Post by CrimsonPhantom on Aug 23, 2018 10:09:34 GMT -7
What happened at Ohio State Wednesday, with Urban Meyer receiving a piddling three-game suspension for clearly and deliberately trying to cover for an assistant coach intent on committing violence against his wife, was disgusting. Even if you’re someone who pays close attention to how sordid college sports can be, it felt like a previously undiscovered and particularly excrement-loaded layer of muck.
There’s not much need for me to tell you how ridiculous this whole thing is. USA TODAY’s Christine Brennan did that already. As did George Schroeder (and there’s a video of Dan Wolken in there, too.) So did Yahoo’s Pat Forde. And ESPN’s Heather Dinich. And this piece — This Is How You Erase A Woman From Her Own Story — from Deadspin’s Diana Moskovitz, is essential. Please read it.
But also know that all of this — and all of its corollaries, like what happened at Baylor and Penn State and all the other places where the misdeeds are spread apart just enough so that the pattern goes unnoticed — is born from a system of college sports that has been rotting from the inside for decades. When you build a multi-billion dollar empire on the backs of unpaid labor and then market it all as not just an extension of what your schools stand for but what your schools actually stand for you end up twisting and twirling the way Ohio State’s leadership did yesterday, and you claim to the public that one of the most ruthlessly efficient coaches in the history of sports is actually a guy who quivers in difficult moments and can be more than a bit forgetful.
Spencer Hall, at SB Nation, wrote an as-always eloquent and thoughtful piece in the wake of the Michigan State scandal entitled “PLEASE STOP SAYING YOU’RE NOT SURPRISED.” Here’s the heart of it:
The second: please stop saying you’re not surprised, loudly and confidently, like this was something you expected. Like it’s going to make you feel better, like it was something that the lack of surprise can lessen, ameliorate, or dampen. Like it was something easily foreseen because of safe distance, because of being somewhere else at a remove. If the lesson of the past ten years or so has not been that there is nowhere to hide from this, then there has been no lesson whatsoever.
The third point is an extension of the second: Please stop saying it if you’re a man, especially. It only gives a minimal bit of comfort and to you only, and at best only an illusion of power over the situation, as if private suspicions left unvoiced until the moment of revelation mean anything. It is claiming that you knew the car was going to crash seconds after impact. It is the most useless, unwanted, and unproductive “I told you so” in the long history of that phrase.
Mostly it implies the worst of humanity’s worst shouldn’t horrify or surprise a bystander—when that’s what surprise, shock, and horror are there for in the first place. Taking away that feeling takes away their purpose in the first place. Shock, horror, and surprise are there to remind you that this is not okay. None of this can ever be considered okay.
In the immediate aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State (my alma mater), I wrote, in response to all the people sounding shocked that anything untoward could happen at Joe Paterno’s university, that people shouldn’t be shocked. Because the leadership at the school had been ignoring and dismissing lesser problems within the program for many years leading up to that point. To think the president and athletic director would have bumbled through something as serious as the sexual abuse of minors was no surprise whatsoever if you’d ever tried to get them on the record discussing an accusation of sexual or physical assault against a woman by an athlete. There was no accountability for the program. For anyone, really. To imagine that it would just materialize — conjured, I guess, out of all those lofty words spilled about the wisdom and courage of coaches everywhere over the years — when the situation demanded is the sort of notion only a contorted fan could believe.
This is where we are. College sports is broken — but we go on ignoring it because tailgates are very fun.
There’s not much need for me to tell you how ridiculous this whole thing is. USA TODAY’s Christine Brennan did that already. As did George Schroeder (and there’s a video of Dan Wolken in there, too.) So did Yahoo’s Pat Forde. And ESPN’s Heather Dinich. And this piece — This Is How You Erase A Woman From Her Own Story — from Deadspin’s Diana Moskovitz, is essential. Please read it.
But also know that all of this — and all of its corollaries, like what happened at Baylor and Penn State and all the other places where the misdeeds are spread apart just enough so that the pattern goes unnoticed — is born from a system of college sports that has been rotting from the inside for decades. When you build a multi-billion dollar empire on the backs of unpaid labor and then market it all as not just an extension of what your schools stand for but what your schools actually stand for you end up twisting and twirling the way Ohio State’s leadership did yesterday, and you claim to the public that one of the most ruthlessly efficient coaches in the history of sports is actually a guy who quivers in difficult moments and can be more than a bit forgetful.
Spencer Hall, at SB Nation, wrote an as-always eloquent and thoughtful piece in the wake of the Michigan State scandal entitled “PLEASE STOP SAYING YOU’RE NOT SURPRISED.” Here’s the heart of it:
The second: please stop saying you’re not surprised, loudly and confidently, like this was something you expected. Like it’s going to make you feel better, like it was something that the lack of surprise can lessen, ameliorate, or dampen. Like it was something easily foreseen because of safe distance, because of being somewhere else at a remove. If the lesson of the past ten years or so has not been that there is nowhere to hide from this, then there has been no lesson whatsoever.
The third point is an extension of the second: Please stop saying it if you’re a man, especially. It only gives a minimal bit of comfort and to you only, and at best only an illusion of power over the situation, as if private suspicions left unvoiced until the moment of revelation mean anything. It is claiming that you knew the car was going to crash seconds after impact. It is the most useless, unwanted, and unproductive “I told you so” in the long history of that phrase.
Mostly it implies the worst of humanity’s worst shouldn’t horrify or surprise a bystander—when that’s what surprise, shock, and horror are there for in the first place. Taking away that feeling takes away their purpose in the first place. Shock, horror, and surprise are there to remind you that this is not okay. None of this can ever be considered okay.
In the immediate aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State (my alma mater), I wrote, in response to all the people sounding shocked that anything untoward could happen at Joe Paterno’s university, that people shouldn’t be shocked. Because the leadership at the school had been ignoring and dismissing lesser problems within the program for many years leading up to that point. To think the president and athletic director would have bumbled through something as serious as the sexual abuse of minors was no surprise whatsoever if you’d ever tried to get them on the record discussing an accusation of sexual or physical assault against a woman by an athlete. There was no accountability for the program. For anyone, really. To imagine that it would just materialize — conjured, I guess, out of all those lofty words spilled about the wisdom and courage of coaches everywhere over the years — when the situation demanded is the sort of notion only a contorted fan could believe.
This is where we are. College sports is broken — but we go on ignoring it because tailgates are very fun.
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