Long considered one of the best places to live in America, Damascus, Maryland – a short drive from UD‘s Garrett Park – has big houses and good schools and pretty landscaping. And (yawn) it has teenage anal rapers galore.

Yawn because do you know how many teenage anal raper stories I’ve covered on this blog? So many high school football teams in the country seem fiercely devoted to jamming broomsticks up the asses of new players as a kind of Welcome Wagon gesture… If I wanted, I could blog every week about pool cues, broomsticks, and pretty much anything else being jammed up the anal canals of newbies.

Why? Why? Why?

Oh, who gives a shit. It’s a thing, a major thing, part of the university fraternity hazing continuum, only I guess more intense because of the very small closed absolutely brutal world of the football team.

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TO THE DESPOILERS GO THE SPOILS!

If anally raping junior players is the key to success, why mess with a good thing?

With a victory Friday [this was the Friday just before the rapes were discovered], Damascus will pass Urbana (1998-2001) for Maryland’s longest winning streak of all time and add onto the country’s longest active winning streak.

Yes, with its patented broomstick-up-the-ass technique, Damascus has formed a truly unbeatable team bond!

Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes, however, that the experience of reading the Washington Post’s breathless pre-rape article about the school’s amazing achievement is a little different now, with the eye landing hard on certain words, the mind automatically altering certain words…

‘Over Damascus’s 50-game winning streak, Coach Eric Wallich has searched for new ways [LOL] to motivate his team.

… With a victory Friday, Damascus will pass Urbana (1998-2001) for Maryland’s longest broomstick [haha make that winning streak] of all time…

… Damascus (8-0) has become the premier team in Montgomery County this century — winning six state crowns since 2003 — by relying on a rape-heavy [ahem! run-heavy] system.

… Kids look on and dream of donning the green, gold and white jerseys, even as high school football participation has dropped nationally because of concussion and health concerns, among other reasons. [Like anal rape.]

… The Urbana teams that set the state winning-streak record also featured a savvy run game and deep-threat ability. [Turns out you can go to jail for deep-threat ability.]

… [One of the players] said Damascus players are also viewed highly at school and in the community. Handling that attention has helped them manage the spotlight in crucial games. [Managing the spotlight just got a lot more pesky.]’

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Hey but wait but oh oh oh says the school’s principal: It was the JUNIOR varsity team, not the big boys with the new state record!

A commenter on this article speaks for UD:

In all the media reports the emphasis from Principal Crouse about this not having anything to do with the powerhouse varsity team is a little disturbing and I question her priorities.

Correct. You might have noticed that football everywhere has a (cough) culture problem. You don’t get to break up the team when something like this happens. You don’t get to suddenly chuck all your language about how everyone’s part of the team, we’re all a unit, blah blah. You don’t get to claim in your official statement that the group rape is “unrelated to the varsity football team.” First of all, we don’t know that yet. Second, this is the varsity team in a very short time. And if you’re trying to convince us that the event was a bizarre one-time, Halloween-night grotesquerie etc. etc. good luck with that.

Another thing: UD knows of virtually no group teenage anal rape these days, football or non-football, that doesn’t include someone recording the thing, texting about the thing. If the Bixby Oklahoma case is anything to go by, parents are currently trying to buy the evidence (!) and everyone’s madly erasing tapes and texts. Damascus has a state-wide record to protect… IOW: get ready for the investigation.

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.

[Johnny] Manziel … won the Heisman in 2012… Other recent Heisman winners with questionable off-field problems include Auburn’s Cam Newton, who was in the middle of an NCAA eligibility investigation when he won the 2010 trophy.

In 2013, Florida State’s Jameis Winston was being investigated for a rape accusation in the middle of his Heisman run. There are more than 900 Heisman voters, and Winston was left off 115 ballots entirely. He still won the award with the fifth-largest margin ever, and he was never convicted in the investigation.

Other Heisman winners include O.J. Simpson, who was charged in an infamous murder case and later convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping in a separate 2007 case. Then there’s LSU’s Billy Canon, the 1959 Heisman winner who later in life spent more than two years in federal prison as a result of a massive counterfeiting scheme.

But the only player ever to have to vacate a trophy was USC running back Reggie Bush, who was found guilty in an NCAA investigation of taking improper benefits from an agent while at USC.

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[Last February, University of Oklahoma Heisman candidate Baker Mayfield was arrested for public intoxication.] In a dash cam video that went viral, Mayfield was seen shouting and cursing at police officers. When confronted, he attempted to run, only to be tackled into a wall. The video also showed him on the brink of crying in the back of a police car.

… Mayfield grabbed his crotch and shouted expletives in OU’s game against Kansas. Combined with the arrest and Mayfield’s flag-plant at Ohio State that caused a stir, Mayfield was forced to deliver his third public apology in less than a year.

(Watch it here.)

Lamont Evans, associate head coach for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, Chuck Person, associate head coach for the Auburn University Tigers, Emanuel “Book” Richardson, assistant coach for the Arizona Wildcats, and Anthony “Tony” Bland, assistant head coach of the University of Southern California Trojans, were all named in the complaint.

How did “Book” get his nickname?

Arizona assistant coach Emanuel Richardson was nicknamed Pocketbook by his grandmother because she would catch him riffling through her purse. The name was eventually shortened on the basketball courts…

But the beauty of it is that she has both. Capulet, Montague, Smith, and Wesson – they’re all there now at the University of Kansas:

It’s [now legal] to walk down the middle of Kansas’ serene Midwestern campus with a hidden firearm. The carrier will need neither a permit nor training.

Coaches are being real wussy about it.

“It is a deal that I will be very adamant about in a way of banning [guns],” [a] Kansas third-year coach said. “I don’t want weapons around for our team. I know it’s a bad, bad deal for us. I understand the politics involved in it. I get that. But we’re talking about kids with lives and kids getting pissed with each other and kids that are highly competitive with each other. I fear what it could blow into.”

You can’t ban guns for the team, dummy! That would be illegal.

“It’s a little scary,” said Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor.

Ooh, little Genie’s scared…

So is Oklahoma State’s coach:

“I was in college, been to a bunch of parties, been around a lot of football players,” the coach said. “Moderation that should have been part of what we did, wasn’t. It was college, we were dumb. If you throw a gun in the mix, it’s not good. You make poor decisions. When you have a gun there, you have a chance to make a decision you can never make up for.”

And back in Kansas:

Kansas basketball coach Bill Self called the law “unbelievable.” He did not elaborate.

Who needs to elaborate? You bring a bunch of big macho guys to a college campus. You pump them up to be even more macho, more violent, on the field. If you’re the University of Oregon, you put up signs in their cafeteria that say EAT YOUR ENEMIES. You and everyone else treat the guys like kings, giving them free muscle cars, willing “hostesses” among the coeds, tutors to write their papers for them. The local cops look the other way when the guys do bad stuff. The guys learn that they can get away with anything because they play the game really violently.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that giving them a concealed weapon can only be for the best?

Both Richie and Johnny were obvious wrecks during their college years, but at Incognito’s University of Nebraska and Manziel’s A&M, keeping them on the field was far more important than noticing that their mental health was shot. Not only was everything bad they did fine, just fine; John Sharp, one of many washed-out politicians who run universities in Texas and Oklahoma, babbled incessantly to the press about Manziel’s adorable perfectness. He was “innocent” of all the wrongdoing of which he was accused. “My mother wishes I was as nice a kid as Johnny when I was a sophomore in college,” Sharp told a newspaper.

Manziel’s the kind of alcoholic no one could miss, but Sharp missed it, or didn’t care.

Yet what’s most important in this is Sharp’s leadership skills. As head of the university, he established for the entire community the proper attitude, the proper emotion, the proper language, to bring to their quarterback. Sharp modeled a paternal gruff humor, an indulgent folksy tolerance that turned into outraged attacks on the press for reporting the things Manziel did.

So now Manziel has really imploded — not that this means he won’t be picked up by another football team, of course, but he has certainly imploded…

And after all much of the fun of watching NFL games is watching players get fucked up six ways to Sunday on and off the field: concussions, domestic violence, on-field fights, bar fights… Something in us loves fucked up athletes and loves to witness and contemplate the things they do that finally get them locked up. Right now there’s the insanely hyped OJ Simpson tv series.

It is a story that could tell us, on a smaller scale, why O.J. Simpson was the way he was, and what happens when a young man is venerated for his strength and power, and never has to learn how to do anything else.

It fails to tell us any of that.

But we can learn something by looking at the presidents and chancellors of our universities, people like Penn State’s Graham Spanier and Texas A&M’s John Sharp. They lead their university communities in venerating players – and of course sometimes coaches – whose darkness turns out to have been there for anyone to see.

This local editorial says all the right things about the budget-stressed state of Wyoming giving millions to university football and slashing millions from public education. (See this post for details.)

We don’t believe for one moment that this money is going to improve UW’s chances of having a winning football team – which really is the goal behind this. At best, it keeps pace with other schools in the Mountain West Conference. And it does nothing to ease the impacts of UW’s bigger problems: Quality athletes are not going to play in Laramie, at least not consistently, when they have options with better amenities and climates.

This is a myth, a dream, that UW’s athletics department and its supporters peddle. It is time to move on to a smaller conference and perhaps even a different division – at least in football.

True, there is some value in seeing athletics as the “front porch” of the university. But in times of fiscal crisis, it is unwise to toss millions at trivialities when cuts are being made that hurt the public schools, and UW’s academic programs, and the state’s poor.

The editorial board even tries to make the argument that sports are less serious than study.

Athletics are an extravagance; academics are not.

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Wyoming is just like Oklahoma, where the University of Oklahoma’s president is yet again explaining to stupid us (“the public misunderstands”) that we shouldn’t even ask the question posed in this Tulsa World headline:

HOW DO [OU’S FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL COACHES] MAKE $8 MILLION AT A SCHOOL FACING A $20 MILLION BUDGET CUT?

We shouldn’t even ask this, because the money’s not coming from the state and hell that’s how people spend their money in Oklahoma! They don’t give a shit about whatever else the university does. What else does UO do? Don’t ask! Don’t even ask!

Boren misunderstands that the real question isn’t about state or non-state funds. Oklahoma and Wyoming are two of our most happily and severely concussed states. They don’t cotton much, round them parts, to thinking.

Why, asks this writer, is Temple University going to be the next school to screw itself over but good by building a new football stadium? Why? And why does no one ever ask why?

The question that we never seem to ask is why… What we won’t ask, what we never ask, is why a college such as Temple University – or any college, really – should care [so much about things like football and football stadiums]. We won’t ask how a Top 25 ranking or a visit from ESPN helps fulfill the mission of an institution of higher learning, or why such an institution should spend any of its resources pursuing them, particularly when those resources are financed in large part by taxpayer and student debt.

Take, for instance, the University of Akron’s stadium, “a $55 million project that would be funded exclusively by private donations and stadium revenues. When it hosted its first game in 2009, it was a $62 million project funded primarily by student tuition and fees… [This] year [Akron’s deeply indebted stadium] is attracting the lowest attendance in the MAC.”

David Murphy provides other examples. There are many.

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But okay. Let’s go there. Why? Big stadiums and big football programs have nothing to do with (indeed they erode) the academic mission which defines a university, and they will almost certainly do terrible damage to everyone at the school (via deficits and scandals) except for the athletic department and whatever trustees own companies doing sports-related business with the university.

Some people will claim that the mystery of the new stadium is essentially a religious mystery, having to do with the “unchurched” American’s evolution away from houses of worship and toward football fields.

Clemson University coach Dabo Swinney is aggressively Christian, even letting one of his players get baptized on the 50-yard-line during practice, never mind that Clemson is a state school.

A Georgia public school is looking into a mass baptism on its football field that was posted on YouTube but later taken down.

If your font is a fifty yard line, you’re stadium-building on faith, not reason. The economics of New Life Stadium are simple: The Lord will provide.

But there’s more to the stadium mystery, I think.

UD suggests that at some universities it’s a combination of not being able to think of anything else to do, plus sexual fantasy. The two things are related, because when people don’t have much to do, when their lives seem kind of drifty and pointless and empty, they’re liable to do a lot of fantasizing.

I think some leaders of universities – presidents, trustees – don’t know what to do with themselves. A very high-profile professor, a leader, at the University of North Carolina spends years negotiating pretend grades for pretend student papers and thinks nothing of committing the grade-haggling to writing in an email. What was Jan Boxill thinking? asks the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The answer is absolutely nothing, just like her colleague Julius Nyang’oro; they were just sort of drifting along, lost in erotic reverie about their beautiful athletes for whom they would do anything, including destroy themselves and their university. An assistant coach at the University of Louisville comes up with the idea of turning an athletes’ dorm into a brothel. Why? Popped into his head one day during a sexual reverie. Popped into his head while he was thinking hard about how to make his beautiful athletes’ lives even more beautiful.

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You have to have a high threshold of embarrassment to read people describe their feelings about football.

I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…

Look at the shirtless boys with faces and torsos painted in the school colors; look at the cheerleaders on the fields, the ‘waves’ surging through the stands.

These men, either of whom could have written “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” represent countless sports-factory denizens spending their days in a haze of university-hatred and hormones.

Is hatred too strong? What sort of emotion allows you to seek and destroy any vestige of intellectual seriousness?

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One key here is hiring retired politicians as university presidents, good old boys who don’t give a shit about “academia,” whatever that is. The sort of men currently running, for instance, Florida State and Oklahoma University.

[The university’s academic unit can go, but] the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.

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Listen to this song. It also asks why. Listen to its lyrics, and imagine them sung by a university president as he or she thinks about one of the school’s football players. You just tiptoe into all my dreams…. It’s the kind of passion that will not be denied, no matter how many hearts are broken.

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UD thanks Ian.

Eight of the fifteen American university football teams that dominate the “most flagrant chaplaincies” list also dominate the “most team arrests” list.

“MOST FLAGRANT CHAPLAINCIES“:

Auburn University
University of Georgia
University of South Carolina
Mississippi State University
University of Alabama
University of Tennessee
Louisiana State University
University of Missouri
University of Washington
Georgia Tech
University of Illinois
Florida State University
University of Mississippi
University of Wisconsin
Clemson University

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MOST ARRESTS:

1) Washington State: 31
2) Florida: 24
T-3) Georgia: 22
T-3) Texas A&M: 22
5) Oklahoma: 21
T-6) Iowa State: 20
T-6) Missouri: 20
T-6) Ole Miss: 20
T-6) West Virginia: 20
T-10) Florida State: 19
T-10) Tennessee: 19
T-12) Alabama: 18
T-12) Iowa: 18
T-12) Kentucky: 18
T-15) LSU: 16
T-15) Marshall: 16
T-15) Oregon State: 16
T-15) Pittsburgh: 16
T-19) Arkansas: 14
T-19) Michigan: 14
T-19) Oklahoma State: 14
T-19) Purdue: 14
T-23) Auburn: 13
T-23) Colorado: 13
T-23) Kansas: 13

Whether it’s national disgrace University of Oklahoma or national disgrace Florida State, the crucial step in creating a totally shitty university is appointing as president a used-up political hack. Once you’ve given David “We can’t control the marketplace” Boren and John “I want FSU to have a chiropractic school” Thrasher their pointless sinecures, the sky’s the limit. Coaches and boosters and – er – fraternities – are free to run the school right into the ground.

FSU faculty begged the trustees not to appoint Thrasher; one professor called him, with remarkably accurate foresight, the “scary” rather than the “safe” choice. It’s scary to appoint passive stupid people to run things; active, clever, bad people step in and run them instead. It’s scary to attend a school where everyone has to hide from the football team. It’s scary to realize how quickly a campus can become a criminal syndicate.

Well, you take the comparative approach. Let’s say you’re comparing the University of Oklahoma and Florida State.

In the case of Oklahoma, the video of one of the most prominent students on campus punching the lights out of a woman remains private, and after a suspension the student has been put back on the football team; in the case of FSU, the video of a similarly prominent student punching the lights out of a woman is public, and he has been dismissed from the team.

Those who’ve seen both videos are able to offer a more detailed comparison.

Some are saying the Mixon tape is worse than the DeAndre Johnson tape, but I disagree. I thought the Johnson video was more graphic. The picture is more up-close from Tallahassee, and Mixon’s response appears more instinctual, which cuts him a little slack, for what that’s worth.

So, okay. You can choose a school where the assault was instinctual, versus a school where the assault was premeditated… You can choose a school where students who do this to women are put back on the team, or a school where students who do this to women are kept off the team… Hm… Hm…

An Orlando Sentinel columnist puts the matter in terms of the great currency of any university: knowledge.

[FSU] kicked [De’Andre Johnson] off the team Monday after video was released of him punching a woman in a bar. Somewhere, Ray Rice was having elevator flashbacks and Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon was grateful he plays for a school that still knows how to protect football stars who slug women.

The Sentinel writer even puts it in terms of one of the university’s disciplines: philosophy.

If a female … falls after getting hit by a football player and nobody sees the video, is it really that big of a deal?

Not at Oklahoma.

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If you’re a parent thinking through this decision with your daughter, maybe you should tend toward FSU. The batterer there gave the act a moment or two of thought, which would maybe have given your daughter a little time to defend herself… And actually Mixon is one of two woman batterers brought back onto the Oklahoma team – they obviously like their hard-hitting players, er, seasoned…

On the other hand, if tradition matters to you, you’ll find Oklahoma standing firmly and proudly in the past. One writer looks back on

… the days when athletes battering women was just another one of the dirty little secrets of big-time sports — right along with academic fraud, failed drug tests and severe head trauma.

But at Oklahoma, it’s still like that!

Still — Decisions, decisions…

… the lower depths? Do you THINK she wants to read about, much less write about, the lurid sub-basements of the American university?

Well yes okay. She does rather enjoy it.

And yet for years now, on this blog, she has noticed that she’ll do almost anything to avoid writing about fraternities.

Imagine you’re starting out as a reporter at a local paper, and you’re told that your first assignment will be a multi-part series on the systematic abuse of dogs at puppy mills. That’s the sort of excitement with which I go to details of stories about those brick colonials set aside on the American campus for the purpose of concentrating young men willing to drink themselves to death so that someone will like them. Cover this rape, UD! Cover that sadistic haze! UD: Learn the folkways of lads who ladle gin… anally!

Louis-Ferdinand Céline captured the inside of many fraternities better than any other writer:

It so happened that just to one side of my bench there was a big hole in the sidewalk, something like the Métro at home. That hole seemed propitious, so vast, with a stairway all of pink marble inside it. I’d seen quite a few people from the street disappear into it and come out again. It was in that underground vault that they answered the call of nature. I caught on right away. The hall where the business was done was likewise of marble. A kind of swimming pool, but drained of all its water, a fetid swimming pool, filled only with filtered, moribund light, which fell on the forms of unbuttoned men surrounded by their smells, red in the face from the effect of expelling their stinking feces with barbarous noises in front of everybody.

Men among men, all free and easy, they laughed and joked and cheered one another on, it made me think of a football game. The first thing you did when you got there was to take off your jacket, as if in preparation for strenuous exercise. This was a rite and shirtsleeves were the uniform.

In that state of undress, belching and worse, gesticulating like lunatics, they settled down in the fecal grotto. The new arrivals were assailed with a thousand revolting jokes while descending the stairs from the street, but they all seemed delighted.

The morose aloofness of the men on the street above was equated only by the air of liberation and rejoicing that came over them at the prospect of emptying their bowels in tumultuous company.

The splotched and spotted doors to the cabins hung loose, wrenched from their hinges. Some customers went from one cell to another for a little chat, those waiting for an empty seat smoked heavy cigars and slapped the backs of the obstinately toiling occupants, who sat there straining with their heads between their hands. Some groaned like wounded men or women in labor. The constipated were threatened with ingenious tortures.

When a gush of water announced a vacancy, the clamor around the free compartment redoubled, and as often as not a coin would be tossed for its possession. No sooner read, newspapers, though as thick as pillows, were dismembered by the horde of rectal toilers. The smoke made it hard to distinguish faces, and the smells deterred me from going too close.

Now imagine a second pink marble staircase that takes you even lower than this.

You are now in SAE, the only fraternity with two mentions on this list. The fact that a chapter of SAE is currently dominating domestic news because its members do racist chants (to the tune of the only song they’ve all been able to learn: If You’re Happy and You Know it Clap Your Hands) is kind of weird if you ask ol’ UD. This sort of thing is way mild for Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

Yes, it’s all guys; and this moving eulogy to what used to be a university ponders the grotesquerie of universities as settings for the ongoing drama of one’s struggle to be a man. John Shelton Reed’s opinion piece makes the point that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill used to be a good school until a group of rich men with their manhood at stake began to stick their dicks in it.

Other famous dick-stickers are Oklahoma State’s T. Boone Pickens (the entire university lolls open to Pickens; his dicksticking into the hedge fund and death payout markets really fucked the place up, but no one cares) and the University of Oregon’s Phil Knight, who has ginned up his new pleasure palace for UO football players with huge lettered signs saying things like EAT YOUR ENEMIES.

Famed Penn State had, of course, multiple and varied dick-stickers.

If the only university arena for at-stake manhood were athletics, it would be bad enough; but as ol’ T. Boone’s hedge fund maneuver demonstrates, sports programs already rife with financial, sexual, and academic perversion are only part one. Like “Big Stones” Larry Summers, who lost Harvard over a billion dollars on interest rate swaps (“No one had the stones to stand up to Summers when it came to this high-risk strategy of essentially borrowing at Treasury rates and investing the proceeds in an illiquid long-term endowment…”), T. Boone out-balled all voices of reason at Oklahoma State and lost the school an unimaginable fortune.

Yet Harvard is so rich, long hot Larry barely made it break a sweat. Ditto for T. Boone. Bouncy bouncy. Big deal.

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Now, soon-to-be-ex-universities like Yeshiva – that’s another matter. It does matter there, because – unless at the last minute Big Berries Rennert decides to give the place a couple of billion dollars – that school is permanently post-coital. (One of the characters in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer says to his lover, “I am fucking you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucked.” Insert Yeshiva in place of Tania.) Its trustees – trying to compensate for their loss of testosterone when sooooooper-macho fellow trustee Bernie Madoff went to prison – hedge funded away money Yeshiva didn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t ever have.

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University Diaries thinks it’s time to open the chemical castration conversation.

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Update: At-stake manhood strikes again:

Polish anxieties about who’s blowing who and who’s got the biggest dick are apparently going to bring down the government.

Regular televised “exposés” of the already fully exposed academic reality of big-time sports schools (the latest such broadcast is available for viewing on Tuesday, when HBO will tell you what you already know about what universities do to keep many of their revenue-sports players academically eligible) will, UD has long predicted on this blog, eventually disappear. Eventually most sports factories will make their head football coaches president of the university (Jim Tressel’s a candidate at Akron, from which he’ll make a move back to Ohio State; I think Nick Saban or one of his assistant coaches will be Alabama’s next president, etc.). The idea is a no-brainer: When you’ve got even a vaguely respectable academic at the helm, she’ll have enormous difficulty dealing with the SAT cheating, the fake classes, the hilariously named academic advising centers (“[A]cademic advising centers “operate as ‘schools within schools’ and are responsible for enabling student-athletes with elementary educations to graduate from big-time universities.”), and all the rest. But once it’s clear that your university really is just a sports factory, there’s no scandal to expose. The curriculum is all sports-specific; the trustees and administration are all former college athletes; there’s not a scintilla of pretense to intellectual activity, let alone intellectual respectability. It’s the wave of the future. It’s the only way to go.

What’s nice about this rather typical appraisal of America’s many football schools is that the writer names names. I mean, he doesn’t say this school and that school are no longer schools. He simply provides the data and lets you arrive at the obvious conclusion.

So the standouts, the almost-entirely-without-discernable-academic-missions, are:

University of Arkansas
University of Nebraska
University of Oklahoma
Auburn University

These are the Big Four, the prime nullities, that this particular author highlights – schools that spend huge sums on games and stadiums and all, and vanishingly little on education. So little that their academic mission is pretty much gone. There are plenty of other such places, including almost every school in West Virginia.

These four schools naturally take up a lot of air time on University Diaries, each of them a massive military industrial academic fraud violence against women drunk driving plus all them other naughty big boy thangs complex. Nebraska loved to death two of America’s current high-profile bad boys – Richie Incognito and Dominic Raiola – so that place (along with the University of Florida ’cause of loved-up Aaron Hernandez) is at the top of Google News lately. But Auburn, with its long tradition of massive cheating, and its board of trustees packed with former Auburn athletes, is perennially in the news, as are vastly corrupt Arkansas and Oklahoma…

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Speaking of tradition — that whole tradition thing, so important to all of these schools, can really backfire. Just like Penn State, all four schools on this guy’s list seem to think they have these glorious traditions…

When things go wrong in nullity schools, when the essential scumminess of what they’re about becomes too public, they often try to play this tradition card, as if the act of reminding people of the essential glory of what they’ve always been about will make people’s backs straighten… Yet these places forget that although they might have won many games over a long period of time, the scumminess was always there and everyone knows it…

So – here’s an example of the problem.

Louisiana State University is trying to get its students to stop commanding their game day opponents, in unison, on national television, to suck their dicks. How to go about this?

LSU decided to initiate something called Tradition Matters, which is essentially a series of notices all over campus, signed by the president of the school, asking students to stop saying suck my dick in unison on national television.

An LSU student journalist writes:

I didn’t realize how sleazy [the cheer] made my university look until I sat in a press box last season and watched my professional colleagues shake their heads in disgust.

Yet in what way will an appeal to LSU’s traditions help the matter? LSU qua football school has always been pretty sleazy… Indeed sleaziness is kind of a point of pride for the entire state of Louisiana... traditionally… It seems fully in keeping with Louisiana’s traditions that the president of an academic institution there would devote his time and the institution’s money to plastering campus with a plea that its scholars not get drunk and invite a national television audience to suck their dicks…

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So you see the problem. Nullity schools cannot make an appeal to their academic traditions, to the ethos of reason and moral reflection at the heart of non-null universities; they are forced to make an appeal to their athletic traditions. But athletic traditions at schools like these are as much about decades of publicly pleading for people to fellate you as they are about clean-limbed sportsmanship.