs that look less and less like they bear any relationship to the university’s mission and role.”

Ah, mon Kustra! Here’s your school! Here’s your school! Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! “It seems they are never satisfied with their bloated athletic budgets,” hisses Kustra, whose own budget bulges like an Idaho spud on steroids. Then he gets real high and mighty.

It is sometimes hard to believe that our finest universities and their presidents are behind this effort to fuel what the former NCAA President Myles Brand termed the “arms race” in Division 1 athletic budgets. You would think that the primacy of the academic mission and the long-held principles of amateur athletics would trump the drive toward commercialism and professionalism in the athletic department. You would think that university presidents would be up in arms at the way the NFL and the NBA use the universities’ athletic departments as training camps and minor league clubs for professional sports.

It is beyond me why university presidents are so quick to fall in line with powerful conference commissioners who seem to be calling the shots with these NCAA reforms. But I have no doubt why the power conferences are working to separate themselves from some Division 1 universities who still see the value of equity and fairness in athletic funding. Lately, those pesky mid-major programs such as Boise State and many others have showed up the big boys for what they are – wasteful models of athletic spending that cannot be justified.

Little late now to be moving them slow thighs, ain’t it, Kustra? You didn’t give a shit about evil commercialism until the big boys began making your school pay through the nose to stay in the big leagues. Now you sound like ol’ UD herself with all that excellent rhetoric about universities having something to do with academics.

Face it. You’re poor. And the poor stay poor. Accept your caste.

It’s a little late for Syracuse, too. Faculty there has finally decided to squawk about that school’s wasteful degrading ridiculous sports program. A local reporter talks to an economist who specializes in sports.

“Pay is up for coaches, pay is up for administrators,” [Andy] Schwarz said. “Athletic departments are hiring people, building new facilities. It doesn’t look like any losing business that I know of. But if you can say you’re losing money, there are a lot fewer questions. You don’t have people asking what you can do for them. The only people annoyed at you if you’re losing money is a few faculty members, and you can sort of manage that.”

At Syracuse four of the five highest-paid university employees are members of the athletic department, including athletic director Daryl Gross and women’s lacrosse coach Gary Gait. Gross, basketball coach Jim Boeheim and former football coach Doug Marrone all made at least $150,000 more in 2013 than they did in 2012, according to tax documents released by the school last week.

But the program’s losing money, see, so lay off, Little People of the Faculty.

Faculty of Syracuse University! You’re poor. And the poor stay poor. Accept your caste.

To keep geese off the quad –
students find barefoot frisbee
à la feces unappetizing –
Boise State University
has constructed predator
silhouettes. Coyotes.

Seems a good seasonal job for
students: Predator Silhouette Mover.

“If I don’t act fast enough to save your life, prevent you from getting septic, I could be liable for civil cases … malpractice. But if I act too quickly and I’m not 100% certain that the patient is going to die from the complication she’s sustaining, then I could be guilty of a felony.”

… [Idaho] allows certain family members of a patient to sue providers who perform an abortion for at least $20,000 if the procedure breaks the abortion law.

Doctors in those cases also face suspension of their medical license, felony charges and even prison time.

Beyond that, Idaho’s governor also signed a law that says anyone helping a minor travel out of state to terminate a pregnancy – without parental consent – is guilty of a crime.

… [F]ive of the nine remaining full-time maternal-fetal medicine physicians in the state will have left by the end of this year.

… Jim Souza, the chief physician executive at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Boise, told CNN: “We’re at the beginning of the collapse of an entire system of care.”

… And because there are no ob-gyn residencies in Idaho, finding doctors willing to relocate given the abortion laws on the books is a real challenge.

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But God never closes a door without opening a window! Idaho will soon be America’s ground zero for diploma mill grads! Recent graduates of the Lake Natron School of Medicine will flock to the state, where desperate hospitals will snap them up. And all will be well.

Thanks, Professor something or other at some school in Idaho. Here goes.

After the successful extra-point attempt went into the stands, the mostly-empty stadium provided its loudest ovation of the night in support of the fans who tried to keep the ball away from security by throwing it around the seats.

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UPDATE: The situation at this particular university event is drawing a lot of commentary. Read some of it here, and revel again, on this Christmas day, in the blessings of being an American taxpayer.

… telling the truth. In a student-athlete variation on the Kinsley Gaffe (“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”), Jones, an Ohio State football player, tweeted:

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.

Cardale Jones is my hero. He alone speaks the truth through the bullshit of APR scores, and Sociology and Sports Management departments bursting with jockshop courses, and sweet kindly academic counselor ladies who take the boys by the arm and lead them to the courses the ladies will take for them. It’s degrading – to the school, the players, to other students, to everybody. Cardale breaks through the lies and asks an admirably rational question: Why are you making me play school?

It’s why, if you’ve read this blog any length of time, you know that I refer to sports factory personnel as Blanche DuBoises. It’s their job to live in a gaudy gauzy unreality… To lie and lie and lie and even try to believe it all…

When someone firmly based in the reality principle – like Cardale here – comes along, all the Blanches, with a sharp scandalized intake of breath, say Ah declare ah’ve never heard such manner of thing… Lord, lord, lord have mercy…

UD says: Let the Blanches blanch. We know what’s right.

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UD thanks Doug.