… will be dominating news from that university for awhile. As in – what’s my girl Briles doing with her lawyers today? Last week she was suing everybody at the university cuz they said hurtful things and made her feel bad; this week she’s withdrawing her suit because “a girl can only carry so much… she wants some peace in her life…”

But don’t worry! Two other ex-football people are still suing, and there’s tons more where they came from.

America’s highest-profile Baptist university is increasingly divided up between people who are suing and people who are in prison.

Where else but Waco would you want your kid to go to college?

The long tradition of university football players wearing immediately identifiable clothes, or driving cars with immediately identifiable parking permits, during the course of their robberies is burnished once again in the case of the University of Oklahoma’s Parrish Cobb.

Here’s UD‘s favorite headline:

Oklahoma cornerback Parrish Cobb, burned for 2 Noah Brown TDs, charged in 3 robberies

You wanna get the important stuff out there first, and only after that get around to his off-field activities…

Some nice comments at Deadspin:

(spring practice)

Stoops: Is there any video?

Cobb: I don’t think so.

Stoops: Well take an extra lap. Wait, we’re in a new era. Make it two.

… every day is a challenge. Ken Starr, Art Briles, gang rape and cover-up galore… All in the context of a very self-righteous, very Christian campus…

It would be a challenge for anyone [“Uh we’re pleased to announce we have the final numbers… Let’s see… ’17 women [have] reported 19 sexual or physical assaults involving football players since 2011, including four gang rapes…'”] , but Heath Nielsen is really struggling with it. Maybe it’s something in the Waco water supply, but (paraphrasing Tammy Wynette) sometimes, in Waco, it’s hard to be a man.

A sportswriter was photographing a football player after a game, see.

[The writer] had received permission from a football player to take [the] photograph, and after the picture was taken “Nielsen walked up to [the writer] on the right, grabbed [him] by the throat with his right hand, squeezed and pushed him away from the football player,’ an arrest warrant affidavit … says.

When [the writer] and the player asked Nielsen what the problem was, he replied, “He’s abusing his privileges,” the affidavit said.

To review: This is the guy in charge of managing the team’s public image.

As Oberlin College finally rids itself of a really florid Jewish-conspiracy devotee on its faculty, as we deal with yet another (there have been several in the last few years) serious embarrassment to a respectable institution — is there actually much of use to be said about this?

A racist conspiracy theory powered the political career of our president-elect. These things are apparently mainstream and can get you places. If some professors at our universities believe Jews brought down the World Trade Center and the New Town massacre was a federal government simulation meant to undermine gun rights, so what? For forty-two years a professor at Northwestern who seems to be a Nazi-symp has been (in the words of NU’s president) a “reprehensible… contemptible… embarrassment” to the place, and assuming the guy is hardy enough to continue teaching past his current eighty-three years of age, NU will continue being embarrassed for some time.

No doubt people with sociopathic and inane beliefs and belief systems crawl the woodwork of plenty of universities. Most are with-it enough to figure out that they should keep their views – at least in their most overt forms – out of their classrooms; but social media and other forms of publication betray them, for eventually some student or colleague is going to discover the place where they park their deepest, most delirious, convictions. Then the press, which is under the impression that professors have something to do with rational and responsible teaching/scholarship (no one cares if the dude bottling vitamins next to you in the vitamin factory writes Facebook postings blaming the Waco biker shoot-out on Muslims), will talk it up, and in seconds a university’s got one hell of a bimbo eruption on its hands.

But what is to be done? How can we avoid it? How should we think about it?

Well, as to the selection and cultivation of faculty on the fringe… Look to your recruitment committees, o ye sinners, and repent. Everyone knows that America has universities that pass all the way to the PhD people whose views move them from the provocative subversive margins (see Trump supporter S. Zizek) to flat-out beyond the pale, and it’s not that hard for hiring groups to check these people out. I mean, they’re not shy about putting what they think about the CIA, the Zionist conspiracy, and black presidents out there. Just take a look. Decide how important it is for your students to understand the links among the Trilateral Commission, King Edward’s abdication, and fluoridation.

As to how we should think about it – well, UD can offer this. People do not like evidence. They really do not like evidence. Americans have just elected an evidence-execrator. More than a few American colleges and universities teach their students that the earth is six thousand years old. Anything goes, and, as Don DeLillo points out in his hilarious novel White Noise, the more sources of information Americans enjoy, the stupider and more credulous they become. Why should one person with a vicious racist conspiracy get to be president, while another person with a vicious anti-semitic conspiracy have to lose her job? Just because, as one of her colleagues correctly points out, her arguments about the world lack evidence?

[Y]ou don’t generally hear such things being espoused by scholars with PhDs. That is because such unsubstantiated, unfalsifiable, speculative hypotheses are not only overwhelmingly wrong, but are also the opposite of research.

But nobody much cares about substantiation – including, on occasion, PhD and hiring committees. In fact a lot of people, inside and outside of universities, have a strong preference for big ol’ crazyass bullshit.

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.

****************

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.

***************

Some like it hot.

Hot and bloody.

It’s the Baylor way.

Pledges to Coach and Fans that He’ll Get Better at It.

Ah Baylor Baylor Baylor Baylor.

Ah Waco Waco Waco Waco.

That university. That town. A very American crossroads.

I’d turn some of this into a song, but at the moment I’m exhausted from mowing my lawn in hellish heat.

Funny, you’re a team that likes raping.
That’s a disturbing sign.
Funny, but you also like stalking.
Waco, isn’t it? Baylor, isn’t it?

WACO, TEXAS

Waco’s lost in the wilderness
It’s lost in bitterness
It’s lost, lost somewhere in this, in loneliness

If the model of “the buck stops here” applies to this situation, then the buck stops not at the president’s office but at the board level. Yet I have not heard one board member state in effect, “I offer my resignation,” in order that Baylor might move forward from this with integrity and transparency. Instead, they tarnish the reputations and accomplishments of others and point the finger of blame in other directions while the truth lies buried beneath hidden agendas, cliques and power struggles. And they then cloak their language in theological piety, while their very actions suggest otherwise.

As it happens, he’s describing the board at Baylor.

In both cases, not only does no one resign. Everyone plays the theological piety bit to the absolute hilt. Only card they’ve got.

Well, let’s just go down that list, shall we? Horrible hideous shit can happen anywhere, especially in a country where everyone has at least two guns. We’re getting the list now because of the latest entry on it – the nation’s premier Baptist university, and that university’s local police department, spent years ignoring rampantly raping football players. That’s Waco’s latest claim to fame.

Okay, so four things on the list are about Baylor, basketball, and football: The murder, the cover-up, the NCAA sanctions, and now the rapes. If you ask ol’ UD, who’s been covering big-time sports mayhem at America’s universities since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, there’s nothing reigniting or even igniting about that list — homicidal raping covering up and heavily sanctioned university sports programs are not uncommon in the United States.

Admittedly most of the murders take place shortly after the player has dropped out of the school.

Since 2007, [Aaron Hernandez has] been charged with, or linked to, the shootings of six people in four incidents. Three of the victims were gruesomely murdered. One survivor, a former friend named Alexander Bradley, has had multiple operations and lost his right eye. The other two survivors were shot in their car outside a Gainesville, Florida, bar after an altercation involving Hernandez and two of his teammates his freshman year at the University of Florida. While in Gainesville, he sucker-punched a guy and shattered the fellow’s eardrum, and reportedly failed multiple drug tests, though he was suspended only once for those offenses.

But who’s counting? It’s your beloved suspension-averse alma mater we’re describing here, and right this minute you’re loading up the Bud Light in anticipation of tailgate season for you and the young’uns.

So is Waco problematically special? Only stuff special on the list is the two cults – the Davidians and the Pagans.

I’m sure Texas gets more than its share of violent cults, just as Utah and Oregon do, because these states get all goose-bumpy over guns plus they hate laws and shit cuz that’s the state and fuck the state.

No, by prevailing big-time university athletics standards and prevailing state standards, there’s nothing special about Waco.

**********************

UPDATE: UD thanks Derek for pointing out
that this is about basketball as much as football.

A Texas writer grapples with the philosophical implications of Baylor’s conscience-of-a-nation president, the man who had WHAT to say about Bill Clinton’s fellatio with a White House intern, now clammin’ right up when it comes to his football players. Title of the writer’s article:

Ken Starr, Full Monty on Fellatio 18 Years Ago, All Shy Now About Baylor Rapes

When Lewinsky describes the sex she had back then, she says it happened because “I fell in love with my boss.”

When scads of Baylor women describe the sex they recently had, with members of the football team, they don’t talk about love. They just go straight to the police reports.

[Ken] Starr .. wanted to make fellatio a national issue … And now that Starr is president of a Baptist university, he and the regents of his school are cloaking themselves in legalisms and claims of privacy on the arguably much more urgent question of serial campus rape.

*******************

To jog your memory:

Starr, whose main claim to fame at Baylor has been beefing up the football team and building a new stadium, now has two star players in prison for rape, a third about to be tried, another player expelled, a fraternity president arrested and charged. This occurs against a backdrop of foot-dragging on federally mandated anti-rape measures and a pattern of stony silence roundly decried by national and Texas media including even the university’s hometown newspaper, The Waco Tribune.

The Silence of the Starrs. We’ve had a lot of that, haven’t we? Brings to mind that Edgar Lee Masters poem…

I have known the silence of the Starrs and of their teams,
And the silence of the buck when it’s passed,
And the silence of the AD and the Assistant AD,
And the silence for which juries alone find the word,
And the silence of trustees before football season begins,
And the silence of boosters …

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.

And and and and and… You’ve got to string together a lot of ands to describe campus life at Baylor University.

We’ll use this Alberto Moravia title to describe not the moral degeneracy of twentieth century Italy, but the moral degeneracy of one of America’s most noisily Christian universities, Baylor. One of the victims of one of Baylor’s woman-beaters is indeed currently suing the school for “indifference,” and UD thinks she’s got a winner on her hands. It’s hard to come up with a university as consistently indifferent to beaten and raped women on its campus as Baylor.

Baylor knew three [football] players had serious assault charges against them and chose the best course of action was no action…

But you have to understand…

The one area on the field where [the team] consistently struggled was defense, and all three of the players in question were defensive linemen.

*************************

I guess Baylor figures there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

*************************

Remarkable candor on the ethics of accepting into a university setting – and deifying – violent people.

Talent trumps all, said Peter Schroeder, a sports management expert, chair of the University of Pacific’s Department of Health, Exercise and Sport Sciences. “A really good player can make a big difference.”