… we find one of their specialized coaches – he’s solely about conditioning and strengthening the lads – paid the sixth highest such coaching salary in the country. With contract extensions and all, he’s well on his way to half a million dollars a year. (His most recent salary is a “126.25 percent increase from his initial [2010] $160,000 salary with the Seminoles.”)
Now I want you to put aside petty distractions about FSU that are all in the past: the rapes, the thefts, punching women in bars, animal abuse, the conniving local police force, blahblahblah… I want you to think about this hagiographic Showtime special on this great team, this great school, this great community.
Watch the trailer – it features this guy, this strength and conditioning coach. One of FSU’s heroes.
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So – the nexus? The very crux of what makes a great academic institution?
Well, you’ve got the coach, and you’ve got the Showtime special. Now you need that ineffable combination of elements that makes for scholarly excellence. Let us put these elements together.
Let’s have this coach get stinking drunk in his campus office with the Showtime crew and then pile into his car and crash into a stop sign.
AND let’s let this class operation give him a slap on the wrists and insinuate in its public statement that it was all the evil Showtime crew’s fault for forcing whiskey into the hands of this great good and innocent man.
Now you’ve got it. The life of the mind, Florida State University.
America’s rapeabilliest campus prayed for a president able to deflect relentless incoming sexual assault claims, and God gave it the perfectly named Thrasher — a man willing to spend his twilight years (he’s in his seventies) thrashing back and forth like Bonnie and Clyde in their 1934 Ford Model 730 Deluxe Sedan as one sex-bullet after another smacks him pow right in the kisser.
As they pass the turkey, students, faculty, administration and alumni can reflect with gratitude on the way Thrasher’s long career as a Florida pol and lobbyist, er, seasoned him for the curious job of chief academic officer at a school with virtually no academics and virtually non-stop rape claims.
FSU is the star of a new film; it’s featured in big splashy New York Times articles; and just this morning, as FSU football fans begin to dig in to the bird, news outlets all the country are headlining the just-released content of court papers that detail special treatment for football players accused of rape, the fear of retaliation on the part of victims, and… you know … just the whole stinky stewpot of a school that wants everyone to shut the fuck up so it can watch men bash each others’ heads in.
And sure – things are closing in on FSU. Even the DOE is after them for mishandling the assault claims. But did Bonnie and Clyde give up? Did they run and hide and try to live respectable lives? No! They were what they were unto the breach! Sic Semper FSU and amen!
At Florida State, salaries for non-coaching administrators rose from $7.7 million to $15 million. That’s the raise that Seminoles athletic staff gave themselves for running up a deficit of $2 million, while presiding over an academic fraud scandal involving 10 teams, and mishandling criminal allegations against football players.
… Dominique Strauss-Kahn to help it over its, um, hump. Apparently DSK will advise FSU to move its campus to France, where “internationally acclaimed philosophers will defend your players.”
The [Jameis] Winston rape allegation coverage has changed this fan base. That year and half of constant negative publicity forced FSU fans to circle the wagons and become a unified force against those who would seek to discredit Winston, the program, or the University. They saw any attack on Winston as not just an attack to the individual player, but to the legacy of Florida State. With #FSUTwitter leading the way, they took on an “us against the world” mentality and embraced the evil empire role.
The most recent acts of violence against women by two FSU players has emboldened what was an already ill-tempered, constantly on-guard fan base.
… They still want to believe Jameis Winston is innocent and will likely defend Dalvin Cook until he’s either found innocent or some type of video shows up laying all doubt to rest of his guilt.
As easy as it would be for me to do so, I find it hard to blame them for that. Not for the acts of victim shaming or social media attacks by #FSUTwitter, which led me to comment that FSU has the worst fans in all of college football, but for the defense of a football team they hold near and dear to their hearts…
Unfortunately for Tallahassee and its citizens, FSU fans or not, it is our turn to take the brunt of a world that is quick to judge and slow to understand.
How quick we are to judge, how slow we are to understand, the confused minds of people like this writer. On one hand, a unified force of FSU fans together faces a hostile world. On the other hand, an ill-tempered and borderline-paranoid fan base, “the worst fans in all of college football,” lashes out at us. All or some?
And whichever it is, what precisely do we fail to understand?
The writer does not tell us. He simply tell us that FSU fans love their football team. Does he understand that you can love something unworthy of your love? Lots of football (and basketball) fans change allegiance when they’re so disgusted with a team that they can’t enjoy watching it anymore.
What am I failing to understand here? That there’s something virtuous about continuing to defend with angry belligerence a team that for ten years has been a scandal and a laughingstock? That there’s some atavistic FSU football-love that no one will ever truly be able to understand/explain/justify, but the rest of us have to honor it, and sympathize with the humiliation people who experience this love have to undergo?
FSU football is and has long been a contemptible program. If you can continue to love – passionately love – something this contemptible, there’s something wrong with you.
Florida State running back Dalvin Cook, who was arrested and charged Friday after punching a woman in the face outside a bar in June … was charged with criminal mischief last October for his participation in a BB-gun fight in June 2014 that damaged several vehicles. And on July 25, 2014, the City of Tallahassee Animal Services cited Cook for the mistreatment of three pit bull puppies.
Quench your thirst for sadism against animals by clicking here for details!
And don’t worry, FSU fans. There’s still hope.
[Cook was] the Seminoles’ leading rusher last season, so [Coach Jimbo Fisher] will likely let the entire legal process play out before making a final decision [about letting him play].
Apparently this local columnist believes that “Winning doesn’t trump players abusing women,” and he’s issuing a warning to FSU about it. Basically he’s saying that, sure, one or two woman batterers in the space of a couple of seasons is fine with fans as long as those are winning seasons; but two in two days… plus Jameis Winston… well, FSU had better watch out because…
Because what? FSU fans will never reach the too-much-thuggishness level. Look at the history of that school. Thugs galore. Do you notice any effect? If anything, thugs on the team excite the fans to ever greater orgasm. Hit ‘er hard and hit ‘er again! Show the world that we’re gonna win! Every time one of these guys coldcocks a woman, a fan-generated petition appears demanding that she go to jail and he be given the keys to the city or whatever. These petitions attract thousands of signatures.
The columnist consults an expert in men who punch women in bars.
“This is really antisocial, criminal behavior that isn’t normal. This is way out of bounds,” said Jacksonville attorney Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a Title IX and women’s advocate. “It makes you wonder what kind of environment you have that allows these kids to think that’s OK.
“If a team thinks it can act with impunity and the most powerful man in Tallahassee [Coach Jimbo Fisher] will support them, then you’re probably going to get more of it.”
This is what enhances the sexual excitement. The most powerful players for the most powerful man in Tallahassee! How do you display that power? You do what you want. You get away with it. It’s like your local drug god in Oaxaca. It’s not enough that everyone knows he runs the city. He has to show that he and his team run the city. The special masochistic thrill at the display of your captive status in regard to the most powerful man in town is the most exciting thing you’re ever going to feel in your life. The FSU community is clearly demanding regular punishment, and Jimbo’s more than willing to give it to them.
Every FSU fan adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
To paraphrase Sylvia Plath. Hogshead-Makar says it “isn’t normal,” but we’re being awfully judgmental there. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, said Terence, and UD thinks we do well to start with that if we seek to understand the reality on the ground in places like Tallahassee. Hell, in places all over America, as our homegrown Mussolini swaggers across the continent gathering presidential votes. You don’t have to watch a Chevy go airborne and plow into fans to know that that’s why they came to the track.
Read Crash and learn. You won’t be surprised when the next FSU player crashes into a woman.
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Spare a thought, by the way, for the players. Powerful, yes, but not as powerful as the coach. In fact, they’re playing out their own Story of O:
One of [my FSU colleague] Derek’s better-adjusted athletes said it wasn’t the practices or the physical abuse that bothered him, but how the coaches force-fed him and his teammates. “They watch me clean the plate,” the player told Derek. “‘You let that settle and then go lift.'” That’s in addition to the supervised supplement-swallowing, the pills and powders of who the hell knows what. “He looks down at me, this monster man, this beast, and now he’s got kid eyes,” Derek tells me, “and he says to me: ‘Mister Derek, sometimes I’m not hungry anymore.'”
Some of what its sponsor says tells you just how amazing things are at America’s sports factories.
“If this altercation had occurred between him and another guy I believe the legal system would have taken care of it. He may have been suspended for a while but would have been right back on the team,” she said.
True, true. A routine incident, a total non-event, the sort of thing that happens every weekend at jock schools – a fight between a player and another guy… this would have been nothing. Nothing at all. How many times has UD covered a story in which a big bruiser, a fancy recruit, damn near killed another guy? Big deal. You recruit Richie Incognito you gotta figure stuff like that’s gonna happen. But oh no let ’em hit some woman and boooo fucking hoooo…
Watch its quarterback in action here.
The school’s a class act all around.
Best part: It’s run by a hack who, with his BFF coach, specializes in the “enabling and justifying of behavior other schools at least pretend to care about.”
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FSU’s an experiment in progress: Is there any behavior football fans won’t tolerate? At a university?
And don’t tell UD they’ve dismissed the guy. They only dismissed him when a now-way-viral video of one of FSU’s hottest quarterback recruits battering a woman at a bar was released… And hell. How did that happen? FSU is famous for its control over local law enforcement. What’s going on??
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FSU, pre-game.
A Florida writer titles his article about the University of Florida and Florida State University’s amazing criminal record Want to Stop Campus Crime? Stop Cheering for Criminals:
The root cause is the fans themselves.
Coaches do what athletic directors allow. Athletic directors do what presidents allow. Presidents do what the public allows.
And the public thinks characters like [Chris] Rainey are the S.
(Suffice it to say it’s slang for “very special”).
Any other university-related club would be boarded up if members were suspected of 119 crimes in five years.
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Another commentator:
ESPN’s latest report on [Florida State University] football moves the program’s smell from “stink” to “stench”.
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And since every year everything gets worse, where does FSU go from stench? Stink is strong; stench is stronger… What’s stronger than stench?
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There is no one word. Only literature will get us there. FSU and even more crime-ridden University of Florida have fallen all the way down to Dante’s Inferno.
By reason of the horrible
Excess of stench the deep abyss throws out,
We drew ourselves aside…
The next step for Florida State University will be to jettison its old motto (Vires, artes, mores – Strength, skill, character) for a new one:
In foetore luxuriae voragine – Excess of stench in the deep abyss
Bottom line: A lot of your university’s sports heroes – coaches as well as players – are seriously scary people. That’s why even though many of them quite often do horrible things – crimes of violence – they almost never get prosecuted. Everyone’s too scared.
Some of these people are scary for obvious Richie Incognito reasons: They’ve been recruited because they’re humongous, violent motherfuckers and you really really really do not want to be anywhere in their way. Or in their vicinity. We all had a very good laugh when we saw this take on Rutgers coach Mike Rice (start at 1:05), but it’s kind of nervous laughter, isn’t it? It’s kind of like I cannot believe that a highly paid, high-profile representative of a university is a violent psycho… I don’t want to believe this…
I love my team! Want to cheer them on! Want them to win!
Oh. But in order to win a lot of teams seem to need psycho coaches who recruit angry motherfuckers like Richie Incognito.
Hm. Hm. Yes, it’s a problem…
Around midnight on April 12, 2014, Oregon State student Michael Davis said he and a friend had been arguing with some football players about cutting in line at a bar and he had fallen to the ground with one of them while fending off a punch. As Davis stood up, tight end Tyler Perry ran up and punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground, the police report states.
According to the report, Davis said a friend who played football told him that he “shouldn’t call the cops. We won’t have a starting lineup next year.” Another person involved in the incident said he “knew the males to be OSU football players so did not really want them in any trouble.”
Days after the incident, Davis said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.
Fuck, man. What did I tell you? Stay out of the way.
But hey. UD, qua professor, finds the bit about the professor really interesting. Look at the intriguing relationships and experiences you can have as a professor at a major sports school! There you are lecturing on Marcel Proust or the Burgess Shale, and you notice that outside your classroom door there’s all these big guys from the team milling about!
It’s like living in Naples, and I don’t mean Florida! It’s like – there they are! You know them. Your students know them. The police know them. The judges know them. Everyone knows them. They run the place, and they can do anything they want because they scare the shit out of everyone.
Yes, turns out there’s nothing sacred even about the classrooms at the big sports universities. Of course, we already knew that from Julius Nyang’oro’s University of North Carolina… Nothing sacred there at all… Nothing even semi-sacred… Professors are just as scared as everyone else.
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UD thanks the several readers who linked her to the ESPN article.
The perfectly named Mr Thrasher
Thrashed this way and that at a basher.
“Yes, P.J. hit and ran.
But when he left his van
He moved like a hundred-yard dasher!”
… is that the attention of the first-string press (to put this in terms that people at FSU might be able to understand) has now decisively been drawn to all of this nation’s jockshops. The heavy hitters (still trying to keep this comprehensible to the folks down there) of American journalism, the elite squad of long-form writing — they’ve all assumed a very tight huddle right on top of schools like Florida State, and they’re peering intently down at them.
What you have to understand is that backwaters like FSU traditionally get covered only by the local booster wins-and-losses press. If anything having to do with their corruption manages to get published, it’s going to be written up by the local cynical wags as the big ol’ joke corruption is in Florida. Think Carl Hiaasen. That’s the prose model.
But now you’ve got these guys in New York takin a fine-tooth comb to the way we been doin things down these parts for a long time. Take for instance this paragraph in a New York Times article one of UD’s readers, John, just sent her:
The Tallahassee police said officers have discretion in deciding when to press charges and issue citations. They provided The Times with seven other cases in which someone hit a car and left the scene but were not charged with hit and run. A review of those cases, however, found that none was comparable in severity or circumstances to the Oct. 5 crash. Four involved cars bumping into each other in parking lots, one caused no damage at all, and the other two were very minor; in no case did a driver abandon a wrecked vehicle in the middle of the night and flee the scene after totaling someone else’s car. Notably, most of the seven crash reports contained far more narrative detail about what happened than the report on the Oct. 5 accident.
That pesky Oct. 5 accident! Happened to involve some of our Most Valuable Players, sure, and, sure, they fled the scene, but no one was hurt and, you know, they’re just kids. Yes, yes, driving on a suspended license, overdue fees from an earlier speeding ticket, whatever. Who said it’s any of your business?
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UPDATE: Don’t wanna say I told you so about ol’ FSU, but a reader sends me the response of the FSU fans to the New York Times article.
Before I tell you what they did, recall the reaction of Penn State fans to the Sandusky scandal. Do you remember? When Penn State finally fired the man who helped make it possible for Jerry Sandusky to do what he did for so long, the fans rioted. As Gawker put it in a headline: Thousands of Students Riot Over Firing of Child Rapist’s Protector.
FSU fans launched a Twitter block. They flagged the article as spam. They made it so you can’t read it.
Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston is being accused of point-shaving in the Florida State game against Louisville this year to help a high-school friend win money. TMZ reports that the quarterback is said to have purposefully tanked during the Seminoles’ first half against Louisville on Oct. 30. Florida State was losing 21-7 at the half, but the team came back to win. Winston was previously accused of raping a fellow student and stealing crab legs. He was recently suspended for half a game for chanting “fuck her right in the pussy” in public on campus.
(UD thanks Dave.)
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Oh. And if you’re wondering why this university just keeps on keeping on with Jameis Winston, here’s a quick rundown of the business interests and community involvements of the school’s board of trustees, starting with Allan Bense and moving alphabetically.
Golf Courses
Being an FSU Fan
Golf Courses
Seminole Boosters Club, FSU Athletic Board, Captain of the FSU Football Team Back In The Day
FSU Booster Club
Florida Sports Foundation
Seminole Boosters Club
Seminole Boosters Club
Orange Bowl Committee
Stumbled across one of the few female trustees here. No sports involvement listed.
Two final guys list no sports involvement.
So according to UD‘s count, that leaves three trustees out of twelve who might – I say might – have some vestigial sense of what a university is. But one of the three is a woman so forget her. That leaves two, one of whom is a professor at FSU, so forget him.
I’m afraid that leaves you, Brent W. Sembler.