Here’s a good formulation of the problem:

This is a typical problem around the country. College demographics are changing and nowhere is that more clear that at the University of Georgia. The student body is approaching 65% women and 35% men. Higher admission standards coupled with more prestigious academic programs result in fewer legacy students. The typical Georgia student doesn’t show up for a basketball game.

The question, then, is how to reverse these trends.

… is upon us, which is why, you might notice, UD‘s been covering one story after another about spectacular turnouts at these all-important early games. Georgia State University, for instance, has 32,000 students.

A few minutes before the start of the game, there were less than 70. Overall, I would estimate less than 300 showed up.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Fewer than, not less than.

But that’s but a trifle here.

… the worst university in America. Go ahead and type UNIVERSITY GEORGIA in my search engine. You’ll get a few hits for other Georgia universities, but mainly you’ll get one unbelievable UGA scandal after another. The board of trustees tried to take over the student newspaper because they haven’t heard about press freedom. A professor shtupped one of his students in front of other students. Sports teams are endlessly full of gun-toting miscreants. After tailgating, the campus is literally a pile of shit. The school has outrageous rates of student alcoholism.

The school is of course on this year’s top-ten party school list; it always makes the list, and often tops it.

The latest is that Jim Donnan, UGA’s amazingly compensated football coach (he recently left), is under federal indictment as a Ponzi schemer. Most of his victims seem to have been his fellow sports morons.

UGA. As ever, a class act.

The voice of the people. Philosophy of education, American-style. If the University of Georgia students and alumni like to shit all over the campus during football games, “it’s a college campus for crying out loud.” That’s what college campuses are for.

… perhaps from an overdose, and instantly a sports writer starts talking on-field replacements.

His death coincides with the release of the book Basketball Junkie.

“Georgia football still leads all collegiate programs in offseason arrests,” continues an opinion writer in the University of Georgia newspaper. He’s unhappy about it.

It’s a distinction UGA works to maintain.

Apparently, head coaches need to worry about their bosses dipping their toes into legal hot water this time of year as well as their players.

According to the FOX affiliate in Atlanta, Georgia athletic director Damon Evans was arrested Wednesday night following a traffic stop and charged with DUI.

The station reports that Evans’ 2009 BMW was pulled over at 11:55 p.m. Wednesday. Evans was given a field sobriety test, and then later refused to take a breathalyzer test.

(It also apparently took police officers quite some time to set the camera up for Evans’ mug shot as the athletic director appears to have nodded off at some point during the process.)

From a comment thread after an article about the latest University of Florida player arrest:

[Commenter #1] Please point out one program that has [like UF] had 28 players arrested in the past five years. Thanks.

[Commenter #2] [D]id you forget the fact that Georgia had 30 arrests over the 4 year period that UF had 24?

Professor of Law Peter Appel, of the University of Georgia, “has been invited to train federal wilderness managers at the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center, a facility in Missoula, Mont., run jointly by all federal agencies responsible for wilderness management.” Appel specializes in environmental law, and knows something about managing wildernesses in particular.

UD thinks Appel should take a hard look at the wilderness right outside his window — the seventy tons of broken glass and human shit in front of the University of Georgia law school — and think about how to manage that. Think globally, act locally. This wilderness stares Appel and his fellow law professors right in the face … right in the nose … after every football game on campus.

The university has no idea what to do about it. It gets worse every year, and this year, with the opening game, it’s so bad that it’s become a very big scandal.

UD‘s been studying the problem, reading lots of news articles, blog entries, and comment threads about it. The University of Georgia Law School Wilderness Area, it turns out, has a number of interesting features.

For instance, the wilderness is created not merely by thousands of drunk tailgaters hurling bottles at each other and shitting in the doorways of Professor Appel’s law school building. The drunks begin the process, to be sure; but after they leave, the derelict of Athens show up to loot the place. Whatever trash has managed to find a bin is now overturned in search of valuables that the drunks may have left behind.

Once we know these sorts of details, once we understand the rhythms of this ecosystem, perhaps we can do something to manage it. Contraceptives in the beer, so tailgaters don’t reproduce? UD‘s not an expert; she doesn’t really know. But there must be professors, in the law school and elsewhere at the University of Georgia, interested in studying the wilderness just outside their doors.

Ponzi bait.

McLeod was a guy’s guy: He loved to talk about sports, particularly University of Georgia football, the school from which he claimed to be an alum. Along with naming his boat Top Dawg, a play on the team’s nickname, McLeod liked to brag that his own dog was a direct descendant of the original Uga, the football team’s bulldog mascot. He made a big deal about attending the annual Georgia-Florida game, which is held in Jacksonville, frequently reminding people that it was known as the “world’s largest outdoor cocktail party.”

Wisconsin fired Paul Chryst on Sunday, fired him five games into the 2022 college football season, fired him with a career record of 67-26. Just sent him packing, humiliated the former Wisconsin quarterback, as if his previous seven seasons — all ending in bowl games, the Badgers winning six of those — hadn’t happened.

This is where college football has gone. Into the dumpster, into the land of toxic make-believe.

Into the SEC.

Trees aren’t even shedding leaves yet, and already five Power 5 schools have shed their head football coach. Wisconsin on Sunday joined Nebraska (Scott Frost), Arizona State (Herm Edwards), Georgia Tech (Geoff Collins) and Colorado (Karl Dorrell), firings that will cost those schools more than $50 million in buyouts. All five are public schools. The money comes from somewhere, a shell game of shady boosters in the background writing checks, money diverted from more noble potential causes. Cleaning up a landfill, for example...

[University coaches?] Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, Georgia’s Kirby Smart, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher and Alabama’s Nick Saban have contracts in the $100 million range…

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You know, toting up all the money pathetic states like Alabama give their coaches, blah blah. It’s like NFL concussion stories. Blah.

…they cling to guns and football.

But… you know… BRING ‘EM ON!

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.

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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.

… reminds ol’ UD to talk about a trend among prospective students and faculty at our country’s universities.

Krugman points out that

our madness over guns [is] just one aspect of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described long ago: a society “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” And Hobbes famously told us what life in such a society is like: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

There are larger and larger areas of this country where

[people regard any] public action for the public good, no matter how justified, as part of a conspiracy to destroy our freedom.

This paranoia strikes both deep and wide. Does anyone remember George Will declaring that liberals like trains, not because they make sense for urban transport, but because they serve the “goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”? And it goes along with basically infantile fantasies about individual action — the “good guy with a gun” — taking the place of such fundamentally public functions as policing.

Anyway, this political faction is doing all it can to push us toward becoming a society in which individuals can’t count on the community to provide them with even the most basic guarantees of security — [including] security from crazed gunmen…

We’re beginning to see evidence of some faculty leaving, and some students not applying, to universities in these frontier settings. Bullets, rapists, and riots, oh my…

Many such locations are already cultural wastelands; some are also beginning to look like shooting galleries.

Why, for instance, would anyone with a choice want to live – even for a few years – in Waco, Texas, home of armed cults, armed motorcycle gangs, and Baylor University? Why would a non-Hobbesian want to work there, live there, go to school there, teach there? It’s not as if there’s any cultural compensation to living in the Wild West. It’s guns and strip malls and megachurches where you beg divine protection.

Why would you go to Hammond, Louisiana and attend Southeastern Louisiana University, famous for being the last school in America willing to take Jonathan Taylor? Can anyone be surprised that at 3 AM yesterday a fight broke out on campus and a bunch of people got shot?

These schools are part of America’s Hobbesian wastelands, where you grabs your AR-15 and you takes your chances. The idea that a university could thrive under these conditions is hilarious.

Trying to teach or learn in these settings is like deciding to take your family vacation in Beach Blanket Bloodbath Myrtle Beach. Why? Unless you’re a Hobbesian and you enjoy that sort of thing?

UD anticipates a militarization of certain campuses – having been abandoned by civilization, they will become weedy tracts patrolled by open-carry paranoids offering Active Shooter Response seminars.

If you’re in the wasteland, and you can leave, you should. Get out while the getting’s good.

… when she sees scathe-worthy writing, she rises to the occasion.

Here’s the SEC commissioner trying to get Mississippi university leaders riled up against the overwhelming passage, in that state’s House, of legislation clearly paving the way for conceal carry folk to bring their guns to football games. He intervened in the very same way when Arkansas tried to get guns in the hands of football fans; now he’s sticking his nose in the business of the good people of Mississippi. Here’s what he wrote to the chancellor of the University of Mississippi.

Given the intense atmosphere surrounding athletic events, adding weapons increases meaningful safety concerns and is expected to negatively impact the intercollegiate athletics programs at your universities in several ways… If HB1083 is adopted to permit weapons in college sports venues, it is likely that competitors will decline opportunities to play in Oxford and Starkville, game officials will decline assignments, personal safety concerns will be used against Mississippi’s universities during the recruiting process and fan attendance will be negatively impacted.

Yes, SOS hears you. ‘SEC Commissioner’ describes a position of dignity and gravitas. The SEC Commissioner is not in a position to say

I’m shitting bricks thinking about your wasted frat boys whipping out their AR-15s and blowing everyone away.

But he could still have done a better job of writing to the chancellor. Let’s consider how he could have issued his warning more eloquently.

There’s a stiff bureaucratic feel to the whole thing, isn’t there? And given that he wants above all to convey a sense of urgency, dead language of this sort does the opposite. Notice that he begins all bass-ackward, backing up to his point rather than stating it right out.

Given the intense atmosphere…

No. Start right off with guns. Guns make football games more dangerous, and they’re already somewhat dangerous. In other words, the whole intense atmosphere thing begs for clarification.

I mean, having for a long time read coaches and fans talk about university football games, UD would have thought ‘intensity’ in their regard referred simply to wholesome fellowship and partisan fun! No? Ok, then don’t leave me hanging: Is there something else intense going on at football games?

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Well, think about it, UD. Look around an SEC stadium during a game. Did you ever see so many police? Why do you think they’re there?

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But of course the commissioner doesn’t want to specify the nature of pre-addition-of-weaponry football game intensity, because there’s a large athletics industry supporting him and his family, and that’s nothing to fuck with.

So, along the same lines, he goes for the unbearably ugly negatively impact to try to delicately gingerly ever so lightly skip around …

Skip around what? Good writing is more direct than this. You’d have to be insane to add guns to crowds of drunk agitated immature males.

And now for the windup, which of course features a second use of negatively impact. Finds it so nice he uses it twice.

… it is likely that competitors will decline opportunities to play in Oxford and Starkville, game officials will decline assignments, personal safety concerns will be used against Mississippi’s universities during the recruiting process and fan attendance will be negatively impacted.

I wonder why football players, specially in the south, might not be happy to play in front of tens of thousands of Mississippi university students with big ol’ guns at the ready??? Hm. Hm. That’s a real poser.

But anyway… Let’s redo this final clause, shall we?

Pads and helmets can only do so much. Bad enough you’re concussing your head. You’re also putting yourself out there in a huge open shooting gallery with armed angry drunk southern males. Ditto for sitting-duck game officials. People get real angry at officials. In the pre-technological world of high school sports, you have to get up, run onto the field, and beat officials to death with your own fists. With guns, it’s a piece of cake.

Georgia will not hesitate to tell recruits trying to decide where to play that they definitely could get their asses blown off in Mississippi. As for your fan base: Though the lads’ aim might be wobbly from a few hundred feet, they’re for sure not going to miss the nice broad back of the guy two rows ahead who just called them a motherfucker. So your attendance numbers aren’t going to be enhanced. Unless you add all the new fans who are there to shoot off their guns.

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Yes, yes, SOS knows that she has slipped into the sort of language incommensurate with the moral stature of an SEC commissioner. Sorry.