Baylor University:
[A] nationally-ranked football powerhouse that can be classified as anything but Christian: a program that has developed into a nightmare of criminality engulfing the entire school community…
[We are following] the horrific news that has been spilling out of Waco, Texas regarding the overall tone and personality of the football program and the despicable actions of an inordinate [number] of their players over the years…
[Baylor features] an accepted culture of severe criminal behavior, sexual assaults and rapes …
[Baylor’s football coach] willingly and purposely recruited some terrible characters who he, his staff, the university and the local police department allowed to run amok while terrorizing a community.
A Texas sports journalist puts the rape scandal at Baylor in perspective for us. (UD‘s comments appear in brackets.)
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So am I calling Art [Briles, Baylor football coach,] a liar?
Yes, I’m calling him a big-time college head football coach in the same classification as Urban Meyer, Nick Saban, Bob Stoops, Jimbo Fisher, etc. [These are all the biggies, plus etc. – i.e., pretty much everyone else.]
Check their rosters. [Plenty of scary people on them. But c’mon on: The Steelers just signed Michael Vick.] These are coaches who will always gamble on talent over character, and when that talent brings trouble to campus, the talent will be protected and coddled. These coaches just don’t care, and they are powerful enough they don’t have to care.
Art doesn’t have to care at Baylor. And it’s paid off big time for him and the school.
Well, it was paying off. Except now, all hell has broken loose.
Briles, however, won’t stop gambling on bad actors, even now, unless at some point, he’s ordered to stop. But who exactly gives that order in Waco? [Baylor president] Ken Starr?
On that leave ’em laughing note, we know heads will roll over all this. And we know Art will be watching from a Waco safe place, high above it all. [Hilarious to think that the official head of a football factory has any power. The God who stands above it all directing and watching is the coach. UD read somewhere – can’t find the link – that a sacrificial woman from somewhere in the administration has been selected to suffer for her Art.] [Good one, UD.]
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Remember: This guy is writing about a place that was founded as a university.
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Oh. And here’s a great blast from the past. In a recent tussle with his league over their team ranking system (it placed Texas Christian, the place Briles found Baylor’s most famous rapist, over Baylor), Briles said
[The league is] obligated to us because we’re helping the Big 12’s image in the nation.
Totally, Art, and keep up the good work.
You have to do the hard work of getting inside the culture of schools like Baylor and Louisville (the University of Louisville, a reliable scummy-sports-source on this blog, just recruited a guy — “domestic violence charge involving a gun” — even Texas Christian found too scary).
But it is hard work. Take Baylor. The larger culture of its hometown, Waco, heartland of homicidal Harley honeys, birthplace of branded breastaurant-bred Boss-Hoss boys, is mainly about open carry. That’s the burning social justice issue that fires up so many Baylor/Wacoites — now more than ever:
The day after a deadly confrontation between rival biker gangs in Waco, top Texas lawmakers defended a proposal to loosen the state’s handgun laws [to allow open carry].
What plenty of people in Waco and at Baylor seem to be, uh, shooting for is a campus/town where hotly recruited rapists and criminal biker gangs are placed in an open carry setting…
UD understands that this picture seems unfair to these Texans, whose self-image involves prayer for themselves and for the souls of recruited rapists who shall be redeemed in cleansing local waters. Same as these football programs. And so many others. It’s all about winning football games and redeeming souls.
So you’ve got Baylor’s famous president, Ken Starr, overseeing an internal investigation of his school’s rape-positive policies, and he’s already at a disadvantage, since his experience lies in investigating consensual sex (or, as a commenter at the Chronicle of Higher Education poetically puts it, “President Starr, you went after Bill Clinton for much less. What are you going to do about this ugly mess?”). And you’ve got all the hump-lovin’ folk of this great land, who understand the crucial synergy between sexual and on-field violence, as dramatized so succinctly here.
In this film’s most poignant moment, a father pleads: “Just give it to me straight Doc. Will my boy ever rape again?”
As long as schools like Baylor and Louisville exist, we can answer that question with a resounding Yes.
… is how they seem to sing it at Baylor University, a Christian school apparently, but far more committed to football (and basketball) than to anything spiritual… I mean, if you go by the sorts of things that happen there…
For instance, it’s a very violent place, which seems to UD (she’s no expert) rather at odds with the Christian ethos. One of their basketball players a few years ago “punched Texas Tech forward Jordan Barncastle … breaking Barncastle’s nose and causing both benches to clear.” Although concussed during a recent game, Baylor’s quarterback insisted it was nothing and that despite some fogginess and a headache he’d be back out there again right away because nothing’s more important than winning at football. And
In January, 2014, Tevin Elliott, a defensive end out of Mount Pleasant, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for twice assaulting a former Baylor student in 2012. During that trial, two other women testified that Elliott assaulted them. A fourth alleged victim was not called to testify.
And now everyone’s abuzz with the latest Baylor violence: Under the same coach as Elliott’s, another football player is going to jail for sexual assault on a Baylor student. And this player had already been “kicked off the Boise State football team after punching and choking his girlfriend.” It looks very much as though the Baylor coach knew about this violent past.
But hey. If there’s one thing you’ve learned reading this blog, it’s that plenty of American universities will open their arms to woman beaters if the guys can catch a football. And the schools will do all they can to lie and cover up and victim-blame (Baylor carried out a wretchedly inept internal investigation.) until the bad stuff their football players do goes away. Or maybe it doesn’t go away.
And… uh… this seems to be the Christian way. I mean… One of America’s leading Christian universities keeps doing it.
Baylor’s president is Ken Starr. That Ken Starr. Investigator extraordinaire.
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Read this if you can stomach it. Baylor is a sister school to Florida State University, with similar cooperation by local media and law enforcement. Absolutely disgusting.
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UD thanks dmf.
This sentence could come from a contemporary American commentary on the Kaplanization of our once-great universities; or it could come from a contemporary American commentary on the NFLization of our once-great universities.
This particular sentence happens to be about the sporty arm of the pincer movement; and coming as it does from Texas, of all places, it tells you something. It tells you something about why immense new Adzillatronned university football and basketball stadiums are full of gaping holes during even the biggest games… Why a growing branch of the digital and design industries is now devoted to making an empty silence look like a crowded blow-out on network tv…
The author of this commentary is telling you why people are leaving the American university stadium, but you don’t want to listen because you know that the problems are too basic to fix.
If college football is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the A&M – LSU game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.
… It’s hard to say what should happen with college football. Paying the players would certainly be fairer, but it would finish off whatever remains of an institution that once meant far more than money. The arcane rules put in place to protect college athletics from market forces have spawned a densely complex culture of cheating, a tradition almost as old as the sport. How long can Universities, bastions of enlightened rational values, continue this charade? What toll is it taking on the wider goals of those institutions?
College football may be a necessary casualty of a freer, more prosperous world. We are all likely to cling to the remains at least a little while longer. Maybe someday (next year?), when the Longhorns’ helmets are sporting a giant BestBuy logo and the program is playing two additional highly-paid exhibition games each year against the likes of Abilene Christian and the fighting Javelinas of A&M Kingsville we’ll finally have to give it up.
Try his first paragraph this way:
If a college education is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.
Except that in the Kaplanization case, it’s not just emotional energy that’s lacking when the professor is a coached happy face on a jiggly screen full of funny little games. It’s also of course intellectual energy.
Stadium seats will go the same way as classroom seats: Eventually all university activity will jiggle on-screen. Imagine the University of Phoenix with a sports channel.