The heartland! The heartland! It doesn’t get more all-American than Nebraska – a state that, along with Missouri, UD (an evil coastal Jew married to Euro-trash) routinely forgets exists.
My headline quotes a commenter on an article about Lawrence Phillips, the latest proud son of that state’s university’s storied football team. Now that Phillips has murdered his cellmate, the University of Nebraska enjoys the same spate of publicity it did when its beloved Richie Incognito ran into some trouble.
The article’s a bit vague on the wonderful Nebraska coaching that brought Phillips to that school and kept him there –
Phillips was a superstar running back at Nebraska who was controversially allowed to keep playing for the Cornhuskers even after multiple run-ins with the law.
– but here’s a detail from another source:
[Coach Tom] Osborne reinstated Phillips in the same season the star dragged his girlfriend by the hair down a staircase.
Same sex marriage in Nebraska? Goodness me, no! But drag your girlfriend down the staircase by the hair and … instant football star!
And talk about coacha inconsolata. Get a load of the headline on an article about Osborne:
Lawrence Phillips Tragedy Continues to Haunt Former Nebraska Coach
Wow.
When asked about keeping Phillips on the team, the coach recently said that as a coach
“You take hits.”
Hit me again! That’s it, hit me again! What do I expect? I’m a coach! I can take it…
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UD thanks the many readers who sent her updates about Phillips’ amazing career, and the totally amazing University of Nebraska.
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.
… and Scathing Online Schoolmarm, long a student of propaganda, finds them well worth a look. If you read through the SOS posts on this blog, you’ll see plenty of analyses of modern American sports agitprop.
The point of this genre of writing is to transform empty stadiums into … well, not full… everyone knows what’s what these days in university sports… But to transform the total embarrassment of empty stadiums (the stuff is broadcast) into the mild discomfort of half-full stadiums. And since shitty dissolute sports programs repel everyone, your hackwork here ain’t gonna be easy.
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Why is why SOS finds it sad that the people to whom editors throw these challenging assignments are usually the rookies, or anyway the worst writers on staff. Who else would take the gig? Your job is to rally the troops – to get the burghers of Bogalusa out of bed in order to hit terrible traffic, deal with scary drunks, sit for three hours while almost nothing happens, etc., etc., etc.
Those long empty hours give people plenty of time to contemplate less than attractive aspects of the sports program they’re supposed to be cheering. FAMU’s fans, for instance, will have trouble shaking off memories of their school’s homicidally hazing marching band…
But you won’t find a word about that ongoing unpleasantness in Jordan Culver’s piece in the Tallahassee Democrat yesterday. Culver begins with a lament:
[F]ans have been absent — if not totally nonexistent — during home games.
That’s home games, so I guess we’re talking, uh, even less than nonexistent for away.
What to do? The team stinks, the band kills its musicians, and to make matters worse vanishingly few people are applying to attend FAMU anyway. Into this desperate situation steps the local propagandist. What can he do to help?
There are basically two ways to go: Righteous rage against the people (we’ll see an example of that in a moment), and – the Culver option – humble entreaty. Culver goes ahead and acknowledges that the program’s a total mess, with new coaches stepping in every ten minutes or so… But please note! When I call FAMU coaches, they answer the phone and talk to me!
I call, he answers. I ask a question, he — to the best of his ability — provides an answer.
You can’t abandon a program whose coaches pick up the phone. Plus they all have “a vision.”
[FAMU’s interim athletics director] is willing to share [his] vision, and I think it’s one even the most disgruntled FAMU fan can get behind.
But what is that vision? Culver doesn’t quote the AD; nor does he quote any of the other people who will be running the FAMU program for the next few hours. He just says they all have a vision. The vision thing. We can get behind that, can’t we?
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Righteous rage against the people has certain inherent risks, familiar to the classic propagandists of communist countries. The greatness of humanity, its glorious freedoms – these are what life is all about. They’re especially what the freewheeling all-American ethos of sport is about. You don’t want to mess up that… vision… with nasty, coercive, or – God forbid – threatening language.
On the other hand, if you are Clemson zealot Zach Lentz you are in a terrible vindictive snit, especially about the basketball team.
[S]upport for this team is dwindling at an astonishing rate and it has to wear not only on the coach but the players.
This first point is a variant of what SOS has long called coacha inconsolata (put the phrase in my search function), the evocation of the agonies suffered by coaches who through no fault of their own recruit criminals or make institution-destroying salaries or play to empty stadiums. In an echo of the notorious “kitten” internet meme, coacha inconsolata says Every time you fail to attend a game, a coach is worn down to a nub.
Same deal for the kids:
These student-athletes put hours of blood, sweat and tears into a job that’s sole purpose is to entertain the fans watching. The least we can do as fans is get out of our house or dorm and make the trip or walk over to support them. Maybe if we fans get behind the team from the beginning rather than waiting on a magical end-of-the-season run, we might see something special from a special group of kids.
First, then, you inflict guilt. Next up is the drill sergeant, barking his orders with numbing redundancy:
[T]here is no excuse. There is no excuse for there to be empty seats in the student section. No excuse for the people who have said of football game times, “I don’t care if they play at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, I’m going to be there.”
Liars! Look what you said, and look what you did! No excuse, no excuse, no excuse!
The next thing is fully in line with the tendency of communist regimes to say exactly the opposite of the truth as if everyone knows this exactly the opposite thing is obviously true:
[P]eople love to go to sporting events. They love to be a part of the pageantry and witness the spectacular in person.
We don’t have to threaten our people with reprisals if they fail to show up for the May Day parade. Everyone loves pageantry and spectacle.
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It’s strange how Lentz hasn’t noticed the national conversation about massively tanking attendance at university sports events.
It’s especially strange since he’s writing about massively tanking attendance at his university’s sports events.
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Finally: The sobbing old-timer grapples with his lost world.
There was a time when students camped outside, waited in the cold and rain and people couldn’t wait to get inside to watch their team take on whoever dared enter the arena that night.
Why, I remember, back in two thousand naught eight…
To understand big-time university sports, you have to go beyond the headlines. UD spends a lot of time reading the local booster press at pitiably sports-obsessed places like Indiana University so that she can understand the deep structure of a significant part of this country’s grotesque (the recent failures of Penn State and the University of North Carolina to, uh, control their narratives has contributed immeasurably to our recognition of just how grotesque) university system. So take this latest piece out of Bloomington, which announces its grasp of reality in its headline. Let us see how that reality is evoked.
The background here is that everyone in Bloomington has decided to be upset because some mysterious critical mass of team criminality has flicked some switch in their collective mind. Should they fire the coach? Would that be with cause or without cause? What’s the deal with recruiting anyhow? Have we tarnished our grand reputation? Und so weiter.
Start with coacha inconsolata (background on that term here).
[The] mess in Bloomington [has occurred under Coach Tom Crean’s] watch … [He’s a] grown man unable to keep his teenage players from chasing the night — no matter how hard he tries.
This great and good man has tried and tried and tried. Let’s not talk about how the same man avidly recruited these players.
Next: Lugubrious nostalgia for The Earlier Better Coach, The True Great and Good Man. Unfortunately for this writer, that role at Indiana is played by notorious Bobby Knight, the most frighteningly demento university basketball coach ever. So let’s see how we handle that prose-wise, in our reality-based account of things.
Bob Knight may be long gone, and though he didn’t live a life of sainthood in Bloomington, he drafted … [the] “It’s Indiana” blueprint. It’s a privilege to wear the candy stripes. And with it comes responsibility, higher standards, round-the-clock commitments. It’s not easy. It’s not always fun. But it’s what’s expected.
I mean, which of us is a saint? Which of us hasn’t experienced a rage so intense we’ve thrown a chair at referees during a basketball game and then because of our general aspect of insane obscene violence been thrown out of the game? A game we’re coaching? And this is the man who drafted the blueprint that for some reason players aren’t following. What’s wrong with them? Can’t they follow an example?
Now to the defense of the players themselves.
Troy Williams and Stanford Robinson… when they weren’t failing drug tests, were putting in the work and getting better.
So it’s another mixed bag, like Bobby Knight: Putting in the work, chair-tossing, drugging… Throw it all in together and you get a storied team!
There are two final elements of all booster journalism:
1. Biblical quotations.
“He talked about how we are our brothers’ keeper.” The athletic director describes the coach’s recent pep talk.
2. Always calling the players “kids” and invoking an inspiring future with them.
The kids … will forge onward this season.
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To review: These are the basic elements of university sports booster journalism:
* Coacha inconsolata
* Players are children; the coach is their hapless adorable bumbling dad
* Great times lie ahead
* Nostalgic reminder of our grand tradition
* Biblical quotation reminds us God is on our side
* Gotta take the good with the bad, balance the failed drug tests with the work ethic
The only thing missing here is the otherwise very popular Comparative Approach. We’re pretty scummy, but Florida State is so much scummier. Scathing Online Schoolmarm recommends the writer revise and extend his remarks to include the Comparative Approach. Then he will have written a comprehensive account of Reality in Bloomington.
UD has kind of run out of things to say about the University of Kentucky. Its academic ranking has tanked like crazy over the last few years; its run of drunk corrupt practically insane coaches is matched only by its run of criminally violent practically insane players… The school’s best friend is Big Coal; it hates the state’s greatest living writer but it sure do love its bourbon and Adzillatron…
It’s always illuminating to read the local press there. Reporters reflect the local mood, the local ethos. Let’s SOS through a recent representative piece.
The writer headlines the article UK arrest should concern Stoops, and concern is the operative term… Nothing to get alarmed about! Just concerned.
We begin not with the arrest. For that, we’ll have to wait for the third paragraph.
The beginning of the article is about what matters – UK football’s “swift” and “stunning” current winning streak. Lots of excited language about that starts the piece.
Ahem. Now:
Off the field, however, there have been some potholes…
A few bumps in the road is all… Sure, a player was just arrested for rape, but our visibly shaken coacha inconsolata said all that needed to be said about that:
Later in the day, [Coach] Stoops, who was visibly shaken, twice said that he “feels for all parties.”
Then there was the case of the misunderstood players:
[L]ast week, Wildcats freshmen Stanley Williams, Drew Barker, Dorian Baker and Tymere Dubose were charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, after an on-campus incident involving air-soft pellet guns.
It sounds as if the players were just shooting at each other in a playful game, but there was nothing playful about the ensuing campus-wide lockdown.
Playful lads! Boys will be boys. And coach is such a good coach! Why,
Entering this season, he had dismissed five players for violations of team rules.
I mean – haha – you might ask who the fuck recruited this lot. But let’s not go there! Let’s instead be really impressed that our coach “has built up some equity as an enforcer.” Because if there’s one thing an amateur university athletics coach is, it’s an enforcer.
The writer goes on to list several more forms of criminal mischief among yet other players, and then cautions:
Taken as a whole, these incidents show that maybe the Wildcats need some more oversight.
But basically this is the situation:
[T]he Wildcats are finally winning, finally thriving, finally happy…
He might as well be talking about Happy Valley, Pennsylvania! Happy, happy, thriving, winning – this is the reality at UK. Potholes we may have to negotiate here and there, but when all is said and done, these are our best days.
And don’t talk to me about students not going to the games…
Tis the lot of the university basketball or football coach to ever and always be disappointed… Nay, even at times disgusted. He looketh upon th’inconstant student fan and despairs. He looketh upon the arrested student athlete and despairs. He is (in a phrase UD coined) coacha inconsolata, a perpetually grieving figure who stands amid the wreckage of his dreams. What profiteth it that his salary is the highest not only at the university, but in the entire state, if he cannot bend his wayward charges to his will?
Michigan State University’s coaches are among the most inconsolable of them all. Izzo, gazing at the charred ruins of East Lansing, weeps at his wayward ones. MSU’s football coach, for his part, has abandonment issues. “The fans that left, that’s just not right,” he says of the huge numbers of students who walked out before the end of the last game (to say nothing of the students who bought tickets and didn’t show up at all, and the students who didn’t buy tickets).
Indeed the whole university is aflutter. Having spent all its money on stadiums and coaches and Adzillatrons, MSU is staring down the barrel of the end of its raison d’être if the little buggers won’t play along.
And a truly classic example (don’t read it without a hankie) of what UD calls coacha inconsolata.
… that a particular sport makes you more likely to murder? Who said football makes you likelier to murder? UD chronicles the notable violence of the game and the off-field violence of some of the players… And since her blog is about universities, she regularly registers her incredulity that many American universities all but define themselves in terms of a game that notoriously damages the brain; but she has never suggested a link between football and murder.
Why then, in the context of Aaron Hernandez (who graced the University of Florida), does the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins feel compelled to write the following:
Initially, Hernandez’s arrest provoked a number of commentators to associate his violence with NFL. But it doesn’t follow; if there was a real association between football and murder, there would be more Hernandezes. There is a huge difference between men who are talented at a violent game, and a man who is simply, viciously, senselessly violent. If Hernandez is guilty of these additional murders, all it proves is that NFL executives were as fooled as the rest of us by the blankness of his face.
I think this paragraph is worthy of a Scathing Online Schoolmarm scathe. Let’s see how Jenkins does what she does.
Initially, Hernandez’s arrest provoked a number of commentators to associate his violence with NFL. But it doesn’t follow; if there was a real association between football and murder, [Uh, hold on. Note how Jenkins subtly shifts from violence in her first sentence to murder in her second. I’m not aware of people saying football makes you a murderer. I’m aware of plenty of people pointing out the obvious, whether it’s boxing or hockey or football: Sports that put an amazing premium on brutality are likelier to attract and cultivate violent people.] there would be more Hernandezes. There is a huge difference between men who are talented at a violent game, and a man who is simply, viciously, senselessly violent. If Hernandez is guilty of these additional murders, all it proves is that NFL executives were as fooled as the rest of us by the blankness of his face. [This is a version of what SOS calls coacha inconsolata. Poor naive NFL executives! Can’t read faces! Because what you’re looking for in an NFL player is a warm vulnerable approachable sort of face.]
In a subsequent couple of paragraph, Jenkins attempts to refine her argument. Let’s scathe that one too.
Given football’s savage nature it’s tempting to draw a correlation between the NFL and violent crime. Throw in the fact that a lot of high-profile athletes have an undeniable romance with guns. Reuben Fischer Baum, a data cruncher who posts on Deadspin.com, found that NFLers are twice as likely as their male peers to be arrested on weapons charges.
But football by itself is not the culprit. In fact all of the rules of the game are oriented around preventing harm, and penalizing willful injuries. It’s a game of controlled violence, not uncontrolled. As Grossman has written, “the purpose of play is to learn not to hurt members of your society and members of your own species. In a basketball game, or a football game, when one of the players is hurt, the play stops.” A far more likely culprit is the sustained desensitization of video games and other forms of glorified media violence. Grossman argues these are “murder simulators” that actually award points for killing.
SOS loves this. Jenkins cannot avoid stating the empirical obvious truth at some point. Yeah, NFL’ers (and college football players) tend toward really incredible rates of violence. (It’s been a constant argument on this blog that the professional leagues are free to deal with the gun shit, etc., as they would like; but it’s obscene for universities to recruit it, valorize it, and expose their students to it.) But it ain’t the game! It ain’t that these players have been systematically rewarded – with incredible money and acclaim – for their bulk, their menace, their violence, as football becomes more and more violent. No. It’s… video games!
After all, football is fine; football has way non-violent rules.
This point reminds me of something Mr UD routinely does at the beginning of his Comparative Constitutional Law course. He reads to the students a truly inspiring Constitution. Beautifully written, guaranteeing all of the country’s citizens all sorts of excellent rights. Mr UD then asks his students to guess which country’s Constitution this is. They guess various advanced European democracies.
“Sorry, no. North Korea.”
When your football team boasts Richie Incognito and… so many others…
Incognito was suspended (twice) at Nebraska, and you know it’s not easy to get suspended at Nebraska, where character-building coach Tom Osborne let a cornerback play while awaiting trial for second-degree murder. Osborne also retained a defensive lineman who was arrested eight times, convicted four times, and left the heartland accused of multiple sexual assaults, before his induction into Nebraska’s Hall of Fame in 2006. Not to mention Nebraska’s current leader of young men, Bo Pelini, who is still apologizing for an epic carpet-bombing of F-words, an attempt to say exactly what he thought of Nebraska’s fans.
… The Incognito rap sheet includes a note that his peers voted him the NFL’s second-dirtiest player. No. 1 in a Sporting News poll last year was another Nebraska worthy, Ndamukong Suh.
… it’s maybe hard to get worked up about the team currently – allegedly – harboring a linebacker who’s a very professional bicycle thief… I mean, a linebacker who’s part of a very professional bicycle theft ring, made up of himself and fellow hometown-boy-made-good (they met in high school) Lucas Keifer. Both are two of the university’s finest – Keifer is a long-distance runner. So both of these heartlanders are excellent runners… Maybe they should have fled the scene of their theft on one of the bikes – that’d be faster than running, even given their terrific running ability…
I’m not sure why the nation never focuses its attention on teams like Nebraska’s. People seem more comfortable thinking about thugs in Florida or New Jersey schools. Americans are very sentimental about the heartland. But actually Nebraska is one of the most disgusting teams out there. And that’s saying a lot.
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UD thanks Dirk.
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Here’s the local press, featuring the writing style Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls coacha inconsolata:
Here is a problem Husker football Coach Bo Pelini certainly doesn’t need or didn’t count on this off season…
Poor Bo! Poor put-upon Bo! Only months removed from the revelation of his own shitheadery/paranoia, Bo must now suffer the slings and arrows of his highly recruited bicycle thief. Dear God! What can we say at this point of this great and good man?
How about… BO‘DIED BUT UNBO‘D…
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary, as Stephen Foster put it. The guy in this post’s title wants to know why he can’t just love his Vikings and not have to think about being one of millions of Minnesota taxpayers who’ve given hundreds of millions of dollars to the team’s racketeering owner, Zygi Wilf.
Zygi is one of Yeshiva University’s most honored trustees. He is part of the Yeshiva University tradition of having its trustees called “evil” by judges. First Bernard Madoff and now Zygi have inspired some of America’s finest jurists to rise to this rhetorical occasion…
(Update: Yeshiva’s main campus is named after the Wilf family. Yikes.)
But back to our headline. Like it or not, your sports news – university sports, professional sports – will always be saturated with – imbricated with (to use an English major word) – criminal news. This being the case, UD proposes that MFA programs at sports factories offer not just instruction in Minimalism, but also instruction in Criminalism, a prose style in which you entertainingly interweave afternoons at the arena with evenings in jail.
There is a good deal to study here. UD has been a student of criminalist prose for years and has accumulated a syllabus-full of methods, approaches, points of view. She’s particularly intrigued by the style she calls Coacha Inconsolata, a mournful account of the sufferings of coaches who through no fault of their own recruited drunks and flunkies to the team and of course to the school. Here’s a very recent example. The trick is to focus not on the totally foreseeable stupidity and criminality of the recruit, but rather on the shocked and hurt coach.
Here are some excerpts, with commentary from Scathing Online Schoolmarm.
U Conn [basketball] center Tyler Olander has put Kevin Ollie in a difficult position … [This is the beginning of the first sentence of the article. Start right off not with the player, but with the coach. It’s unseemly to dwell on jailed players — too many of them, doesn’t look good, challenges alumni to keep loving the team — so dwell rather on the sacrificial agonies of the coaches.] Legendary coach Jim Calhoun had already left Ollie with a underwhelming and thinning front line. Now, calling that front line “thinning” is like a bald man using the comb over. It’s approaching nonexistent. [Next move: Recall the impossibly big shoes into which the coach must step. Legendary Jim! You only have to watch this famous clip to understand how beloved, how amazing, Calhoun was… Poor Ollie! Left only with thinning hair.] Olander was UConn’s only big man left on the roster with any sort of real experience. The Huskies had already lost veteran Enosch Wolf, who had his scholarship taken away for his own legal issues… [If you’re not blubbering by this point, you’ve got a heart of stone. What is this good and great man, this Job of the jocks, supposed to do?]
Just continue like that if you want to write Coacha Inconsolata criminalism: The writer here goes on to talk about the coach’s “major headache,” the way he’s “scrambling” to do a good job, and how “This is not what he had to have in mind when he laid out his plan” for greatness. Do not touch on the question of how it is that anyone entering a major university sports coaching position lays out non-criminogenic plans for greatness. Do not ask how anyone could possibly be that stupid. Just go with the Job thing.