Once an obscure school, Edinburg now captures the world’s attention with its football program’s amazing, award-winning defensive end, who … well, the thing that caught the world’s eye was his vicious attack on a referee who did something he didn’t like. But let’s roll the whole tape.

Edinburg High senior defensive end Emmanuel Duron, the team’s star defender, was flagged on a play early during the second quarter after he shoved an opposing offensive lineman to the ground and attempted to make a tackle on PSJA High freshman quarterback Jaime Lopez after the whistle had blown the play dead.

Duron and referee Fred Gracia exchanged words after the play was over, and Gracia ejected Duron from the contest after back-to-back unsportsmanlike penalties on the same play.

Duron, who was leading the Bobcats in tackles (102) and sacks (eight) through four games, then charged onto the field as teammates raced after him in an attempt to hold him back. The senior defensive end collided with Gracia, checking him chest-to-chest at full speed and sending him to the turf.

Duron was escorted out from the stadium by a team of four Edinburg police officers who were working security for the game. He was not handcuffed, but was removed from the premises and did not return.

… Duron was suspended for the remainder of the 2019-20 soccer season after a similar incident occurred during a match on the pitch last year against crosstown rival Edinburg Vela.

Duron was The Monitor’s All-Area Boys Wrestler of the Year last season.

You’ll note that I linked you to local coverage up there. Here’s Emmanuel Duron’s current Google News page. He and his school have really hit the big time.

I linked you to local stuff because in order to understand the sort of world that generates and lionizes notoriously violent eighteen year olds, you need to understand Texas. Everyone else headlines this story with words like violent, disgusting, shocking; the local press doesn’t even make reference to the assault.

Bittersweet: Bobcats beat

Bears for 6A playoff berth,

lose star defender

The most important thing, the headline thing, is that his team won; but the victory was “bittersweet” because they “lost” their “star defender.” No explanation of how they lost him.

First two paragraphs:

The Edinburg High Bobcats and PSJA High Bears met Thursday night at Richard R. Flores Stadium to play a win-or-go-home District 31-6A zone play-in game that started off with a frenetic pace.

But the moment was bittersweet for the Bobcats, who lost their best defensive player during a 35-21 victory over PSJA High to advance to the Class 6A Division I playoffs, after an ugly moment during the first half threatened to derail the entire game.

So the lead is that the game had a good fast pace, and that tragically one side’s best defensive player was “lost.” But they won anyway! The still unspecified event that prompted the loss almost derailed the game… And an assault on a ref followed by four police officers dragging the player from the field would certainly derail a game anywhere outside of Texas; but why not take advantage of the points your side made as a result of the unhinged physical attacks and the cheating of your most admired player?

Oh, the article goes on to recount the attack; but look at the whole thing. Almost all of it is taken up with fans’ excited accounts of the win.

This blog has long covered our most revered college football players – the crazed giants led by Richie Incognito. Duron is king of the Edinburg world and will soon be fought over by recruiters from all the big football universities. He will soon be king of the world.

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PS: I’m always astounded at the fragile sensibilities of sportswriters. These guys are blown away (“unreal,” one of them writes) when violence like this happens on the field. Someone needs to tell them that it’s routine. German soccer officials get bodyguards.

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UPDATE: The school has withdrawn altogether from the playoffs and has apologized profusely. It’s a start. But the district faces a world of pain. Litigation. The worst imaginable global publicity. Huge money awards. Plus questions as to why their Incognito-in-Training wasn’t removed from football, given that he’d already been removed from soccer. Did the school think a differently shaped ball would mean different behavior? The sports-mad folk of Texas have a great deal to answer for, in so many respects. This is merely the latest disgrace.

Another Update: “Duron was charged with assault in Edinburg Municipal Court, a class A misdemeanor. If convicted, the charge is punishable by up to one year in county jail and a fine of up to $4,000.” That’s the least of his and his school’s problems. Because of the global attention to the case if nothing else (and he may have prior arrests/convictions), he’s liable to get some jail time; the school district may face an expensive lawsuit. It seems especially damaging and unfortunate for the particular school (coach, principal) that Duron was allowed to keep playing. Brace yourself for lurid tales of his off-field violence from friends and teammates.

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Mugshot. Adorable I’ll fuck you up too motherfucker expression on the lad’s face.

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MORE: And here’s what the players – gathering, with LET US PLAY signs in their hands, for a protest in front of the administration building – don’t get. It seems obvious to them – and to a lot of other reasonable people – that collective punishment is unfair. THEY didn’t attack the game official.

But they are in fact a collective, and collectively they represent a school, a school district, a town, even a local culture. What happened on their football field was grotesque — so grotesque that it has captured the disgusted attention of significant parts of the world, not just America. Something is wrong with Edinburg High School, not just with the dude who socked the official. It knew full well it had a monstrous person on its teams, and it removed that person from soccer. But not from football. Why the hell not?

Let UD tell you why. Because football is already an incredibly violent sport (soccer’s violence is all about the audience, with fans in some countries routinely staging fascist rallies while the game proceeds), with enormous tolerance — nay, admiration — of violence. You can just hear the coach telling the principal (assuming the principal even bothered expressing hesitation to him about Duron) that the dude is admittedly too hot-headed for soccer, but football suits his temperament fine. You can hear the coach reminding the principal (and is it a factor that he’s a man and she’s a woman?) that he’s the most valuable player on the team, and they’ve got to get to the playoffs. “They’ve played their hearts out all season. He’s learned from the soccer punishment. I’ll take responsibility for his behavior.”

Football culture up and down the line is pretty fucking twisted; but high school kids! Texas! Ain’t my place out here on Coastal Elite Coast to tell football-crazed Texan towns how to live; but I can tell them that we’re all watching, and when their way of life produces Emmanuel Duron we’re judging everyone down there, not just Duron. Durons are enabled by groups of moral idiots who can’t see past the next field goal. If students at Edinburg High want to be angry, they should be angry with their coach, their principal, and their superintendent. Those are the people who make Durons happen.

With the shocked and appalled eyes of the world on their little school, Edinburg needed to acknowledge its twistedness, and needed to make a strong reformist statement. Sorry, kiddies.

… is one of UD‘s favorite (translated) literary titles; despite its sad content, the words themselves have a lilting poetic something (say them out loud a few times), with their thrice-invoked or…er…or…

And everyone knows that sorrow is a beautiful word, sounding the dignity of its emotion in its soft open letters. Give a title sorrow and watch it soar: I Am a Maid of Constant Sorrow. The Sorrow and the Pity. The Sorrows of Young Werther. The Sorrow of Love. Infant Sorrow.

Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart.

Every bond is a bond to sorrow.

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UD often thinks of Disorder and Early Sorrow as she follows our collegiate football players into the big leagues. Plenty of them escape disorder and early sorrow, but some do not, as the media’s current disordered darling, Antonio Brown, abundantly demonstrates. A non-graduate of appalling (feast your eyes) Central Michigan University, the man is an absolutely brilliant athlete. Tens of millions of dollars in professional contracts have been thrown at him, and he’s pissed virtually every cent of it away. These two commentators may disagree about whether he should be allowed to keep playing football, but they seem to agree that something’s wrong with the guy’s brain.

And yet, and yet. This writer notes that in one of Brown’s many rageful Trumplike tweets he makes “an interesting point.” Brown bitches that our old friend Richie Incognito remains in the game even though he appears to be violently demented; why shouldn’t Brown, who rolls the same way, continue to play? “AB is not wrong, is something I never thought I’d say. It was absolutely confounding when the Raiders signed Richie Incognito…”

… you’re a better man than I am. The writer struggles to give a complete account of all the multimillionaire assholes on NFL teams, but like everyone else who tries this trick, he seems overcome, toward the middle of the piece, by his own incredulity at the numbers.

UD wonders if it will ever occur to this guy that the reason violent, amoral, and on occasion overtly demento, shitskies are all over our best teams is that the game targets them. Still unclear? RECRUITS them. SCOUTS for them. COMPETES for them. LAVISHLY REWARDS them. The worst of the worst, most recently, were both team captains. Beau idéal: Richie Incognito. Tell me if this is still over your head.

Even Argentina’s beginning to worry about it, but American football pays through the nose to do the on-field tango with Richie Incognito, Antonio Brown, and Vontaze Burfict. Audiences love their moves; at a time when NASCAR carnage is at an all-time low, there’s nothing like football to keep the crushed-skull statistics steady. Crowds went wild, most recently, for beaten-comatose Mason Rudolph, dragged upright off the field because no one could manage to scare up a stretcher (each NFL team is only worth around three billion dollars so there are budgetary issues).

Vontaze has been suspended and Brown dropped. Looks as though it’ll take a few more Incognito attacks for the Raiders to do something about Richie. But even if the team has to give up Richie, Americans also love watching the legal and recruiting moves that ensue after the insane giants that bestride our game fields are removed from play. How will their appeal or lawsuit go? Which lucky team will now welcome the big bad head case?

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Above all, American football needs to do something about Juju Smith-Schuster and players like him.

[Ruldolph’s agony] was so upsetting that teammate JuJu Smith-Schuster was in tears on the field.

We don’t need crybabies out there making the audience think there’s something wrong with kicking the shit out of people’s brains.

It’s getting positively elegiac out there, as football scribes in empty stadia find themselves reduced to the elaboration of despair. At most of our universities, the whole lucrative rah-rah project has come crashing down, leaving intellectual institutions bereft of money as well as dignity as they desperately try, with cheap booze and trinkets, to get people to sit down and watch, in its full sordid duration, an unwatchable game.

It’s not just the disgusting injuries (concussions; “gruesome” fractures; coach-bullied players’ deaths from overexertion); the rampant violence against women and other students among players; the university-budget-destroying coaches’ salaries, buyouts, and lawsuits (“Schools end up not only paying millions to their former coach, and millions to their new coach; they have to pay millions more to their new coach’s previous school, so he can leave to come to their school.”); the institution-destroying bad publicity arising from corrupt merchandise and recruitment deals; the filth all over campus from drunk tailgaters the day after; student riots when they win; student riots when they lose; the school- and city-destroying insistence on building vast new indebted stadia to accommodate the two thousand people who want to attend games; university presidents pretending that borderline-psychotic players (Aaron Hernandez, Richie Incognito, Lawrence Phillips, Johnny Manziel) are just feisty charming lads; presidents honoring coaches who hang out in school showers raping children; assistant coaches who set up houses of prostitution in players’ dorms, for players and their fathers; the institution-wide academic scandals arising from the sickening compromise of faculty integrity as students admitted only for their football skills are handed bogus … not degrees, since few graduate, but bogus courses; it’s also the sheer boredom and insult of the stadium experience (“The issue for me is games lasting nearly four hours. TV commercials are killing the game … I just can’t sit in the hot weather that long in back breaking seats.”).

What a shocker that few outside of fraternity members (the functional equivalent of football players) and hopeless drunks (who aren’t even financially viable, since they typically stay just for the tailgate) want anything to do with the shit-show.

Where did the university go in all this?

Buried, under mounds of Bud bottles.

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.

Just hours before Richie Incognito, a violent paranoid wreck with a long history of mental illness, was hauled off to the hospital, this Vikings fan wrote:

[S]igning Incognito at least gives the Vikings more options at figuring out the best offensive line combination for next season… [H]e has seemingly turned a corner for the better …

Sho nuff. That’s what they said of Richie way back when he attended the University of Nebraska, and then during his … brief scholarship run at the University of Oregon.

Incognito fell into [a] mind-numbing pattern of offensive behavior, always washed away by the fact that someone was willing to ignore his troubles because he could physically handle himself on the football field. He’s been identified as a menace, suspended and dismissed. He’s been kicked out of games for fighting, accused of being dirty, and now, exposed as an apparent bully who shook down a younger teammate for $15,000 in milk money.

Universities and professional teams have been all over this profoundly damaged man for years and years and years, excited by the vicious bullying that is his sickness and their field advantage. Surely after Richie’s latest incarceration and observation for dangerous insanity he will be picked up by a team once again, and we can once again enjoy the spectacle of this volcano of a man erupting all over a town near you, as local reporter/boosters and coaching staff assure us he’s turned a corner.

Arrest season comes early this year for the SEC, and a local writer in Alabam assures us there’s nothing to see here.

When you have a group of 100-plus young men between ages 18 and 22, the law of averages dictates that a handful of them are going to get into trouble of one fashion or another.

As I wrote nearly three years ago, this sort of thing goes on everywhere and has for decades. Your least favorite team isn’t “recruiting thugs” or cutting corners on character any more than your favorite team is or ever has.

And anyway, I wouldn’t enjoy too much schadenfreude at the expense of your rival team if I was you. As history has shown us, your time is probably coming.

RELAX. Twas ever thus; it’s universal; and it’s completely 100% natural. These guys are just like all the other guys hardwired for violence. Richie Incognitos are not made; they’re just random young men statistically likely to get into trouble.

Why, UD wonders, do people like this dude bother writing articles about a perfectly natural phenomenon? He knows it will happen every year, and he admits it’s entirely unremarkable. So what is the point of covering each crime?

Or if you insist on covering something that’s not newsworthy but simply normal, why not cover it honestly? Why not admit that what’s abnormal here is a system of universities and their administrators turning themselves inside out to recruit not normatively trouble-making young men, but carefully nurtured steroidal grotesques like college star Richie Incognito? Let the university-cultivated and university-venerated Incognito stand for the legions of highly evolved human battering rams that dominate life at many of this country’s universities.

Remember what the Alabama guy forgot: The whole sick feed ’em and need ’em system set up by universities, of all places.

There’s your story: The angry pummeling gods of the American university campus, and the students, faculty, and leadership that love them.

… and Blotto God …

If your university worships football, then Johnny Manziel and Richie Incognito and Jameis Winston and so many others in the pantheon shock and appall you again and again as they spit on the divinity you have granted them and leave your school as lost as the nation of North Korea will be, should The Dear Leader ever be called home.

The latest scene of disillusion and devastation is the University of Oklahoma, whose quarterback is a drunk who gets in fights with cops and then, when they try to arrest him, flees. A local scribe puts this football-god violence in the context of all the other such violence in the program and concludes it’s a real shame and something should definitely be done about it.

These are tough days for Sooner football. Not as tough as the final days of the Switzer Era when guns and drugs and woes abounded, and yet, the release of the Joe Mixon video and the revelation that Dede Westbrook was twice arrested for domestic violence before arriving in Norman has stained the program.

Stained? Woe unto thee, scribes and Pharisees! Be careful, when thou liest safe and soft, lest thou forget Baylor.

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UD thanks two of her readers for the Jameis Winston link.

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The tweets are coming in.

Positive for Oklahoma fans is at least Baker Mayfield wasn’t charged with punching any women.

All in good time my little pretty; all in good time.

Her sentence is maybe a little grammatically awkward at the end, but Sally Jenkins gets the job done here, noting first of all that corruption in university football is currently massive and growing. She notes more particularly that America’s most rape-licious campus – oh-so-Baptist Baylor – should get NCAA’s death penalty, but probably won’t cuz there’s too much money at stake. “[T]he death penalty is difficult to contemplate when major college football revenue is more than $3.4 billion.”

Plus, whether it’s Whorehouse University of Louisville or Sex Slave Baylor University (spiritual sex slaves, like what did they call those Greek temple prossies, hierodoulos), who are we to interfere with freedom of religion? It’s been said often enough – and it’s utterly obvious – that pro- and pretend-not-pro- football is a religion in America. The thick description here, as Clifford Geertz would put it, is that of multiple temple cults where worship of naughty haughty Player Gods means full submission to them. Full legal, financial, academic, physical and sexual submission. THERE IS BUT ONE GOD AND HIS NAME IS RICHIE INCOGNITO. We love steroidal fucks like Richie and want them to do whatever they want with us. They beat the shit out of our students, rape them, whatever, and the president of our university pleads Give them another chance! This is our holiest of mystery sects, full of blood and sex and brain spatter, and it all plays out, of all places, on our university campuses.

I’m not gonna do that thing where I say They started as monasteries and other religious-type entities and look how far they’ve fallen! I’m not gonna say universities – much less American universities – must continue to represent a higher, purer, realm of activity than, say, Myrtle Beach Bike Week.

No, no, let it rip. Let sex-scandal-soaked University of Minnesota produce as a finalist for regent a football player with exposure issues. Let UMN’s current regents grumble about having been left out of the hiring and compensation decisions around their incoming multimillionaire football coach (background on him here). Let the probable upcoming scandal and massive buyout of this guy’s contract also weigh heavily on the pointless dithering trustees. Fine. Fine.

Go ahead and make universities places where highly paid employees routinely injure students so badly they have to be hospitalized. Where brainwork means concussions. Football players with exposure issues are part of the grand legacy of American universities, as are sadistic-training hospitalizations. As are – at some of our highest profile schools – child rape, gang rape, and woman battering.

But consider this:

I don’t want to scare you, but more and more people are talking about a fundamental change in the higher education of this country. More and more people are talking about a minor league for football.

And American universities had better watch out, or it’s ave atque vale Richie Incognito, Johnny Manziel, and Peyton Manning. These guys are not merely the heroes of schools like Nebraska and Tennessee – they’re the trustees of the future. Their ethos is the school ethos. All the money and the passion and the very identity of the university follow them. What happens when American teenagers are able to go directly into a minor league system and bypass the university?

UD‘s friend David Ridpath is all excited.

For anyone that loves football at all levels and wants college football in a more educational setting along with providing more talent for the NFL, it is simply a no brainer.

A lot of people are excited. But if you’re a university, ask yourself: What happens to the trillion dollars you’ve already invested in new stadiums and all that shit? You’re already looking at seriously declining attendance at the games, and serious resistance to paying vaster and vaster student athletic fees. Much more fundamentally, you are football. Nebraska, Penn State, a hundred others – What happens when a few grade-conscious pussies tiptoe out on the field for you? As Mrs Dalloway put it – the death of the soul…

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UD thanks Charlie.

Longtime readers know that UD uses that term to designate the tendency of the local booster press to respond to violent university football players by focusing not on the scandal of American schools recruiting people who rape and/or beat up their students, but rather on the sainted martyred suffering university football coaches who only meant well when they pulled out all the stops to attract Richie Incognito and others like him to our campuses. Let’s not talk about the gross neglect demonstrated by admitting dangerous people precisely because they’re dangerous (you want to assemble groups of big nasty types for the team – results range from Baylor on down); let’s talk about the poignant disappointment of Father Coach as he watches his wonderful lads go astray…

So there’s a perfect current example of Coacha Inconsolata, written by a University of Oregon hack. Let’s scathe through it, starting with its headline.

Eddie Heard’s Arrest Another
Headache Mark Helfrich Doesn’t Need

Did he give himself the headache? Yes – he and his recruiting guys went after people they knew posed an off-field threat. The important thing now is for everyone in the community – led by the hack – to forget that and to express shock and despair on behalf of the coach who just knew this guy would make an exemplary gentleman scholar… a more than worthy addition to the Oregon campus community…

[Coach] Mark Helfrich might want to buy stock in Advil.

The 2016 Oregon football season has been one headache after another with a bad defense, changing quarterbacks and a five-game losing streak. His job security has been under fire and only let up some with last week’s win and will quickly heat back up if or when USC defeats the Ducks on Saturday.

God knows how he’ll weather a possible humongous buyout from his “a five-year, $17.5 million contract worth an average of $3.5 million per season.” If you have tears, prepare to shed them now...

Now news comes out that linebacker Eddie Heard has been arrested on Wednesday evening on misdemeanor charges of fourth-degree assault and harassment that was a result of an incident at an off-campus bar. Heard was immediately suspended for Oregon’s upcoming game, but more importantly, the incident is just another unwanted issue that Helfrich needs to explain to the media.

… To Helfrich’s credit, however, he seems to be on top of the situation. Chip Kelly didn’t have many weaknesses in his time at Oregon, but dealing with off-the-field problems wasn’t his strong suit. He was often slow to recognize those issues and tended to “get all of the information” before acting. Helfrich suspended Heard the very next day after Heard’s arrest.

This good and great man! Now comes news that one of the bruisers he recruited beat up a student! How much can one person bear? But listen – here’s the good news. Unlike the last coach, with all his bruiser arrests, this one dumps the guy right away.

While everything wasn’t rosy on campus, things were beginning to take a turn and a win over USC on the road might complete that turn with the thoughts of the Ducks might be contenders once again next season.

That still may be the narrative around 8 pm Saturday night. Oregon is a double-digit underdog and an upset would be huge.

Heard’s arrest, however, puts a temporary halt to the good feelings that were just starting to become apparent at Oregon.

This is straight out of the Monty Python restaurant sketch.

Manager: It gets me here. I can’t give you any excuses for it – there are no excuses. I’ve been meaning to spend more time in the restaurant recently, but I haven’t been too well. Things aren’t going very well back there. The poor cook’s son has been put away again, and poor old Mrs Dalrymple who does the washing up can hardly move her poor fingers, and then there’s Gilberto’s war wound – but they’re good people, and they’re kind people, and together we were beginning to get over this dark patch. There was light at the end of the tunnel… now this… now this!!

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Hey ladies! Duck!

Details on the latest player assaults… against women.

It’s gone way past Orwellian in Pullman Washington, where the most criminalized football team in the country, Washington State University, enjoys high praise from the police chief even as his officers keep arresting its players. The team’s coach, a big-mouth bully trailing accusations of player abuse from coaching job to coaching job, is loudly and persistently outraged that his guys, currently subjecting the WSU student body to torture and disfigurement, should be arrested at all, given that most of this stuff started during fights and other people were also fighting but his guys were picked up just because everyone knows who they are and just because they’re the biggest so they inflict the most damage.

Add humongous, ever-growing student athletic fees, and you’ve certainly got a creeping Ick Factor problem on that campus…

WSU is becoming a kind of laboratory for an emergent reality in American football schools. Until now, we’ve been told to regard player violence on many football campuses as a sometime thing – this domestic violence, that armed robbery, that melee, that beat-up freshman. The coach’s job was to be the wounded daddy, disappointed that junior had misbehaved. The player disappeared and we went on with the show.

WSU shows us how this picture has evolved. The coach has gone from disappointed daddy to belligerent defender of violent people. Sure, they’re violent! But so are a lot of other people, and if other violent people aren’t arrested, our guys shouldn’t be.

The violence itself has become less individualized and more team-centered: Attacks aren’t just one lunatic like Richie Incognito; they’re now liable to be three or four players working as a … team. Which is how schools like WSU rack up national most-arrested titles.

Everything’s getting more explicit: Under pressure from splashy New York Times exposés, police departments like Pullman’s are more likely to actually arrest players.

And though schools keep trying to fudge the numbers, huge spikes in student fees to pay for the glorious athletics department have not gone unnoticed.

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UD thinks Mike Leach, a very high-profile Donald Trump supporter, knows exactly what he’s doing. Once a man like Trump is elected, the sky’s the limit.

This University of North Carolina student (yes! UNC again – talk about scandal fatigue) – the student UD quotes up there – isn’t quite up on the M.O. of big football schools, so UD will help her. Listen up, oh latest victim.

Football schools are looking for big mean bruisers to play on their football team. Not all bruisers are nasty off the field, but some are, and football schools tend not to care much about off-field behavior. If Richie Incognito beats up a few Nebraska students, BFD. Put a guy like that on a campus full of wussses and they’re bound to irritate him at some point. As for coeds… are you kidding me? There are athlete dorms in this country which have been converted to whorehouses.

There are costs to winning, see. Students are of course obliged to pay the monetary costs. But there’s also surgery on that dislocated jaw (a player didn’t like the way you looked at him) and a lifetime of humiliation and rage because the school made fun of you when you claimed a player raped you.

Not that there aren’t costs for the school itself. Lawsuits galore from many injured parties. Ten million dollar buyouts to make foul sadistic cheating coaches go away. I could go on.

This latest UNC outrage will, UD reckons, be a big story. This blog will follow it every step of the way.

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UD thanks David and Ken.

At this late date in the history of scandalous Baylor University, we shouldn’t be surprised that this very assertively Christian University lacks the basic moral clarity a local newspaper columnist displays. “[W]hat Zamora did was illegal. But to me it’s not about the legality and more about what Zamora’s actions say about him as a person. A good, kindhearted, person doesn’t abuse innocent animals.”

[Baylor] fans just endured a disgusting sexual assault scandal and many are having a hard time supporting the team after that. But we were told all the guilty parties were removed from the team, so we’re not rooting for sexual predators. Baylor shouldn’t turn around and ask those who stood by them to root for an animal abuser.

Actually, Baylor just stonewalled – rather than endured – its way through a sexual assault scandal. It was dragged kicking and screaming to doing the right thing.

Baylor University is that most curious thing: a Christian institution seemingly designed to encourage cruelty and viciousness.

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What I’m talking about at Baylor goes beyond the moral dissonance demanded of all serious football fans – you must adore a sport so freakishly violent that its beau idéal is Richie Incognito, even as you tell yourself you’re adoring clean-cut all-American fun.

But that’s nothing. That’s step one. Now place yourself at Baylor. Or at Notre Dame. Pile university and Christianity on top of all that dissonance. Reconcile vast mass worship of a hyper-concussive sport, quite a few of whose standout players feature, on the field and in their private lives, exactly the sort of lunatic aggression you’d expect, with some stubborn vestigial notion in your mind, some vague remembrance, that the bloody ritual you’re adoring takes place on hallowed intellectual and spiritual ground.

It should be difficult to enjoy yourself unadulteratedly under these conditions, as the bullies, brawlers, domestic abusers, rapists, and animal floggers (fuck academic cheaters; forget cheaters; c’est entendu) bloody each other down there…

But hey. Turns out not only isn’t it difficult; it’s easy. It’s a pleasure.

Because – to state the bleeding obvious – violence is the primary object of worship in the world of Baylor University. You’re sitting in Waco – home of last year’s enormous bikers-with-guns melee/massacre. You’re sitting in the heart of Trump territory. Your choice for national leader is the man who has turned a presidential election into The Rime of the Ancient Tackler.

Strangely, you don’t even like nobly violent people; you cheer on chickenshits like Trump – a man who crapped all over a war hero because he was captured and “I like people who weren’t captured.” You cheer on players who beat up women, children, and animals.

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Some like it hot.

Hot and bloody.

It’s the Baylor way.