It’s been real, following the University of Nebraska on this blog. This proud enabler of Lawrence Phillips, Richie Incognito and a host of other great players has its own system for figuring out a person’s age: Three years per DUI. So in keeping his recruitment coach in the program after the man’s third DUI, Nebraska’s AD notes that the 45-year old is after all “a young man” with his whole life before him. So 45 in DUI years means that the guy is actually only fifteen years old.

In helping to put this guy back on the road to his fourth DUI, Nebraska’s AD showed the sensitivity and moral clarity for which this university has become famous.

“[We knew] we weren’t going to make everybody happy, especially those who have been uniquely affected by that sort of behavior. So we respect that and appreciate that.”

Yes, those of you paralyzed for life or, you know, bereft of a child because of people who drive drunk – you have certainly been uniquely affected! And we can all totally understand and appreciate that you might have an exaggerated reaction to this sort of thing because of your unfortunate personal experiences…

If you’ve taken an antiemetic in the last hour or so, feel free to put Nebraska in my search engine to review the history of this wasteland.

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UD thanks John.

… because, according to the investigative report in the aftermath of the Miami Dolphins’ Richie Incognito bullying scandal, he

lied to investigators, attempted to convince [the player Incognito bullied] to exonerate Incognito, and [himself] participated in the taunting of players

you might want to be careful. You might want in particular to keep an eye on the coach.

I mean, Manziel was all about bullying plus really disgusting and out of control behavior, all of which the team and the school, from the chancellor on down, not only tolerated but seemed to celebrate… And maybe, you know, it wasn’t such a great idea, reputation-wise, in the immediate aftermath of Manziel, to hire Jim Turner, fresh off being fired from the Dolphins for his apparently very bad behavior with his buddy Incognito.

Another reason you might want to keep an eye on this coach is that he seems rather bitter he’s been forced to lower himself from the big boys to college level ball – he’s filed a big-ass defamation suit against the guy who wrote the report that said bad things about him and Incognito… Seems to be trying to get his own reputation back and maybe ditch his school gig for another professional team. I mean, any school might want to avoid this character…

But Texas A&M, one of this blog’s perennial clown schools, is not any school. Texas A&M is a broad shouldered good ol’ boy football uber alles (though truth be told th’aint much alles there for football to be uber) kinda school and don’t matter to them one bit that they’ve got players like Manziel and coaches like Turner cuz that’s how you win games. Not that the school’s win/loss record looks very good, but, you know, it’s Texas (Rick Perry was an A&M cheerleader) and a boy can dream.

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So before I tell you the latest from Texas A&M, it might help to provide a specific example of the kind of guy Jim Turner, recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary from this school, is.

For Christmas 2012, Turner gave all the Dolphins offensive linemen gift bags. Inside the bags were inflatable female dolls. But Turner, knowing that offensive lineman Andrew McDonald was frequently harassed by other linemen with homosexual slurs, gave the tackle a male blow-up doll to join in on the “joke.”

When Turner was asked about the incident that plenty of others recalled without a problem, he said he couldn’t remember.

You see UD‘s point. You’re going to hire a coach with that bad a memory? UD‘s getting on in years, but she’s confident she could remember giving blow up dolls to offensive linemen for Christmas. Notice that “plenty of others” were able to reach back in time and recall that holiday season…

So anyway Texas A&M’s coach hires this guy, this Jim Turner, and gives him a big fat salary, and I don’t find any record of anyone minding… Like, say, maybe, a woman student or two, or a woman professor or two, might find something a little off about the whole thing… But no. The place is almost entirely a football school, and why bother? Turner in fact worked at the school in years past, before he got raised to the big leagues, and his good buddies there took him back and that’s that.

Anyway, not only did this school’s football coach not keep an eye on Jim Turner; he turned his back and let Jim Turner loose on the football team’s vast Texas fan base. He looked the other way while, at a big public event intended to appeal in particular to women, Turner and another assistant coach presented funny material – the sort of material you’d write if for a special seasonal gift to your friends you share the sexual technology that means so much to you – they’d written about women and football. (More images here.)

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There’s an old New Yorker short story titled Man Here Keeps Getting Arrested All the Time. UD thinks of this title when she thinks of the adorably incorrigible men of Texas A&M – men like Manziel and Turner and lots of others (the school has one of the highest arrest rates among university sports teams) who keep getting suspended and arrested all the time. Turner has just pivoted from being fired by a professional football team for being morally disgusting to being suspended by a university team for being sexually disgusting.

And when his two-week suspension is over?

You know the answer.

His $200,000 raise will be announced.

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Okay. And ladies? A&M ladies who were in the audience for Turner’s performance and complained about it?

You were offended? You tweeted the images and got ol’ Jimboy in trouble again?

Don’t come looking for sympathy to UD. One of the first safety rules you’re supposed to learn is Be aware of your surroundings. Your (chosen!) surrounding is Texas A&M!

Look for a school that isn’t run by people who slobber over Johnny Manziel and hump latex.

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As always, things only get really good when the local booster press has time to reflect on things and share its thoughts.

[L]et’s … not blow this out of proportion. [Jeff] Banks and Turner showed bad taste, but they meant well. It was a charity event that raised more than $20,000. It happened Wednesday night, with more than 700 women there, and it didn’t go viral until Friday. So 200 women didn’t email Woodward first thing Thursday looking for blood… [The head football coach, Kevin Sumlin,] should be commended on how A&M has remained off the police blotter recently, for the most part. A&M had seven football players arrested from the end of the 2013 seasons until early June, one of them (Darian Claiborne) arrested three times and another (Isaiah Golden) arrested twice.

A&M has had one arrest since the end of last season, wide receiver Speedy Noil, was driving without a license.

So kudos to Sumlin…

Our theme today is the way our universities’ love of football leads them astray, breaks their hearts, and damn near kills their students.

Mad about the boys, some universities import major league bruisers to campus, encourage their violent tendencies (Sign in the football players’ cafeteria at the University of Oregon: EAT YOUR ENEMIES), and even teach them to attack people as a team.

Of course the attack-objects the universities have in mind are opposing players, but ol’ UD has been following university football long enough to know that some players – some groups of players – have vision issues and cannot distinguish between on-field behemoths and skinny twerpy fellow students. If they’ve got a violent coach (we read about one of these about every two weeks) these players are going to be that much more inclined to just go ahead and beat the shit, en masse, out of everybody.

I mean, take a notorious head case coach like Mike Leach. (I’m not gonna rehearse his disgusting history of coaching violence here cuz I ain’t got the stomach for it. Put MIKE LEACH in my search engine and go to town.) Apparently six or more of his Washington State University players last Saturday started throwing lit fireworks at fellow WSU students at a party, and when some students objected, Mike’s guys – teamwork again! – sent all their jawbones flying and brains concussing (Leach himself has quite the history with player concussions).

SING IT WITH ME!!

Too many broken jaws have fallen on the pavement
Too many concussed sons have sued the school for millions
You lay your bets and then you pay the price
The things we do for love, the things we do for love.

They interviewed the father of one of the injured.

[A]fter police make an arrest, he intends to file criminal and civil charges against the individuals responsible for his son’s injuries.

“It’s obviously an unfortunate event. The irony is that my son has always been a WSU football fan. He ran the field when they beat Oregon last year,” Rodriguez said. “When somebody is down on the ground and you kick them in the face, that’s a huge character flaw and it shouldn’t be tolerated by any football program.”

Tolerated? The capacity to kick people in the face when they’re lying unconscious because you sucker punched them is … well, it’s Job #1 at big-time university football, ain’t it? I mean, ain’t that just the kind of guy you’re after when you’re recruiting? Do you think Nebraska had no inkling of psycho Richie Incognito’s … tendencies? They recruited him for them.

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So. Let’s compare pricing. UD‘s friend John sends her word that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (already a shining example of what football can do for your school) is going to have to pay about a million dollars in damages and expenses because of their most recently concussed student … and to make things worse, the four guys involved had to sit out one game!

What will WSU – which is willing to pay scary Mike Leach millions and can have no qualms about peeling off more bills on behalf of his violent squad – what will WSU have to choke up to make this go away while keeping the firecracker guys on the field? We’re told at least six players (the WSU newspaper says “between five and twelve“) were involved in one way or another, and there’s also apparently lots of video of the event available to police and lawyers … I’m gonna say about a million even for each of the players, so let’s say seven million… Then there’s WSU’s own attorney fees… And the humongous raise Leach is going to demand for having recruited such amazing players… so make that another two million directly arising from these events…

UD‘s going to predict that WSU will spend another few million on a radical revision of its student orientation program. WSU cannot help but have noticed that at certain other football schools students do not sue when players fuck them up. These students understand that physical injury is part of the price you pay for a really strong football program. Whether rapees or concussees, they understand that you must sacrifice for the team. At schools like WSU, where the word has not yet gotten through, change must start with new students. As part of their introduction to the culture of the school, and to the expectations the school has of them, they need to meet with students from violence-tolerant schools to understand the basis of tolerance, and ultimately to sign pledges releasing their university from any liability that might arise from a player rampage.

UD will close with the most important question of all: If seven of your football players – and maybe some of your best football players – have been suspended from play, what effect will this have on your win/loss ratio?

Here’s what UD has learned about this issue from prior cases. At its worst, a multi-player setback can indeed allow you to lose games. But it’s just as likely to inspire the sort of solidarity and sympathy that make your remaining guys play all the more fiercely.

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Update: The real fun is when the details come out!

For every weapon used, add a hundred thou to Coach Leach’s raise this year.

So – fireworks, yes. But here’s another:

[T]he group had been causing trouble – prying off pieces of a wooden railing…

You gotta figure they used those pried-off slabs as blunt objects as they beat the Washington State University students senseless. Another hundred thou for Leach.

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From the comments section on one of a thousand articles about WSU’s football players:

So why don’t your players go six on one against another college kid who was just asking them to not throw fireworks at people…

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This incident spells nothing but trouble for the WSU football program. Not only is it likely that players will be criminally charged for the assaults, it is also likely that other players will be called as witnesses regarding what led up to the assaults and who participated in inflicting the injuries. This can only create turmoil within the program, disrupt team unity, and divide loyalties. A poisonous atmosphere that will make coaching the team more difficult and success on the field more problematic.

[Yes, but UD is optimistic that the lawyer for the player who sucker-punched a student then repeatedly kicked his head while he was unconscious will successfully argue self-defense. Those Washington State juries do love their football.]

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[Still, some of the locals do have a solid sense of justice.]

Whoever kicked the kid on the growned and who ever broke the kids jaw should probably be kicked off the team.

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Hopefully we’ll see a reprise of Leach’s punishment tactic of locking players in closets.

[Yes, Leach is famous for having done that. The player was concussed at the time.]

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Leach is famous for recruiting that kind of player.

[Yup. Also famous for doing that.]

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UD thanks John.

They’re not just big and bad.

If coaches, they may be the highest paid people in the state.

If players, they’re sports heroes. They get huge scholarships plus under the table payments. Bogus professors and bogus disciplines are invented just for them. All of the best buildings on campus are off limits to everyone but these students, with some interesting results.

The big and bad people – and of course not everyone on your big-time college team is a bad person – may bring a new kind of violence to campus, often working as the team that they are to beat the shit out of male students and sexually assault/film themselves sexually assaulting female.

The president and trustees of places like the University of Nebraska seem to consider what people like Richie Incognito do to their students acceptable collateral damage, and students seem to agree it’s worth it because you need people big and bad enough to beat the shit out of opposing players, and you might not be able to confine to the field or the court the generally violent disposition of big and bad people. Here’s a Rutgers scholar (Rutgers has distinguished itself for coach and player violence) showing his stuff.

I mean, lots of people drink and carouse and get into trouble in college. C’est entendu. But these guys are built like brick shithouses and they work as a team. You do the math.

[H]is early run-ins with the law, instead of provoking interventions by the football coaches who comprised the adult authority figures in his life, only brought cover-ups, aimed to protect their golden goose: a kid who coaches and who, scouts said in hushed tones, ran the ball like a future MVP. In listening to a series of interviews with old teammates, you hear stories of violence conjoined with mental illness: of someone who “didn’t have all the tools in his tool box,” who could turn from kindness to anger on a moment’s notice, lash out, and then be consumed with regret. This was someone who needed counseling. Instead, he had people just hoping he would win the big game before his next arrest.

That took place most notoriously at Nebraska, where Phillips dragged his ex-girlfriend, Kate McEwen, a basketball player, down a flight of stairs. After pleading “no contest” to charges of misdemeanor assault, he was suspended for just six games. As for McEwen, she had her athletic scholarship taken away. An abhorrent message had been sent to not only Phillips but to a team that collected gender-violence charges like they collected conference titles.

Phillips’s coach, the legendary Tom Osborne, said at the time that he took Phillips back onto the team without further punishment because the young man needed “structure” and stability that only Cornhuskers football could offer. That “structure” was a college football program that, like so many others, was built on rank exploitation, with little care for the person under the helmet.

It’s even more insidious than that, isn’t it? Is it that hard to imagine a coach perceiving the twisted violence in a player, perceiving it play out astonishingly against women, perceiving the very same quality playing out against men on the field, and saying: Wow. Great. Let’s tap the football part of that violence… We only need it for a few seasons… Responsible people at the University of Nebraska must have known that wildchild Richie Incognito had a pretty empty toolbox too. I’m sure there have been plenty of other similarly exploited student athletes on that campus. Why hasn’t anyone at that campus proposed a serious investigation, conducted by an outsider, of its coaching and academic ethics over, say, the last two decades, in regard to its football players? I know that plenty of other universities behave the same way, but given the current spotlight on Nebraska, I think that school would be a good place to start.

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A similarly harsh attack on the University of Nebraska.

… its This Is Madness article and sticking it on Page 1A again. UD remains baffled as to why none of these articles (here’s a good one) (what the hell – go to town) tells you why this is going on — the degrading, bankrupting business of new stadiums, multimillionaire coaches, and expensive conferences.

As UD has pointed out before, it’s because the people who run these particular universities cannot think of anything else to do. They’ve already pretty much dismantled their universities as, say, teaching institutions… Everything’s online, or bogus… Their ideal student, their big man on campus, is Johnny Manziel, held up by Texas A&M’s chancellor as a model for us all. Or Richie Incognito, loved up as much by the University of Nebraska as Manziel was by Texas A&M. Did these universities help or hurt Manziel and Incognito, with their veneration and love and no classes and don’t bother graduating and feel free to beat up our students and sell merchandise and reel around being a drunk motherfucker? Have you followed these men’s subsequent careers in the NFL?

If these universities could think of anything to do with their money other than put on games and recruit criminals and destroy players’ lives, don’t you think they would? This is the only thing they can think of doing. This is what they think a university is.

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Since we’re all remembering David Bowie today, let’s remember what he told us.

On the whole, you know, this whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid. Frankly.

“Hardy … likes to hit women,” but much more importantly he likes to hit quarterbacks. So despite all the battered girlfriend pictures that have just been released, he’ll not only continue to play for the Cowboys, he’ll continue to be a university’s poster boy for great sportsmanship. That Ole Miss bio page will stay up forever, just the way the pride of the University of Nebraska, Richie Incognito, will remain on their website. Richie likes to hit everything.

(Hardy’s also got a huge personal arsenal.)

Or, as the article’s headline has it:

DOES COLLEGE FOOTBALL SUCCESS CORRELATE WITH CRIME?

Yes. Yes, it does. Which makes all the clucking certain universities do about the importance of student safety extremely amusing, doesn’t it? And then there’s the NC “Why should you exist?” AA.

The University of Nebraska went way out of its way to recruit Richie Incognito. Most of the SEC schools in particular seem to try really really hard to get some of the most violent of the young and concussed to be part of their campus.

The college athletics arms race includes increasingly intense competition for the biggest and nastiest out there; and of course only the biggest and nastiest make it to the professionals, where fighting isn’t simply something you do at bars near campus. It’s a way of life.

How does Nick Saban earn a zillion dollars a year? He recruits the biggest and nastiest to the University of Alabama.

How to approach the delicate topic of football culture and the gifts it has given the American university? It’s not merely the obvious stuff – the pointless stupid scary violence that scads of sports heroes like Richie Incognito bring to campus (idle Google Newsing turns up the latest helmet-bashing-in-the-campus-locker-room, this one at the University of Delaware, where last February another player “was charged with assaulting three other students at a party.”).

This violence has turned professors into police:

Days after the incident, [an Oregon State student who got beaten by team members] said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

The violence is hard-wired, of course, into the coaching of both university football and basketball, so that on a routine basis latter-day Bobby Knights are filmed and parodied (start at 1:15). The coaches are quickly replaced, sometimes by women, who are symbolically part of the clean-up routine cuz you know women just want to mother the team and would never be violent…

In fact, let’s pause there and think about the incredibly important role of women in big-time university sports. I don’t mean merely as tools of recruitment (several schools attract players via, er, dates with carefully selected female students), and objects of rape, assault, and harassment (see, most recently, the Norwood Teague unpleasantness at the University of Minnesota). And I don’t mean merely the importance of trotting out mom, post-assault, on Good Morning America. (Or, as Matt Hayes puts it, “GMA’s utterly repulsive decision to allow De’Andre Johnson on television to apologize for punching a woman in the face.”)

I mean, think about Donna Shalala’s tenure as president of Miami University. Her main role was as cover for a team that got in big on-field brawls and whose best buddy was Nevin Shapiro. She was like the Good Morning America mom times a hundred. They kept wheeling Shalala out to apply the back of her hand to her naughty charges, and this routine actually worked for a while.

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A local commentator asks incredulously where the University of Minnesota found the likes of Teague (the answer is that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a search firm). “Were the other finalists Bill Cosby and Donald Sterling?”

Donald Sterling, Zygi (“bad faith and evil motive”) Wilf, these are the guys who give professional basketball and football such a great name… And, as the commentator suggests, there’s not a lot of discernible difference between professional and big-time university football. Even in the matter of violence, there’s the NFL…

In the N.F.L., … fits of violence hardly blacklist players chasing roster spots. The day after punching [Geno] Smith, [Ikemefuna] Enemkpali latched on with the Buffalo Bills, whose new coach, Rex Ryan, has created a haven for wayward players…

(What a sweet, Victorian, girly way of putting it! A haven for wayward players! Like Ikemefuna’s teammate, the aforementioned Richie Incognito! The way Jane Addams created a haven for wayward girls! SWEET.)

… and there’s college ball, where getting kicked out for violence means the same thing it meant for Ikemefuna – you just find another team.

All of which is why, as UD has often recommended, universities with big-time football need football coaches, not academics, as presidents. (See Jim Tressel.) In a pinch, a politician will do. You could also go with a figurehead, a Queen Elizabeth to Nick Saban’s prime minister. But you’ll keep getting stories like the one coming out of the University of Minnesota as long as you take some guy – some random polite reflective well-meaning university denizen – and hand him the management of what is essentially a professional football team.

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The petri dish for university football culture is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their new field design is all about Vegas. A sample headline:

UNLV REBELS WILL BE PLAYING FOOTBALL ON ONE BIG CRAPS TABLE IN 2015

“The team’s field and uniforms now reek of the Strip — it’s glitz, gold, gambling and most importantly, its promise of future fortunes.”

This is a team with one of the worst records in university football. An appalling record. Very few people show up to their games. Season tickets sold last year: 3,890. In response, the university decided to build a $900 million, 55,000 seat stadium with an Adzillatron spanning the length of the field. Although they’ve cut back on that original plan, they’ll surely come up with something like it. And they’ve got yet another miracle coach who’s going to shock everybody with the greatest comeback story this side of Elvis.

Take Aaron here. It’s not really her fault, because she played football for Miami University, and you know how sturm und drang that place is.

No? Type UNIVERSITY MIAMI in my search engine and settle in for a long read.

Anyway, the, er, culture of UM being what it is, no one should be surprised that Aaron left there all hopped up and ready for a hankie-heavy coaching career. She cried while confessing that she whispered mean things to a reporter about the quarterback of a team she coached… She couldn’t help herself! She’s high-strung!

And now she’s gone and beaten up a boy because he took her beach chair. She tried to keep it out of the news by promising to kill him and his family if he told anyone, but despite this effort at protecting her team’s name (she coaches for the Buffalo Bills), she got in trouble anyway.

The good news for Aaron is that this other chick, Richie Incognito, plays for the Bills and can give her anger-management advice at this difficult time.

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At least Richie Incognito, whose behavior was nauseating enough, picked on people his own size.

Um. No.

This is a question worth pondering. When not only Florida State, but several other university and of course professional football teams generate so much abuse of women, it’s worth asking whether they are in fact in some sense requiring it.

Of course the question as posed is meant to be amusing, provocative, whatever. But let’s take it seriously for a moment.

The article from which I got the question is titled

What is the Deal With FSU and Their Recruitment of Psycho Quarterbacks?

with the plural meant to refer to FSU’s Jameis Winston… So there’s this “psycho” theme (think also, for instance, of Nebraska’s big hero, Richie Incognito) and this abuse of women theme, that runs through the sport, sometimes with video accompaniment, sometimes not.

UD suggests that the arms race in professional university sports (as UD calls it) involves a dramatic escalation not only of coaching salaries and Adzillatrons, but increasing pressure to locate bigger, scarier, and more volatile players.

The appeal of massive crazy easily set-off dudes on the field is obvious – they intimidate opponents, excite fans, etc., etc. But as Incognito’s sad college career attests, it’s increasingly dangerous to put hopped-up essentially professional football player-sized students on a campus with plain old students. This kind of classroom incident will, I think, become more common:

Around midnight on April 12, 2014, Oregon State student Michael Davis said he and a friend had been arguing with some football players about cutting in line at a bar and he had fallen to the ground with one of them while fending off a punch. As Davis stood up, tight end Tyler Perry ran up and punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground, the police report states.

According to the report, Davis said a friend who played football told him that he “shouldn’t call the cops. We won’t have a starting lineup next year.” Another person involved in the incident said he “knew the males to be OSU football players so did not really want them in any trouble.”

Days after the incident, Davis said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

Yes. Professors protecting students from the team.

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Writing about professional football, one observer notes:

We idolize players of a game that champions aggression and violence. Their lifestyles of opulence and celebrity are dependent on their ability to run fast, throw far and hit very hard. They are so dependent on this lifestyle that they no longer have the ability to control the aggression for which they are revered.

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To make the university situation even more perilous, football players tend, as at Oregon State, to move in packs (the police in Florida are currently interviewing five or six players who entered the bar with De’Andre Johnson). Like the bikers at Twin Peaks, they’re a band of brothers, and they’ll all beat you up.

Keep in mind, finally, that the trend in America is not only toward guns on campus, but, in some places, open carry.

Talk about an arms race on campus.

Feast your mind on the academic future.

Some of what its sponsor says tells you just how amazing things are at America’s sports factories.

“If this altercation had occurred between him and another guy I believe the legal system would have taken care of it. He may have been suspended for a while but would have been right back on the team,” she said.

True, true. A routine incident, a total non-event, the sort of thing that happens every weekend at jock schools – a fight between a player and another guy… this would have been nothing. Nothing at all. How many times has UD covered a story in which a big bruiser, a fancy recruit, damn near killed another guy? Big deal. You recruit Richie Incognito you gotta figure stuff like that’s gonna happen. But oh no let ’em hit some woman and boooo fucking hoooo…

Bottom line: A lot of your university’s sports heroes – coaches as well as players – are seriously scary people. That’s why even though many of them quite often do horrible things – crimes of violence – they almost never get prosecuted. Everyone’s too scared.

Some of these people are scary for obvious Richie Incognito reasons: They’ve been recruited because they’re humongous, violent motherfuckers and you really really really do not want to be anywhere in their way. Or in their vicinity. We all had a very good laugh when we saw this take on Rutgers coach Mike Rice (start at 1:05), but it’s kind of nervous laughter, isn’t it? It’s kind of like I cannot believe that a highly paid, high-profile representative of a university is a violent psycho… I don’t want to believe this…

I love my team! Want to cheer them on! Want them to win!

Oh. But in order to win a lot of teams seem to need psycho coaches who recruit angry motherfuckers like Richie Incognito.

Hm. Hm. Yes, it’s a problem…

Around midnight on April 12, 2014, Oregon State student Michael Davis said he and a friend had been arguing with some football players about cutting in line at a bar and he had fallen to the ground with one of them while fending off a punch. As Davis stood up, tight end Tyler Perry ran up and punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground, the police report states.

According to the report, Davis said a friend who played football told him that he “shouldn’t call the cops. We won’t have a starting lineup next year.” Another person involved in the incident said he “knew the males to be OSU football players so did not really want them in any trouble.”

Days after the incident, Davis said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

Fuck, man. What did I tell you? Stay out of the way.

But hey. UD, qua professor, finds the bit about the professor really interesting. Look at the intriguing relationships and experiences you can have as a professor at a major sports school! There you are lecturing on Marcel Proust or the Burgess Shale, and you notice that outside your classroom door there’s all these big guys from the team milling about!

It’s like living in Naples, and I don’t mean Florida! It’s like – there they are! You know them. Your students know them. The police know them. The judges know them. Everyone knows them. They run the place, and they can do anything they want because they scare the shit out of everyone.

Yes, turns out there’s nothing sacred even about the classrooms at the big sports universities. Of course, we already knew that from Julius Nyang’oro’s University of North Carolina… Nothing sacred there at all… Nothing even semi-sacred… Professors are just as scared as everyone else.

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UD thanks the several readers who linked her to the ESPN article.

Of course it’s not just murderers; for decades, Nebraska has produced manifold themes and variations on Richie Incognito.

What UD finds especially amazing is that whatever you do, the University of Nebraska will continue to celebrate you on its webpages. Look up anyone: Incognito, Povendo, Phillips, Thunder Collins… They’re all still there, worshipped as gods on the Huskers site.

With the Waco biker shootout on everyone’s mind, Nick Povendo’s a particularly interesting Nebraska product. He was actually Incognito’s backup on the University of Nebraska team! But he has now surpassed him. Povendo graduated to criminal biker gang stuff – the same stuff that shot up Waco. He’ll be on trial for murder soon.

UD asks: Why isn’t everyone talking about the University of Nebraska football team? Why aren’t we having a national discussion about what’s wrong with the state of Nebraska?

But wait. Many of these guys attended or graduated from some of our better universities. Ray Rice, Rutgers. Aaron Hernandez, University of Florida. Richie Incognito, University of Nebraska. Adrian Peterson, Oklahoma. Our internationally acclaimed higher education system has taken these and so many other NFL players in and educated them.

Sure, once they’re retired at 29 or whatever, and once the brain damage they got playing for these universities (Motto: A mind is a terrible thing to waste; so we use it, use it, use it!) starts up, they won’t make big NFL money. But they’re college-educated! They went to storied schools like the University of North Carolina!

Bankrupt? Financial stress? They’re not even carrying college loans!

Well.

Anyway.