Veteran University Diaries readers know about what Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls coacha inconsolata – that form of local booster journalism that involves portraying football coaches who knowingly recruit dangerous criminals to our universities as suffering saintlike beings whose only motivation in these recruitments is a deep belief in The Ultimate Goodness of Man. When the dangerous recruits start doing what dangerous recruits tend to do – break the law and put everyone in danger – the local booster press doesn’t say the obvious, which is Why do we pay the highest-paid person on campus to cynically, with arrant disregard for the safety of our community, go to a lot of trouble to bring a very dangerous man into our midst? No, no. It always goes something like this:

Coaches like to believe … that they can rescue troubled kids, even save them. It’s a noble premise.

Far from being assholes who don’t care that they are exposing young and vulnerable people to hardened criminals (not to mention admitting people unlikely to take even one course with any academic legitimacy – but that’s a trifle here), these coaches are noblemen, pure of heart, so sure of the glorious transformative power of university football that they are willing to take risks other people won’t – they are willing to say Under the rap sheet of this running back beats the heart of a true gentleman, and though it won’t be easy I’m going to dedicate myself to finding that heart. Because that’s what Oklahoma State’s football team is all about – turning young men around.

And when the entire divinely-kissed scheme fails to work out, what then?

Why, coacha inconsolata, of course. His heart is absolutely broken. He is suffering.

… you have to ask yourself: How does OSU top that?

Well, ask no more:

A 22-year-old Oklahoma State University student faces two felony charges for allegedly using a loaded gun during fraternity hazing.

Owen Hossack, a now former Alpha Gamma Rho member, faces two counts of pointing a firearm at an individual with the intent to harm, KFOR reports.

Hossack is accused of holding a loaded gun to a pledge’s head on Aug. 16 in an extended cab pickup truck and asking the student if he would take a bullet for his frat brothers. When the pledge said no, Hossack allegedly became angry and yelled before placing the gun up to another pledge and asking the same question, according to an affidavit. Shortly after the second pledge’s response, a flash of light was seen and the passenger window exploded.

No one was hit by the bullet.

OOOOOOOOOOklahoma!! Where the guns come sweepin’ down the plains!

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Here’s some real tasty details I bet even Aunt Eller couldna whipped up.

During an interview with OSU police Sept. 11, Hossack said he fired the weapon at the window, which he believed to be open, to frighten the pledges.

Hossack, who was secretary of the Interfraternity Council in 2013…

Number One: Nuthin wrong with firin a gun out a open window. Everybody on the street oughta be armed to defend themselves.

Number Two: They voted me fuckin secretary of the whole Interfraternity Council.

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UPDATE: Says here the shooter had passed anti-hazing training. Hm. Was the course explicit about not putting guns in people’s faces and threatening to shoot them? Sounds as though we need a little tweaking.

Next up, on the Sports Illustrated hit parade:

Around 2007, Joel Tudman, an [OSU] assistant strength-and-conditioning coach who is also the team’s chaplain and carries the title of Life Issue/Social Development Counselor for the football program — a mentoring position that has become more common within athletic departments — was put in charge of the drug counseling program for football. Tudman is also founder of Net Church, which he started in 2006. The congregation has grown quickly, and Sunday-night services were moved from Bennett Chapel to a student union auditorium, where Tudman’s sermons are delivered to an audience that often includes 40 or more football players.

Tudman, however, has no formal training in drug counseling. While Tudman’s bio on the athletic department website indicated that he had received a “double masters in health and counseling” from Texas A&M-Commerce, he in fact has only a single master’s degree, in Health, Kinesiology and Sports Studies. (Tudman’s bio on the Net Church website also erroneously stated that he had master’s degrees in Health Promotions and Counseling. After Tudman was interviewed by SI the bio was corrected.) His Oklahoma State bio said that he was twice honored by the Lone Star Conference as a running back and was a “3 time All-American sprinter.” In fact, that conference recognized him once (honorable mention in 2003) and he was an All-America sprinter only in 2004. (After SI began investigating Tudman’s background, the school pulled his bio from its website.)

Tudman says because he took courses in health and counseling while at Texas A&M-Commerce he “thought it was a double masters.” He produced a transcript that showed he completed five counseling courses, but none of them dealt with substance abuse and he never enrolled in the two courses Texas A&M-Commerce offered in that area. Tudman concedes that his athletic accomplishments were also embellished. “That’s [a mistake] on my part,” he says. “I take full responsibility.”

… (Tudman remains unlicensed to treat drug users.)

When asked about Tudman’s qualifications and background, [OSU] athletic director Holder said, “I didn’t look at Joel’s résumé” …

What Holder looked at was whether Tudman was a sufficiently pathetic blowhard to be controlled by Holder. Answer: Yes.

The long tradition of university football players wearing immediately identifiable clothes, or driving cars with immediately identifiable parking permits, during the course of their robberies is burnished once again in the case of the University of Oklahoma’s Parrish Cobb.

Here’s UD‘s favorite headline:

Oklahoma cornerback Parrish Cobb, burned for 2 Noah Brown TDs, charged in 3 robberies

You wanna get the important stuff out there first, and only after that get around to his off-field activities…

Some nice comments at Deadspin:

(spring practice)

Stoops: Is there any video?

Cobb: I don’t think so.

Stoops: Well take an extra lap. Wait, we’re in a new era. Make it two.

… this blog keeps its eye on its beloved University of Louisville, scummiest school in these United States. I mean, Louisville is only one of zillions of dirty jockshops awaiting its NCAA fate because it bribed players’ families or took money from commercial interests to steer players toward them or blahblahblah same old shit … This just in: Big time university sports is weawy weawy filfy doity… But when it comes to athletic as well as academic corruption, no one does it like Louisville.

And mes petites – Now that the American university has disappeared as an empirical-world phenomenon, the only happening place on campus is the basketball arena/football stadium, haunt of the heinous.

A Potemkin Village is “a pretentiously showy or imposing façade intended to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.” The three Bloomberg writers who make this comparison – it appears in a long piece summarizing the ongoing national basketball scandal, which they call “the worst since college basketball players were caught shaving points for gamblers in the 1950s” – mean to suggest, I guess, that the glitzy University of Louisville basketball team masked whatever there was of the shabby non-basketball University of Louisville.

It’s quite a statement. Can we have gotten to the point where we’re not a tad astonished by it?

I mean, yes, one remembers the witty president of the University of Oklahoma back in the ‘fifties telling a senator he wanted to “build a university our football team can be proud of.” More recently, the president of Ohio State, “asked whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, … said: ‘No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.'” One has no trouble imagining how the puling little president of the University of Alabama feels about his stature vis-à-vis Nick Saban. And of course we know how the leadership of Penn State felt about that… curious couple, Sandusky and Paterno. Going to jail for them was a small price to pay.

Still…

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And does the analogy really work? For after all, as is the way with many big-time athletic programs, there was never a clear separation between the shabby embarrassing academic UL and the rich degenerate basketball UL. The squalor of college sports spreads itself all over the campus – literally, as in the way the University of Georgia campus for a long time looked the morning after big games; and figuratively, as in the establishment of a house of prostitution in a UL dorm for players, recruits, and the fathers of recruits.

It’s not really that you’ve got on the one hand the glitzy sports program and on the other the hidden humiliating university. The whole thing tends toward looking like the Calais Jungle.

A local commentator in Oklahoma says there’s almost nothing in that state “to cheer for.” He says that by almost any quality of life standard Oklahoma looks terrible.

Instead of asking what in l’esprit d’Oklahome might account for this outcome, the writer proceeds to thank the state’s lucky stars for its football teams.

OU and OSU football have become sources of state pride at a time you can scarcely find them anywhere else.

But… Shouldn’t the guy be asking how it was that Oklahoma got stuck with 70,000 square miles of meh plus two university football teams?

Ask any chancellor, elected official or traveling businessperson and they’ll tell you — nothing has a bigger impact on the perception of universities or the states in which they educate than their sports teams. In Oklahoma, that means their football teams.

The general perception of Oklahoma, for reasons the writer lists (terrible schools, horrible health indicators, over-full prisons… he didn’t have time to mention stuff like the fact that the state’s senior senator showed climate change is a hoax by bringing a snowball to the senate chamber), is bad. If football teams had the biggest impact imaginable on the public perception of a state, Oklahoma would be right up there with Massachusetts and its… university football teams?

I mean I dunno. Some problems with logic here.

… tradition; the university itself is clearly proud of it, since after decades of totally pissed vileness it continues to respond with soft words… Continues to set things up on campus to achieve optimal pillaging. They riot when they’ve been sleeping; they riot when they’re awake; they riot when they’ve been bad or good — so let them RIOT for goodness’ sake!

U Mass Amherst is one of those schools which (let’s be honest) knows it would have to shut down if it didn’t admit its cohort, and the U Mass cohort happens to be gangs of alcoholic bullies from the eastern seaboard. Similarly, if Ole Miss systematically shunned Confederacy loyalists with a big thirst, they’d lose a significant chunk of their incoming class. Most universities are dominated by a representative slice of the American pie; U Mass Amherst, Ole Miss, LSU, Clemson, Auburn, Alabama, Cal State Chico … these schools are not. They play the role of the freaks of this blog, the frenzied teetering muttering mad uncles of the American university family. When you give their students guns, as at Oklahoma State, you witness all manner of amazing things.

You wonder sometimes what it really comes down to, the sort of people and customs it creates. You wonder about the actual daily nitty gritty of university life at schools where nothing matters but sports.

I’m not talking about the big public stuff, the big five-part Sports Illustrated feature on T. Boone Pickens’ Oklahoma State University and its multidimensional pigswill. I mean the microculture – the way people talk to each other; the way they dress; the way they interact, one on one.

For that, you need two types of stories that routinely hit the news:

1. the sadistic coach; and

2. the sadistic hazer.

These two highly placed boosters carry the microculture in a way we can see, a way chronicled – since it maims people and generates trials and lawsuits – by the local and national press. Oklahoma State’s macroculture is the five-part series; OSU’s microculture is the secretary of the Interfraternity Council who pulled a loaded gun on pledges when they said they wouldn’t take a bullet for their brothers. He didn’t shoot them, but in his rage he shot out the window of the pick-up in which they were sitting. Because they obviously had no idea how serious the brotherhood of boosters was at OSU.

My post’s headline comes from a voice mail the women’s lacrosse coach at the University of Louisville sent to one of her players. The university’s system of spies had spotted a player wearing a shirt with the name of a competing university on it.

Darby, change your clothes, don’t bother coming to practice today. Do you know that I just got a phone call about you wearing a Michigan State shirt? You obviously have no idea how serious athletics is at the University of Louisville. I do not want to see your face today until after practice, but your butt better be up in my office with a Louisville shirt on your chest when practice ends.

Winston Smith would have no trouble recognizing this message. It is the functional equivalent of mandating burqas for university women.

The University of Louisville – read about its vile, all-enveloping sports culture here (scroll down) – is now enjoying national coverage of this coach and her alleged abuse of the students on her team.

Are you beginning to see how twisted these all-American settings are? Looked at from both macro and micro perspectives, the nation’s sports sluts get sicker by the day.

… the nation’s number one party school last year (this year it’s number two), the school that has over the decades hired more drunks and debauchees as coaches and athletics directors than any other, the school… oh, read UD’s many posts about WVU if you have a taste for the sordid – put West Virginia University in my search engine… Anyway, it should come as no surprise that the coach at the center of the Oklahoma State allegations has moved on to… West Virginia University! Joe DeForest will be soberly scrutinized by head coach Dana Holgorsen, himself a man of unimpeachable self-control.

UD’s enjoyed, over the years, following good ol’ T. Boone’s beloved Oklahoma State University (and – if you read that last link – T. Boone is so right that it’s a changed school!), and she’s certainly settling in to enjoy Parts One through All Our Coaches Are Pimps.

Hoo-wheeeee!

The morbid, bizarre, hilarious story of T. Boone Pickens and Oklahoma State University cries out for the David Lynch treatment. Only he, among American artists, can capture the twisted pathos of this death-haunted titan and his football team.

The good news just keeps coming for the biggest baddest football schools, with Oklahoma State students responding to a victory by storming the field in a riot that critically injured two and less critically injured several more.

Some students were spared injury by their university’s clever expedience of pricing tickets so high many can’t afford them. The Oklahoma State newspaper’s editorial board complains:

It’s not as if the [OSU] athletic department is broke. It made a profit of more than $16 million from 2009 to 2010, and we know seats aren’t exactly selling like flapjacks on final’s week. One can notice that from looking at all the empty seats at midfield (a costly $832 per seat donation requirement is likely the reason for the lack of a sellout, but that is a discussion for another time)… Fielding a great football team does not require ripping off the students.

Better an empty luxury box than some jerk in the stands with no money!

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And if you think nobody does it better — How ’bout Florida and Florida State??

Authorities ejected 167 people from the stadium for violations. And in what police say was a first, a fight broke out among people in an elevator outside the pricey skyboxes.

Violence also occurred outside the stadium. In two of the more egregious incidents, a man was beaten and his head stomped, and two people doing FSU’s tomahawk chop while walking along West University Avenue were accosted.

You can understand people getting violent in the vicinity of the luxury suites. Not only are those fans drunk (alcohol is only allowed in the skyboxes… imagine how many more than 167 people would have been ejected if the whole stadium could drink!), but if their team is down a point or two it’s like I paid $87,000 for this box and SHIT MAN I’M PISSED.

UD‘s blogpal, Gregg Easterbrook (he of the famed Christmas Letter), takes a wide-angle look at university athletics.

Some excerpts:

[N]early all universities lose money on sports. Recently the NCAA reported that only 14 Football Bowl Subdivision programs clear a profit, while no college or university in the United States has an athletic department that is financially self-sustaining. Nobody in FBS — not Alabama, not Auburn, not Oklahoma, nobody — has an athletic department that pays its own way.

At many colleges and universities, athletic programs cannibalize donations that might have gone to education.

[H]igh coaches’ salaries don’t even result in programs that make money, the way high coaches’ salaries in the NFL result, at least, in profit.

[I]n football, Ohio State has a 1-to-5 ratio of staff to students: while in English, the staff-to-student ratio is 1-to-280. Divide the latter by the former. In staffing terms, Ohio State treats football as 56 times more important than it does English.

The Columbia football coaching staff has 14 people, including a chaired coach — the Patricia and Shepard Alexander Head Coach of Football. Not the football coach, the Head Coach of Football.

It is difficult to believe Auburn really needs an athletic director, an executive associate athletic director, five senior associate athletic directors, four associate athletic directors and a guy with the title senior associate athletic director & CFO.

Well. Auburn. Reason not the need. I got nowhere else to go!

We’ve already done NYU, Larry Rivers, and the breast videos. Might as well make a day of it with a couple of other items.

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1.) Because an Oklahoma State University employee used her OSU credit card to bill the university for sex toys (she’s been fired), “OSU officials have held training sessions to make sure employees understand how to use [their cards] properly.”

Question #9: Dildos may/may not be billed to the university.

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2.) As an homage to the Nobel prize-winning Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who died recently, the Portuguese edition of Playboy features Jesus (Saramago wrote about Jesus) in a variety of poses with naked women.

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UD thanks James.