[If you didn’t expect this outcome, you’re like people who are still] stunned to learn that a game as inherently violent as football would lead to life-altering issues among players from repeated concussions and blows to the head.

Far worse, you’re like Louisville’s superscummy basketball coach, who says he’s “completely shocked” by the shocking corruption in university basketball. As completely shocked as he was by the whorehouse being run in a dorm lived in by basketball players and visited by recruits and their families.

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

So here’s UD‘s take. American university students are being trained to be Italians. Italians are living the good life and they don’t give a rat’s ass that their entire world is howlingly corrupt. In a New Yorker article about the sordid Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, Adam Gopnik noted French anxiety about

what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor …

The University of Louisville is the avant-garde: Can you grow a university whose students heartily endorse, and fork all their tuition money over to, Rick Berlusconi Strauss-Kahn Pitino? His sextortion, his whores for sixteen year old recruits and their fathers, his stuffed envelopes for sports agents in Las Vegas hotel rooms? Can you guarantee a university whose students will rush to the bookstore and buy out Pitino’s many books about how to be ethical?

The entire financial foundation of the University of Louisville rests on a bet that there’s no bottom – that students and alumni will be able — FOREVER — to look at a guy who could give Jerry Sandusky a run for his money and say WE LOVE YOU RICK. TELL US HOW MUCH MORE YOU WANT US TO COUGH UP FOR YOUR SALARY.

It’s a solid bet. This is Kentucky, after all.

… but the one who comes closest to the original is Washington State University’s Mike Leach, a man who arrives at each new job trailing a longer and longer shitstream.

Variant doesn’t quite say it, actually. Leach

keeps a framed, autographed picture of Trump on the wall in his office in Pullman, Wash.

Leach has learned everything he knows from Trump: hit back hard; sue the shit out of everyone; discover conspiracies everywhere.

Leach’s latest is a perennial favorite: a media conspiracy. Some of his lads were allegedly involved in a fight at a recent party, and there are reports that one of them broke a fellow student’s jaw. Badly. He did it by kicking him repeatedly in said jaw while the student was unconscious on the floor.

Asked about it, Leach said it was all lies, all a media conspiracy.

When given the chance to correct any facts about the situation that he alleges the media got wrong, Leach said there were “too many to address…”

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

See, this is what UD loves about Trump and Trump wannabes like Leach. They really don’t give a shit. They’ll just go out there and say anything… make a hail mary pass… kick the ball down the field see where that sucker ends up… The President was born in Kenya. I won’t tell you the facts about a situation whose facts I don’t know because there are too many facts that I know. Just go there. Just do it. Just brazen that fucker out. It’s an amazing spectacle, and Donald Trump is here to prove that it can take you far.

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

Trump has done fairly well with high-profile, unconventional college coaches. But his past two big endorsements — Bobby Knight and … Leach, were fired for, respectively, putting their hands on a student, and making a player stand in a shed.

… it can be a kind of a brain-twister, can’t it? If that one, who put a player with a concussion in a shed, got in trouble, shouldn’t this one, who slapped a junior coach so hard “his headset went flying,” get in trouble too? Or is a slap less serious than negligence? That shed bit? Hm. Hmm…

Even if the Big 12 isn’t interested in setting a proper example, […] then [Texas Tech] should. After all, they were quick to pass judgement on their last coach, Mike Leach, for allegedly putting a player in a shed when he had a concussion. Now they need to practice what they preach. Stay consistent. If that was enough for Leach to be canned, then this is surely enough for Tuberville to be.

We’ve followed many of them on this blog over the years, wrenching accounts of young innocents who adored college football and watched it obsessively until, you know, violence, concussions, asshole players and coaches…

I was watching when the Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s fingers twisted up during what looked like a seizure after his head slammed on the turf. But at least Tua had $30 million in the bank. He wasn’t a teenager, too young to understand the risks, counting on the adults to protect him.

… [I] can’t watch college football at all anymore…

Then a whole bunch of stuff about how mentally challenged coach/player-senators and senator-candidates mean all of America’s becoming college football by a different name.

Tommy Tuberville coached in the Cotton Bowl in 2007. He’ll be in the U.S. Senate until at least 2026. He is America’s future.

Maybe a tad overstated, but it’s the final three sentences of the piece and dude wants to end with a bang.

Anyway, people like UD have been saying the same thing about college ball for twenty years – accompanied by mucho scoffing/derision – but it don’t make no nevermind. I don’t actually think Tom of the Tuberville is our national future; but, like his exemplar Trump, he’s certainly able to kick up a lot of shit.

It’s getting positively elegiac out there, as football scribes in empty stadia find themselves reduced to the elaboration of despair. At most of our universities, the whole lucrative rah-rah project has come crashing down, leaving intellectual institutions bereft of money as well as dignity as they desperately try, with cheap booze and trinkets, to get people to sit down and watch, in its full sordid duration, an unwatchable game.

It’s not just the disgusting injuries (concussions; “gruesome” fractures; coach-bullied players’ deaths from overexertion); the rampant violence against women and other students among players; the university-budget-destroying coaches’ salaries, buyouts, and lawsuits (“Schools end up not only paying millions to their former coach, and millions to their new coach; they have to pay millions more to their new coach’s previous school, so he can leave to come to their school.”); the institution-destroying bad publicity arising from corrupt merchandise and recruitment deals; the filth all over campus from drunk tailgaters the day after; student riots when they win; student riots when they lose; the school- and city-destroying insistence on building vast new indebted stadia to accommodate the two thousand people who want to attend games; university presidents pretending that borderline-psychotic players (Aaron Hernandez, Richie Incognito, Lawrence Phillips, Johnny Manziel) are just feisty charming lads; presidents honoring coaches who hang out in school showers raping children; assistant coaches who set up houses of prostitution in players’ dorms, for players and their fathers; the institution-wide academic scandals arising from the sickening compromise of faculty integrity as students admitted only for their football skills are handed bogus … not degrees, since few graduate, but bogus courses; it’s also the sheer boredom and insult of the stadium experience (“The issue for me is games lasting nearly four hours. TV commercials are killing the game … I just can’t sit in the hot weather that long in back breaking seats.”).

What a shocker that few outside of fraternity members (the functional equivalent of football players) and hopeless drunks (who aren’t even financially viable, since they typically stay just for the tailgate) want anything to do with the shit-show.

Where did the university go in all this?

Buried, under mounds of Bud bottles.

Long considered one of the best places to live in America, Damascus, Maryland – a short drive from UD‘s Garrett Park – has big houses and good schools and pretty landscaping. And (yawn) it has teenage anal rapers galore.

Yawn because do you know how many teenage anal raper stories I’ve covered on this blog? So many high school football teams in the country seem fiercely devoted to jamming broomsticks up the asses of new players as a kind of Welcome Wagon gesture… If I wanted, I could blog every week about pool cues, broomsticks, and pretty much anything else being jammed up the anal canals of newbies.

Why? Why? Why?

Oh, who gives a shit. It’s a thing, a major thing, part of the university fraternity hazing continuum, only I guess more intense because of the very small closed absolutely brutal world of the football team.

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

TO THE DESPOILERS GO THE SPOILS!

If anally raping junior players is the key to success, why mess with a good thing?

With a victory Friday [this was the Friday just before the rapes were discovered], Damascus will pass Urbana (1998-2001) for Maryland’s longest winning streak of all time and add onto the country’s longest active winning streak.

Yes, with its patented broomstick-up-the-ass technique, Damascus has formed a truly unbeatable team bond!

Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes, however, that the experience of reading the Washington Post’s breathless pre-rape article about the school’s amazing achievement is a little different now, with the eye landing hard on certain words, the mind automatically altering certain words…

‘Over Damascus’s 50-game winning streak, Coach Eric Wallich has searched for new ways [LOL] to motivate his team.

… With a victory Friday, Damascus will pass Urbana (1998-2001) for Maryland’s longest broomstick [haha make that winning streak] of all time…

… Damascus (8-0) has become the premier team in Montgomery County this century — winning six state crowns since 2003 — by relying on a rape-heavy [ahem! run-heavy] system.

… Kids look on and dream of donning the green, gold and white jerseys, even as high school football participation has dropped nationally because of concussion and health concerns, among other reasons. [Like anal rape.]

… The Urbana teams that set the state winning-streak record also featured a savvy run game and deep-threat ability. [Turns out you can go to jail for deep-threat ability.]

… [One of the players] said Damascus players are also viewed highly at school and in the community. Handling that attention has helped them manage the spotlight in crucial games. [Managing the spotlight just got a lot more pesky.]’

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Hey but wait but oh oh oh says the school’s principal: It was the JUNIOR varsity team, not the big boys with the new state record!

A commenter on this article speaks for UD:

In all the media reports the emphasis from Principal Crouse about this not having anything to do with the powerhouse varsity team is a little disturbing and I question her priorities.

Correct. You might have noticed that football everywhere has a (cough) culture problem. You don’t get to break up the team when something like this happens. You don’t get to suddenly chuck all your language about how everyone’s part of the team, we’re all a unit, blah blah. You don’t get to claim in your official statement that the group rape is “unrelated to the varsity football team.” First of all, we don’t know that yet. Second, this is the varsity team in a very short time. And if you’re trying to convince us that the event was a bizarre one-time, Halloween-night grotesquerie etc. etc. good luck with that.

Another thing: UD knows of virtually no group teenage anal rape these days, football or non-football, that doesn’t include someone recording the thing, texting about the thing. If the Bixby Oklahoma case is anything to go by, parents are currently trying to buy the evidence (!) and everyone’s madly erasing tapes and texts. Damascus has a state-wide record to protect… IOW: get ready for the investigation.

Words from a University of Maryland student to emblazon on all of their advertising, yes? Come study at our university. Why? Just listen to wide receiver DeAndre Lane: I felt like I was the only one who cared about my brain.

Meanwhile, amid the heat deaths and concussions, it looks likely that the disgusting state of the football program at Maryland will take down a whole bunch of people, including the president.

It would appear the Board also believes the AD and President either knew about what was happening with the football program and failed to report it, learned of it and didn’t react accordingly, or simply didn’t do enough to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Of course, you’ve also got the Board of Trustees… Trustees, you know… AKA Regents… They’ll feed us some horseshit about having been kept out of the loop (this narrative plays out so often, there’s a game plan they all use) and, satisfied by the humiliation and possible criminal culpability of the big guys, we’ll let it go.

But mes petites. You and I know that the rah-rah trustees bear just as much responsibility for the abattoir. If any of them have any decency, they will quit the Board.

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

UPDATE: The larger picture.

UD is grateful to a reader for linking her to this Guardian article about university football player deaths. Excerpts:

The sport is needlessly and heedlessly killing athletes…

Athletes are asked to do too much, too fast, for too long, performing workouts that are untethered from both the sport’s demands and basic principles of exercise science. Too many college coaches use offseason workouts as a tool for developing mental and emotional toughness – as a way to inflict physical pain and suffering, the better to push the limits of what their players are willing and able to endure.

… “Pick a stakeholder or constituency group [in college football],” [one observer] says. “I’ve had conversations over and over with them about conditioning and preventing deaths. And it’s not just me. Others have been involved as well. It just hasn’t resonated as a point of priority within the culture, period … Because it happens so often, there gets to be a little bit of acceptance of things…‘Well, football players die of heatstroke. That’s just a risk.’ I’m kind of wondering what body count we’re waiting for before we take some action.”

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

And back to Maryland:

[University of Maryland football player] Jordan McNair died because his humanity was secondary to the egos of the members of the Maryland coaching staff. He died because he was physically abused in the course of what was supposed to be training for the upcoming season. He was a victim of both workplace violence and of domestic abuse.

… The death of Jordan McNair opened up a chamber of horrors for all to see. ESPN’s subsequent reporting has produced tales of almost inhuman abuse under the guise of coaching, and a reckless disregard for the health of the athletes in the name of “coaching.” Players forced to eat until they vomited because coaches thought they were fat. Verbal abuse more suited to the SERE training given to Navy Seals than to young football players in a college weight room. The Maryland football family was an abusive family, like so many others around the country. The essential dynamic is there for all to see. Jordan McNair is the kid who gets beaten to death in the third-floor walk-up after which everybody stands back and wonders how it all happened. They seemed like such a nice family.

**********

UPDATE: Details, kill rate.

You know how many kids NCAA football coaches have killed with conditioning drills in [the last seventeen years]? Twenty-seven. I say “kill,” because that’s what it is, when tyrants force captive young men to run themselves to death, out of their own outdated fears of weakness. Why is the NCAA tolerating this kill rate, which is unmatched at any other level of football?

… Only the NCAA tolerates – and refuses to regulate – unhinged dictators who think football has to be conditioned with sadistic extremes.

“They get to dictate these things, and we get to keep burying athletes until we make definitive changes to the culture,” said Dr. Douglas Casa, a kinesiologist who serves as CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut.

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.

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

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.

UD doesn’t know who the NYT thinks it’s helping – or hurting? – by running this bizarre hard-luck story about the CSU women’s basketball team. Barely a team, losing every game, attracting no audience, representing a school that – through every fault of its own successive corrupt leaderships – has destroyed itself, this group of players deserves our sympathy. Indeed, it deserves our outrage. But ultimately it deserves to be put out of its misery, along with the virtually empty institution that fails even minimally to prop it up. Almost no one attends, or graduates, from CSU. This scandalous drop-out factory continues to cost the taxpayers of Illinois serious money, most of which goes to on-campus fraudsters and off-campus lawyers.

CSU (here are UD‘s posts over many years about the place) is a little corner of North Korea in America. It cannot afford to keep the heat on. It’s a desperate deadbeat. It will not talk to the press, and it chills the free speech of its professors. Crazy North Korea launches missiles; crazy CSU launches football teams and marching bands (yes – it has plans to spend its no-money on these).

But let’s suit up!

The announced crowd at Jones Convocation Center, a first-rate arena, was 230, but the atmosphere was expectant. Players and coaches on both teams and a number of fans wore pink to promote breast cancer awareness. Allen, the Cougars’ best player, had been cleared to return after the effects of a concussion subsided.

Look at the photos that accompany the article to understand how inflated that 230 figure is. Ask yourself why the writers of this piece are trying to excite us with the expectant atmosphere, the breast-cancer awareness, and that gutsy post-concussion return.

There’s nobody home. There’s only some well-meaning Manhattanite at her breakfast table, trying to make sense of this theater of the absurd.

The NYT should be ashamed of itself, playing CSU for a scrappy up-and-comer in order to help keep a failed, expensive, and deeply destructive institution alive.

I’m not gonna do that thing where I say They started as monasteries and other religious-type entities and look how far they’ve fallen! I’m not gonna say universities – much less American universities – must continue to represent a higher, purer, realm of activity than, say, Myrtle Beach Bike Week.

No, no, let it rip. Let sex-scandal-soaked University of Minnesota produce as a finalist for regent a football player with exposure issues. Let UMN’s current regents grumble about having been left out of the hiring and compensation decisions around their incoming multimillionaire football coach (background on him here). Let the probable upcoming scandal and massive buyout of this guy’s contract also weigh heavily on the pointless dithering trustees. Fine. Fine.

Go ahead and make universities places where highly paid employees routinely injure students so badly they have to be hospitalized. Where brainwork means concussions. Football players with exposure issues are part of the grand legacy of American universities, as are sadistic-training hospitalizations. As are – at some of our highest profile schools – child rape, gang rape, and woman battering.

But consider this:

I don’t want to scare you, but more and more people are talking about a fundamental change in the higher education of this country. More and more people are talking about a minor league for football.

And American universities had better watch out, or it’s ave atque vale Richie Incognito, Johnny Manziel, and Peyton Manning. These guys are not merely the heroes of schools like Nebraska and Tennessee – they’re the trustees of the future. Their ethos is the school ethos. All the money and the passion and the very identity of the university follow them. What happens when American teenagers are able to go directly into a minor league system and bypass the university?

UD‘s friend David Ridpath is all excited.

For anyone that loves football at all levels and wants college football in a more educational setting along with providing more talent for the NFL, it is simply a no brainer.

A lot of people are excited. But if you’re a university, ask yourself: What happens to the trillion dollars you’ve already invested in new stadiums and all that shit? You’re already looking at seriously declining attendance at the games, and serious resistance to paying vaster and vaster student athletic fees. Much more fundamentally, you are football. Nebraska, Penn State, a hundred others – What happens when a few grade-conscious pussies tiptoe out on the field for you? As Mrs Dalloway put it – the death of the soul…

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

UD thanks Charlie.

Our theme today is the way our universities’ love of football leads them astray, breaks their hearts, and damn near kills their students.

Mad about the boys, some universities import major league bruisers to campus, encourage their violent tendencies (Sign in the football players’ cafeteria at the University of Oregon: EAT YOUR ENEMIES), and even teach them to attack people as a team.

Of course the attack-objects the universities have in mind are opposing players, but ol’ UD has been following university football long enough to know that some players – some groups of players – have vision issues and cannot distinguish between on-field behemoths and skinny twerpy fellow students. If they’ve got a violent coach (we read about one of these about every two weeks) these players are going to be that much more inclined to just go ahead and beat the shit, en masse, out of everybody.

I mean, take a notorious head case coach like Mike Leach. (I’m not gonna rehearse his disgusting history of coaching violence here cuz I ain’t got the stomach for it. Put MIKE LEACH in my search engine and go to town.) Apparently six or more of his Washington State University players last Saturday started throwing lit fireworks at fellow WSU students at a party, and when some students objected, Mike’s guys – teamwork again! – sent all their jawbones flying and brains concussing (Leach himself has quite the history with player concussions).

SING IT WITH ME!!

Too many broken jaws have fallen on the pavement
Too many concussed sons have sued the school for millions
You lay your bets and then you pay the price
The things we do for love, the things we do for love.

They interviewed the father of one of the injured.

[A]fter police make an arrest, he intends to file criminal and civil charges against the individuals responsible for his son’s injuries.

“It’s obviously an unfortunate event. The irony is that my son has always been a WSU football fan. He ran the field when they beat Oregon last year,” Rodriguez said. “When somebody is down on the ground and you kick them in the face, that’s a huge character flaw and it shouldn’t be tolerated by any football program.”

Tolerated? The capacity to kick people in the face when they’re lying unconscious because you sucker punched them is … well, it’s Job #1 at big-time university football, ain’t it? I mean, ain’t that just the kind of guy you’re after when you’re recruiting? Do you think Nebraska had no inkling of psycho Richie Incognito’s … tendencies? They recruited him for them.

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

So. Let’s compare pricing. UD‘s friend John sends her word that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (already a shining example of what football can do for your school) is going to have to pay about a million dollars in damages and expenses because of their most recently concussed student … and to make things worse, the four guys involved had to sit out one game!

What will WSU – which is willing to pay scary Mike Leach millions and can have no qualms about peeling off more bills on behalf of his violent squad – what will WSU have to choke up to make this go away while keeping the firecracker guys on the field? We’re told at least six players (the WSU newspaper says “between five and twelve“) were involved in one way or another, and there’s also apparently lots of video of the event available to police and lawyers … I’m gonna say about a million even for each of the players, so let’s say seven million… Then there’s WSU’s own attorney fees… And the humongous raise Leach is going to demand for having recruited such amazing players… so make that another two million directly arising from these events…

UD‘s going to predict that WSU will spend another few million on a radical revision of its student orientation program. WSU cannot help but have noticed that at certain other football schools students do not sue when players fuck them up. These students understand that physical injury is part of the price you pay for a really strong football program. Whether rapees or concussees, they understand that you must sacrifice for the team. At schools like WSU, where the word has not yet gotten through, change must start with new students. As part of their introduction to the culture of the school, and to the expectations the school has of them, they need to meet with students from violence-tolerant schools to understand the basis of tolerance, and ultimately to sign pledges releasing their university from any liability that might arise from a player rampage.

UD will close with the most important question of all: If seven of your football players – and maybe some of your best football players – have been suspended from play, what effect will this have on your win/loss ratio?

Here’s what UD has learned about this issue from prior cases. At its worst, a multi-player setback can indeed allow you to lose games. But it’s just as likely to inspire the sort of solidarity and sympathy that make your remaining guys play all the more fiercely.

———————-

Update: The real fun is when the details come out!

For every weapon used, add a hundred thou to Coach Leach’s raise this year.

So – fireworks, yes. But here’s another:

[T]he group had been causing trouble – prying off pieces of a wooden railing…

You gotta figure they used those pried-off slabs as blunt objects as they beat the Washington State University students senseless. Another hundred thou for Leach.

*********

From the comments section on one of a thousand articles about WSU’s football players:

So why don’t your players go six on one against another college kid who was just asking them to not throw fireworks at people…

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This incident spells nothing but trouble for the WSU football program. Not only is it likely that players will be criminally charged for the assaults, it is also likely that other players will be called as witnesses regarding what led up to the assaults and who participated in inflicting the injuries. This can only create turmoil within the program, disrupt team unity, and divide loyalties. A poisonous atmosphere that will make coaching the team more difficult and success on the field more problematic.

[Yes, but UD is optimistic that the lawyer for the player who sucker-punched a student then repeatedly kicked his head while he was unconscious will successfully argue self-defense. Those Washington State juries do love their football.]

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

[Still, some of the locals do have a solid sense of justice.]

Whoever kicked the kid on the growned and who ever broke the kids jaw should probably be kicked off the team.

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

Hopefully we’ll see a reprise of Leach’s punishment tactic of locking players in closets.

[Yes, Leach is famous for having done that. The player was concussed at the time.]

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

Leach is famous for recruiting that kind of player.

[Yup. Also famous for doing that.]

*****************
UD thanks John.

Both Richie and Johnny were obvious wrecks during their college years, but at Incognito’s University of Nebraska and Manziel’s A&M, keeping them on the field was far more important than noticing that their mental health was shot. Not only was everything bad they did fine, just fine; John Sharp, one of many washed-out politicians who run universities in Texas and Oklahoma, babbled incessantly to the press about Manziel’s adorable perfectness. He was “innocent” of all the wrongdoing of which he was accused. “My mother wishes I was as nice a kid as Johnny when I was a sophomore in college,” Sharp told a newspaper.

Manziel’s the kind of alcoholic no one could miss, but Sharp missed it, or didn’t care.

Yet what’s most important in this is Sharp’s leadership skills. As head of the university, he established for the entire community the proper attitude, the proper emotion, the proper language, to bring to their quarterback. Sharp modeled a paternal gruff humor, an indulgent folksy tolerance that turned into outraged attacks on the press for reporting the things Manziel did.

So now Manziel has really imploded — not that this means he won’t be picked up by another football team, of course, but he has certainly imploded…

And after all much of the fun of watching NFL games is watching players get fucked up six ways to Sunday on and off the field: concussions, domestic violence, on-field fights, bar fights… Something in us loves fucked up athletes and loves to witness and contemplate the things they do that finally get them locked up. Right now there’s the insanely hyped OJ Simpson tv series.

It is a story that could tell us, on a smaller scale, why O.J. Simpson was the way he was, and what happens when a young man is venerated for his strength and power, and never has to learn how to do anything else.

It fails to tell us any of that.

But we can learn something by looking at the presidents and chancellors of our universities, people like Penn State’s Graham Spanier and Texas A&M’s John Sharp. They lead their university communities in venerating players – and of course sometimes coaches – whose darkness turns out to have been there for anyone to see.

One of their players was just jailed for domestic violence; another is out with a concussion. After the worst loss in the school’s history a few days ago (58-0), the school fired the football coach. Virtually no one attended that game, so UM has to figure out how to get someone – anyone – to buy a UM football ticket.

Plus they’ve now got to pay the coach his no doubt enormous buyout.

And meanwhile they don’t have a coach.

But at least there’s a humongous new movie all about what our college football players experience in school, and then experience again when they graduate to the pros.

As you watch the trailer, think of all the university (hell, high school) coaches we’ve covered on this blog who let their players continue playing while they’re still reeling from a hit.

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

“[I]t will sure be fun to watch the NFL attempt to bury or explain this film away come December.”

As for the NCAA, UD is sure they’ll maintain an – er – studious silence.

… 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.

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

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.