Correct answer: Nothing. You don’t want to know from NMSU because NMSU is NSFW – it’s the sort of obscenity from which decent people avert their eyes. Tens of millions of dollars in athletics debt… no one goes to the football games… no money for academics… and except for this guy and a few others no one gives a shit.

Here’s a sample from a letter the chair of the board of trustees wrote. I won’t quote from it because I’m one of those people who doesn’t enjoy puking her guts out, but you might enjoy it, so go ahead and take a look.

A couple of NMSU students actually thought trying to understand what the trustee wrote and then responding to it might be worthwhile, and UD applauds the effort. You should never give up on human beings, no matter how…

This is truly a clown school. This is truly a school with not a shred of dignity. And now this. One of their players is a violent shit who set off a huge on-court brawl. UD figures he’ll be back attacking opponents after a two-game suspension. After all, it’s New Mexico State.

Or, as a commenter on an article about New Mexico State University’s football team puts it, “I will never understand fans from these terrible academic/athletic schools that need to have their teams competing on the highest level just to have their brains beat in.”

Let NMSU stand for dozens of American universities allowing themselves to bleed out as institutions for the sake of big-time football.

Let us once more, on this blog, attempt to understand the masochism that insists – against the simple sanity of one’s own university president, and a state senator – that hurling your expensive team against opponents who will always beat you by ten, twenty, thirty, forty points is a good thing.

I don’t want you to think that anyone from NMSU actually goes to these games. I mean, a few people do, but for most in the NMSU community, group psychosis apparently has its limits. Most people there prefer not to purchase pricey tickets in order to watch the players for their school get their brains bashed in.

At the same time, though, enough NMSU people want to get seasonally excited about new coaches and paradigms and shit that they refuse to let the president and the state senator divert football money toward, uh, education. An anti-intellectual school in an anti-intellectual state, NMSU’s thing is to sit on its ass being stupid while its team gets brained. Our purpose is to figure out why this is.

It’s not the spectacle of the brain bashing itself, since few attend the games. If attendance were good, our problem would be solved: We love gore, and the NMSU football team guarantees it. But people avert their eyes.

Since total massive loss is equally guaranteed, could a campy delectation of failure itself have set in? Are the denizens of NMSU Wildean rascals…?

No. They are sincere, ever-hopeful, dog-like fans.

Here’s the best I can do. The Buddha speaks always of compassion, and what’s going on at NMSU is a communal exemplification of this primary virtue. The hopelessly broken – ever freshly broken – body of this football team exteriorizes for an entire community the first noble truth of human suffering. The team is a precious sacrificial vessel through which, ritualistically, NMSU attains not intellectual but spiritual enlightenment.

… joke schools.

[University of New Mexico Police Department spokesman Lt. Robert] Haarhues said UNMPD’s biggest problem is intoxicated tailgaters leaving the parking lot without attending [football games].

“More people end up leaving than going inside to watch the game, and that can be a problem with driving,” he said. “We are trying to get more people to stay, but the fact that people are leaving probably has to do with the lack of success of the team. If they were better, maybe more people would watch.”

UNM: Just a bar.

With a 3-13 record, the UNM baseball team plays in an “empty” stadium.

Monday the UNM Board of Regents approved the use of a $2 million Severance Tax Bond, which was allocated by the 2010 Legislature for a new baseball complex.

“It’s not money that could be used somewhere else on campus,” Krebs said. “If we didn’t use it specifically for this project it would revert … to the state.”

And while the state is in need of more money, the athletic department says this is money well spent.

An impoverished university, its academics gutted, builds a new baseball stadium for a team without spectators.

Okay… But this makes it look as though New Mexico State still uses Security Concepts to protect its campus.

Either way, you gotta wonder why they hired Security Concepts. The owner was “arrested in 1999 on racketeering and other charges in an investigation of crime in public housing that turned up allegations of illegality at [a] downtown Las Cruces bar.” Charges were dropped because they couldn’t find enough witnesses.

More recently (last month), the same owner was “charged with driving drunk with two loaded firearms in his vehicle.”

… [Michael] Gonzales refused to provide a breath sample … During a search of the Jeep, the deputies found an unloaded Phoenix Arms long rifle under the passenger seat, a loaded Charter Arms .38 Special and a Kel-Tec 9 mm Luger, which was not only loaded but had a round in the chamber …

…has been murdered.

The campus paper doesn’t name him, but his students know who he was, and they talk about him to the reporter. He was apparently killed, along with his girlfriend, by his girlfriend’s ex-lover.

… Student Felicia Lopez, in the professor’s Chicano Studies class, said her teacher did not show up for his 10 a.m. Monday class.

“He would tell us before if he was going to miss class,” she said. “He was always excited and passionate to show up to teach.”

… Student Oscar Ortega said the professor canceled class three times in the past two weeks because he had to testify in court as a witness to a domestic dispute case.

“He talked about how concerned he was about the domestic dispute case,” he said. “He was constantly talking about it.”

Students in the professor’s class plan to honor him by wearing black wristbands on their right arms, Ortega said…

A jock-sniffing, nepotistic president; sociopaths on the sports teams; Mistress Jade, who punishes naughty grad students with whips, on the creative writing staff… It’s all gotten too much for UNM, which has just hired an expensive ‘reputation management’ consultant to make the corrupt twisted people who make UNM what it is look uncorrupt and untwisted.

UD awaits the ministrations of the public relations firm upon her. She looks forward to her sense of UNM as a crony-ridden craphouse being transformed by clever pr into a sense of UNM as something that smells really good.

From a comment on a UNM Daily Lobo story about a sadomasochistic sex worker in the creative writing department:

I propose a no-holds-barred celebrity duel between Mike “Suckerpunch” Locksley and Lisa “Mistress Jade” Chavez to be held in Smith Plaza next Friday at high noon – 15 rounds or until one of our UNM celebrities can fight no longer – tickets will be sold to the public and all proceeds will go to settle lawsuits against UNM resulting from the earlier escapades of “Suckerpunch” and “Mistress Jade” – Come one, come all – see the show of a lifetime – and shake hands with the man who brought you the whole thing, Ringmaster David Schmidly!!!

He acted heroically during the mass shooting last year at Northern Illinois University, but NIU’s police chief has always been a bit unhinged, and students, with whom he has been abusive, want him out:

… [A]n editor of the campus newspaper [has] accused [Donald] Grady of threatening and shouting at him during an interview that became a three-hour tirade.

“It’s time to put an end to this mess. It’s time for a change,” the Northern Star student paper wrote in a blistering editorial calling for Grady’s removal. It accused him of employing intimidation to get his way.

School officials put the 56-year-old Grady on paid leave for 30 days starting last week while a panel reviews the allegations …

DeKalb County Sheriff Roger Scott is among the officials who have publicly backed the paper’s call for Grady’s ouster or resignation.

“NIU has isolated itself under his leadership,” Scott said.

… Controversy has dogged Grady, who also is from Beloit, Wis., during his career. After becoming Wisconsin’s first black police chief in the mostly white town of Bloomer in 1989, he created a stir by issuing nearly 300 tickets, including to himself, for violations of a snow-shoveling ordinance.

When he became Santa Fe, N.M., chief in 1994, he ordered officers to stop accepting free cups of coffee on the job and banned bolo ties.

Police responded with a 103-to-5 no-confidence vote in their boss. After digging in his heels for two years, Grady resigned, saying his reforms had encountered too much resistance.

And at NIU, well before the shooting, staff of the student newspaper had already complained that he often withheld standard crime reports, requiring the paper to file Freedom of Information Act requests…

A letter to the campus paper, the Daily Lobo, from an emeritus professor brings us up to date on this perennial class act.

The TV ads featuring Lobo Louie and his Lobo floozy accurately convey the tackiness of the partnership between the University of New Mexico Athletics Department and the Route 66 Casino Hotel. How did an institution of higher learning end up with the gaming industry as a roommate?

Sadly, these organizations have become soul mates. Intercollegiate athletics in America today has a bad case of gambling addiction. I do not refer to fans wagering on games. I refer to institutions that throw good money after bad in hopes of hitting that elusive jackpot — a championship.

Few, if any, NCAA Division I athletics programs cover their costs, especially if indirect subsidies for physical plant and utilities are factored in. Yet programs and their boosters insist on spending more and more for coaches’ compensation, sumptuous facilities and player recruitment. They say they want to “reach the next level.” Their behavior resembles that of a problem gambler who, in placing ever-higher stakes to recoup his losses, succeeds only in reaching the next level of penury.

Just as the family of a problem gambler suffers from the diversion of limited resources away from essential needs, so the academic communities of Division I universities suffer from the diversion of limited resources away from their basic educational mission.

Teaching, learning and research are starved as money is lavished on games.

Viewed from this perspective, Louie and the floozy are perfect for each other…

He sounds embarrassed, doesn’t he? But when it comes to tacky and the University of New Mexico under President David Schmidly, there’s so much more. Here’s a start.

lolol

How sensitively put… Wouldn’t want to bludgeon the end of the sentence with the blunt force sexual … Want to gentle things along with the delicate smidgeon in nature…

And yet…

What do you really want? Do you want a writer who waves her crumpet and says Well I declare! Multiple sources … [wink wink nudge nudge]…

Or do you want ol’ UD to spill the tea… er, beans? UD, who has for years been covering what guys do to guys in the locker room when broom comes to shove?

Ok. While of course UD did not have the pleasure of attending the New Mexico State University haze, she’s pretty sure three or four guys held down each victim (the event was probably witnessed by much of the team, and to make the police investigation a snap, some of the stupider players probably recorded it on their cell phones) and while he lay writhing and shrieking one of them shoved the end of a straw broom up his rectum.

That night, vomiting with rage and self-disgust, the victim(s) took his nightly call from his mother, who heard something funny in his voice, got him to confess he’d been anally raped, and when she got off the phone with him she and her husband called the university, a lawyer, the cops, and the local newspaper.

NMSU, a wholly vile and dysfunctional location, all of whose leadership is interim times ten and desperately trying to leave, issues a pallid statement, shuts down the rape club, and prays the state legislature doesn’t hold against the school the fact that it’s a cesspool. (Spoiler Alert: The corrupt and mindless state legislature won’t hold it against the school. Boys will be boys. These are real bonding experiences.)

Now I’m not saying there were guns involved. Usually this quaint lad on lad action involves merely fists and brooms; but this being the USA I can’t see why there wouldn’t have been guns involved. Look at the team logo.

Ave Atque Vale:

Now they are a shit show. You have a player involved shooting, a catfishing, a fight with a rival. Shit even the cops chased [the] team bus down the highway. Yet here we are after all of that, [with hazing incidents and a decision] to suspend its season. 

Read all about NMSU.

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

UPDATE: Gee. I even got the number of players who held him down right.

OTOH maybe the broomstick is only a high school thing.

[T]hree teammates held him face down and removed his clothing. The players struck his buttocks and touched his genitals, according to the report. The player said he “had no choice but to let this happen because it’s a 3 on 1 type of situation.” He added that the abusive incidents usually occurred in front of the team and that no one intervened. 

Yeah. I also called the “in front of the team” thing.

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

The victim, whose name was redacted in the report along with those of the other players, said other incidents involving inappropriate physical and sexual touching had been occurring in locker rooms and on road trips since last summer. 

What a team! If they don’t outright shoot you, they at least finger your anus.

The athletic director draws inspiration from the fact that his team played so well after having been arrested.

Half the Eastern New Mexico State University baseball team was arrested (fight, campus parking lot) and then, having been bonded out of jail, they played a winning game that same day.

“A lot of teams in that situation where they saw several of their players get arrested two hours previously could have folded right there at that point,” said [Jeff] Geiser.

How many teams can come back right away from mass arrest to play a winning game? Not many, baby. But our guys were totally not fazed.

… it can be hard to focus on particular states. A new study confirming that NOLA must be relocated will certainly get our attention, but basically if you’re like UD there’s a bunch of pretty squishy territories out there, all of which somehow add up to USA.

She knows Utah’s all virtuous and the Deep South deeply fucked; and because of her special interest in the country’s amazing rates of gun ownership/gun violence/gun suicide, she can rattle off our leading abattoirs.

But when a drug use/drug overdose map like this one comes out, the bright red disparities really jump out at you — as in mega-malsain New Mexico, where a few years ago the desperate governor, knee-deep in gore, declared a health emergency, making it illegal for anyone to carry a gun for thirty days. Angry bangbangers practically torched the state when they heard that one.

As for this most recent map, New Mexico dominates the national overdoses too. While clueless coastals like UD persist in picturing Georgia O’Keefe meditating on Taos Mountain, the reality of (by pretty much any metric) our worst state screams out at them in bright red on a drug map.

Child on child murder (time was, we’d go the shooter is only 28? now it’s yeah yawn he’s 18…) in a University of New Mexico dorm room seems to have involved the shooter going berserk, either from drugs/alcohol, or natural berserkness.

 Fuentes fled the dorm room and went toward his car. State police say Fuentes ended up on the first story roof of the Mesa Vista building where they say he smashed multiple windows, injuring himself.

State police say blood stains, a stolen Glock 9mm handgun, keys, and a pair of blue jeans were left on the roof of the Mesa Vista building.

He was driving his father’s car and holding a stolen gun; in a desperate effort not to be caught, he ditched the gun, the car, his bloody pants, etc.

Two guys in a pickup truck thought it’d be a good idea to pick up a crazed bloody half-naked kid, though they must have had second thoughts cuz the cops arrested him on the highway.

His young life flamed out in one way action packed gunny night… He’ll spend the next fifty years telling the story of his last free day to generations of inmates…