… heroes, now a professional football player, dealt with a recent defeat of his team by taking out his gun and shooting it in the vicinity of players on the winning team.
Leon Mackey’s explanation – “It was an accident.” – is a real poser. UD looks forward to his attorney making the case that taking your gun out and shooting it in the direction of people with whom you’re fighting is an accident.
Or does he mean it’s an accident that he didn’t kill anybody?
… and a Lubbock insurance blogger.
[TT]:
With the Las Vegas shooting happening so far away from here, it’s easy to separate ourselves from the idea that [a nineteen year old Texas Tech freshman – Hollis Daniels – could be a cold-blooded murderer].
[IB]:
The FBI recently released 2016 data for crime in the United States. Lubbock was ranked as the 2nd most dangerous city in Texas with 825.4 violent crimes reported per 100,000 residents.
[TT]:
It feels like our little West Texas world has been darkened by the threat of a shooting.
[IB]:
[T]he violent crime rate in Lubbock is 88% higher than the average across Texas.
[TT]:
[A]s Red Raiders, we are closer than ever and will continue to support each other.
That’s the spirit of Tech and everyone associated with this university, and that will never fade away.
[UD]:
Everyone?
I mean … I guess by Texas gunny standards
a nineteen year old university freshman who
– left alone with a random policeman –
takes out his weapon and shoots the man’s
head off — and before running away
coldly removes the body cam from the
corpse he just created — is absolutely
normal.
**************************
He really told that guy, huh?
Don’t mess with Texas.
Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)
Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.
This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:
[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.
Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”
Not all the details are in yet, but it looks as though a good and dedicated teacher there may have allowed students traveling with him on a field trip to drink on the chartered bus taking them back to Lubbock. One of the students got outrageously drunk, and, once back in her own car, plowed into another vehicle and killed one of its passengers.
[The student] was arrested October 22nd and charged with intoxicated manslaughter, intoxicated assault, and aggravated assault. According to the police report, [she] states that a professor allowed the students to drink on the field trip. She says in the report that she had five beers and a shot of alcohol.
FORT WORTH — A Wedgwood Middle School coach was fired after displaying a knife and threatening to castrate a student, according to documents released by the Fort Worth school district.
Eugene R. Jennings, a social studies teacher and coach who worked in the district for 20 years, has insisted that he was joking, according to the report by the district’s Office of Professional Standards.
According to the report, Jennings entered another teacher’s classroom in September and noticed a student misbehaving. At that point, he pulled a student aside and threatened to castrate him, according to a witness’s statement in the report….
UD thanks Bill for the link.
Former Texas Tech University football coach Mike Leach sued the college on Friday, claiming it defamed him, and suspended and fired him without cause. Leach has denied the school’s accusation that he abused an injured played by locking him in a shed because he suspected the student was faking a concussion.
In his complaint in Lubbock County Court, Leach claims the school’s statements were intended to injure his reputation and hurt him financially.
… He seeks damages for breach of contract, fraudulent inducement, defamation, deprivation of due process and seeks waiver of the school’s sovereign immunity…
Leach’s buyout figure, $1.5 million, is actually cheaper at the end of the day than drawn-out litigation for the university.
Who says there won’t be drawn-out litigation on top of the $1.5 million?
Latest Texas Tech University undergraduate application essay prompt:
YOU’RE CONCUSSED FROM PLAYING FOOTBALL FOR TEXAS TECH. YOUR COACH GIVES YOU A CHOICE – IMPRISONMENT IN A DARK ROOM OR INSIDE OF AN EQUIPMENT BIN. WHICH DO YOU CHOOSE, AND WHY?
… [Football Coach Mike Leach] is the king of Lubbock. He’s bullied his administration numerous times over the last six or seven years. Leach and the school have bickered over his salary several times, and just last year the school president had to personally oversee Leach’s latest contract extension…
… Leach [has] revealed himself as dangerously irrational. He tried to sue Texas Tech so that he could coach “his” team in the bowl game. Are you kidding me? It’s not his team. It’s Texas Tech’s team…
All this, and Alberto Gonzales.
Plus they’ve got years of expensive litigation from the just-fired Leach to look forward to.
If this comment is true, all praise to the TTU law school:
[The chancellor] tried to foist the man off on the Law School. Three times he tried and three time the Law School—-both through its Dean and its Faculty (and perhaps with some help from its alums) rebuffed him. But the Law School has a bit more autonomy than does the Poly Sci Department.
Second, the ONLY good thing that can come from this bizarre appointment is that it gives the Board of Regents serious pause about continuing Hance as Chancellor…
The University of Illinois law school only had to keep unqualified students out…
*********************
UD thanks a reader, jbb, for the link.
Shaking My Head, the man says. Shaking my head cuz one day before the big scrimmage a chunk of the team attacked police and property outside a bar last night. This program, the man says.
But it isn’t just the program, right? Texas Tech is a university; a university whose current national rank is #176 , down twenty points from a couple of years ago. A real trailer park of a place, with violent tailgaters, sadistic coaches, 1500 current lawsuits from dismissed sadistic coaches, a freshman who a few weeks ago got annoyed and took his handgun out and blew the head off of a campus security guy, and, well, there’s jest a ton of stuff like that about this great Lubbock institution. Ask me about Alberto Gonzales!
So … shaking your head? You live in the world’s biggest academic shithole. There’s not enough room in all that shit to move your head, let alone shake it.
**********
UD thanks JND.
It’s an academic bloodbath down there. If you’re looking for the heavy-hitters, look no further than Texas Tech, where a wee freshman of nineteen years just blew a campus cop away – shot the guy to death in cold blood, holding the gun inches from his face.
This is one of the few guns-on-Texas-campuses stories that rose to national attention. The threats, the gun play, the fraternity weaponry — these are so routine as to pass unnoticed.
If you really want to get noticed – a student with a gun on a campus in Texas – you have to have a very big gun, you have to be on the football or basketball team, you have to threaten to kill multiple people, you have to have drugs on you, you have to be part of a conspiracy, you have to flee the police, you have to ditch the gun… You have to do a lot of shit to be worth paying attention to if you’re a college student with your gun out at a Texas university.
So props to Zaycoven Henderson, one of our Sacred Aggies, for accomplishing all of that, and getting all the press attention he and his gun-mad school so richly deserve.
Just a few hours earlier, Henderson was honored at the A&M team football banquet.
You don’t want the recent history of A&M. Trust me. You don’t want the background on A&M.
**************
You know, when a few Texas professors, disgusted by the state-wide gun-love, resign or take jobs in safer states, they’re called pussies or whatever. But in Texas, the shits really are trying to kill us. And they’ve got amazing, amazing, guns. And they’re our students.
*************
Here’s Zaycoven’s hagiographic page at Texas A&M. In the first photograph, he’s doing the classic WHERE’S MY RIFLE? TOSS IT DOWN TO ME. play.
Take the page down?
Nah.
It’s Texas A&M.
***************
Have to go to the local paper for local responses. From a comment thread. Parenthetical remarks from UD:
rippy Dec 11, 2017 5:33am
Welcome to Aggieland Jimbo!
[That’s the new greedy coach they just hired for a zillion dollars.]
pragmatist Dec 11, 2017 5:51am
It is a big challenge to operate a successful program when you depend on young folks who have grown up with little or no guidance in terms of right vs wrong. Don’t know this guy’s history, but it is a safe bet his only male leadership came from football coaches. Coaches, at their best, can do very little to point an 8th grader in the right direction and once the kid gets off course, it is hard to self-correct. It takes a real Dad and a real Mom.
Tragic and far too common but there is no room for this guy at A&M.
[Sad little “pragmatist” hasn’t bothered to check that Zaycoven comes equipped with a father and a mother. And pragmatically speaking, I wonder why Aggie coaches recruit people like Zaycoven. The commenter fails to speculate about why many … questionable people end up on his football team. Do they show up and push themselves forward? Or are they feverishly sought?
“No room for this guy at A&M.” UD always finds this a touchingly delusional sentiment. Our pure school – where Johnny Manziel was so recently God – shudders and passes on morally impure people like Zaycoven.]
Dec 11, 2017 7:00am
Would you look at that. I’ll be willing to bet this kid was recruited solely for his athletic ability and not his character. Another legacy of Sumlin …that goes with the washed up Heisman winner [Manziel] and a new field. Neither of which spells National Champion.
[Implicitly, this commenter expresses the pathetic faith-in-the-new-coach thing. Bad old coach (Sumlin) did this; he was responsible for the now-embarrassing Manziel too. But new god Jimbo will make everything beautiful again.]
Meanwhile, the school has missed financial targets. A 2015 audit of athletic department finances reported that spending on equipment, uniforms and supplies came in 88 percent over budget in the 2014 fiscal year, while travel expenses were 57 percent over their mark. Meanwhile, revenue from ticket sales came in 21 percent under budget.
Overall, the school had planned to reduce its athletic subsidy by $3.5 million for the 2014 fiscal year, according to the audit. It ended up increasing it by $700,000.
La vie continue at wanna-be sports factory the University of Houston; this article about it even has the dude in charge of turning Houston into Clemson alerting us to the fact that sports are “truly the front porch of the institution.” So true, so true, which is why The Texas Tribune has done a long piece on how the school is spending itself into the gutter subsidizing games no one on campus wants to watch.
The quotation in my headline’s intriguing, isn’t it? Technically isn’t an athletic program. Yes, I see the point. It’s in the stadium and it’s used by the marching band, but it has nothing to do with athletics. It’s academic, see.
Along with all that money transferred from academics to athletics, UH has a new football coach who’s kind of the equivalent of this chick — he issues threatening language to students who might be considering not going to a football game (she issues threatening language to students who might be considering using terms like male and female). Poor students.