The football coach who reportedly joked to his team members about the sexual assault on an unconscious girl, who the team trusted to cover up any problems their behavior might cause, who threatened a reporter and her family if they pursued the case, has had his coaching contract extended another two years.
Symbolic of this unholy marriage of jock culture and rape culture was the revered Big Red football coach Reno Saccoccia who didn’t seem to give a damn that his players could have treated a woman this way. Given Coach Saccoccia’s controversial behavior before and during the trial, which drew national scrutiny, many of us thought he at the very least would be shown the door after three decades of service. We all thought wrong. Today we learned that “Coach Sac”, as he is known, has been granted a two-year contract extension by the Steubenville school board. They made this decision despite the fact that a grand jury is meeting next week to assess whether he and others obstructed justice in the case. Saccoccia was legally required to report the sexual assault as soon as he was aware it took place. The grand jury will determine whether or not he in fact knew and tried to sweep it under the turf.
Two members of his team were convicted of rape and sent off to jail. You know, even if all anyone cared about was his win/loss record, this is not evidence of a good coach.
But maybe they should care about more. Isn’t it peculiar that many atheist and gay teachers are terrified to come out because they know it could cost them their job, yet a coach can facilitate a culture of rape with total impunity?
“Isn’t it peculiar that many atheist and gay teachers are terrified to come out because they know it could cost them their job, yet a coach can facilitate a culture of rape with total impunity?”
A straight Christian coach, who oversees football. Those points are very important.
Serious question, although I will understand if all the answers are sarcastic: What’s the deal with football? Why do people care so much about someone’s win/loss record? It’s just a stupid game. Why does anyone care enough to protect football coaches?
How common does this have to be? How close to home for the mouth breathing shit eaters that raise tawdry apologetics for this stuff does it really need to be before someone actually gets sacked for being an irresponsible, negligent, misogynist scumbag?
Oh wait, it can’t GET any closer to home and they’re still doing it. Forget I mentioned it. I’m going to be over in the corner with some rum, swearing at passers by.
Louis
His name would suggests he is Catholic. Is that just a coincidence or is there something to that? I honestly don’t know.
Dianne,
I live in Texas (but I grew up in the UK) and it shocks me every time I pass a high school with an enormous football stadium. I think it comes down from the college level of sports, where there is a lot of money from alums etc. I think that for some of these ‘seats of learning’ football is the only thing that matters.
I would love to give a sarcastic answer , but for once I can’t. The whole system is just too disgusting.
Because a lot of US high schools and colleges believe, rightly or wrongly, that success at football games makes them money.
This is what you get when a society, or nation, discourages people from thinking for themselves.
@Louis
Mind if I join you? I was just reading about the sentencing of the two arseholes involved, which brightened me up a bit, but this has rather killed my mood. I’ll bring Gosling’s?
Oh, sweet Jeebus. I don’t mean to make anyone feel worse, but two girls have just been charged for a campaign of online bullying and threats directed at the victim.
Louis, I could really use some of that rum.
Sadly Steubenville probably has learned something, just the wrong something. Twenty bucks says the coach has already told his players not to take happy snaps of their felonies **vomit**. I think I need a drink.
Stevenbelgium:
Rape culture is hardly limited to Catholics.
I would like to think tat the coach kept his job because no decent person would want to be associated with the football team. But I would be wrong. Hey Louis, any rum left?
Mind if I join you?
If you and Louis will let me join you too I’ll bring the caffeinated beverages and we can swear drunkenly energetically.
Because a lot of US high schools and colleges believe, rightly or wrongly, that success at football games makes them money.
My impression is that most HS and probably most college football programs are money losers. So it’s the classic “American dream” thing: chase a wildly improbable idea no matter how unlikely it is to succeed, no matter how much damage concentrating on that and nothing else is doing. Got it.
Commies, the lot of ya. FOOBALLLLLLLLLLL
*smack*
Thank you.
His name would suggests he is Catholic.
Don’t go there.
“I’m going to be over in the corner with some rum, swearing at passers by”
Alcohol makes me sleepy, but I can come over and teach you a collection of Swedish curses.
dianne @ # 13: My impression is that most HS and probably most college football programs are money losers.
Your impression is probably correct, in most cases, but the books are often cooked – sports program expenses, for example, getting charged to overhead. And the Big Name football teams do garner inordinate amounts of alumni donations – but only in those schools where Jock Worship 101 is mandatory for all levels.
I’d love to see a comparison of alum payouts for schools which win Heisman Trophies and those which win Nobel Prizes.
It sounds like Steubenville needs a new school board, as well as a new coach. But then, it sounds like Steubenville may need an infusion of civilized humans.
Diane — Which football are you talking about? The American version or the one played in the rest of the World? Does it matter? Because from what I’ve seen of the international version, there’s plenty amiss there as well. All sports culture suffers from over inflated importance and a willingness to throw away good sense and the moral compass for the sake of a winning team. That’s why hooliganism is a problem at European athletic events, and there are Steubenvilles all over America.
Sigh. This kind of shit is what’s making me less and less interested in having anything to do with atheist spaces.
Yes, let us blame religion, and ignore that this shit is endemic to humanity. Let’s all talk about how the best way to fight rape culture is to dismantle religion, as if it’s not already in our own backyard, as if it doesn’t survive just fine without overtly religious justifications. My problem with religion is that it’s a pack of lies and by its very nature it encourages people to accept things without evidence or rational thought, but that is not something that the religious have a monopoly on. That’s something we all have to work on. We are all swimming in irrational, stupid, knee-jerk assumptions, every last fucking one of us.
We have all absorbed racist, sexist, ableist, classist, etc. assumptions. Consciously rejecting a single bunch of irrationality doesn’t mean we have consciously rejected others, and it definitely doesn’t mean they aren’t all still there subconsciously.
I’m a bit of a recovering American football fan myself. I played until 10th grade in high school and was told repeatedly by coaches that I should play through college and let it help pay for my education, but I quit, which did NOT please the coaching staff.
The reason I quit was two fold, I was becoming more interested in music but also the culture. As a music geek that played football, I was astutely aware of the way some of my team mates treated others around campus and off. I found the coaches to generally be macho assholes if not straight up Christian wingnuts, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
I confess to still enjoying the game at the professional level. It’s elite athletes engaging in a chess match, a much more cerebral game then one might suspect but I abhor what is happening in places like Stubenville, and no amount of enjoyment I get from a game will ever outweigh the suffering caused by entitled attitudes that seem to be associated with it. I followed football last year after not paying attention for 12 years while I lived in San Diego, and that’s mainly because I’m back in Buffalo and if you can’t talk football and hockey around the water cooler here you are basically a social outcast.
I guess it’s time to put the crack pipe down for good and recognize the toxic culture. I’ll miss Sunday’s glued to the TV, but I can no longer rationalize my support for the NFL unless and until they aggressively tackle the issue of the culture that props it up at lower levels.
The Mellow Monkey,
I agree with the sentiment that too many atheists think that just eliminating religion will solve all of our problems. That mind set has got to change. It’s been ingrained by Dawkins and Hitchens, so I don’t hold out much hope, but reducing everything to “religion is teh evil” is shortsighted in the extreme.
Thus Atheism+, but I’m starting to wonder if it shouldn’t just be rationalism+.
@dianne
Rum and Redbull? I’ll give it a go :)
@birgerjohansson
We could be swearing drunkenly, energetically, and in Swedish?! I’m all over this :)
@stevenbelgium
Much as I dislike Catholicism, I see no correlation, even anecdotally, between incidence of rape culture and Catholicism. I do see a lot of anecdotal evidence which implies that rape culture is particularly bad in football culture.
@erikthebassist
Actually, Dawkins says in The God Delusion that eliminating religion wouldn’t solve all of the worlds ills, but it would dramatically improve it overall. That’s an assessment I agree with.
I too get annoyed with the “Religion is the root of all evil” crowd. It is the source of a lot of evils and the enabler of almost all of them, but it’s not the source of all of them.
Let’s not mince words here.
Gotta wonder if “Coach Sac” has something on the school board members. I did hear this on the news this morning, however, and they said the contract extension was related to “administrative duties” and not to coaching: I translate that as meaning they feel they have to continue paying him but may take him out of direct contact with kids.
Somebody check the lead exposure problem in Steubenville.
What’s the deal with football? Why do people care so much about someone’s win/loss record?
In addition to the money angle already mentioned above, there’s also a village’s or town’s need for some sort of tribal or pseudo-tribal identity to rally ’round — and for many towns, the only point of pride or identity they have is a college or high-school football team. There’s also police and fire departments, but they generally don’t have as many opportunities to show their colors as a football team with a regular schedule of games.
There’s other ways for INDIVIDUALS to stand out and make people proud, but most of them involve getting an education, going away, and spending long tedious years doing things that don’t fit easily into the townsfolk’s understanding or reality. And those accomplishments take time, where organized sports offers instant “results” (and, in the case of football, a big audience, because football is currently one of our more popular spectator sports).
Thumper et al,
It is a large corner, well appointed with swearing couches and sundry facilities. This isn’t my first rodeo! ;-)
All are welcome.
Louis
Mellow Monkey, first of all it’s pretty dishonest of you to cut out my last sentence.
Secondly, you write a whole lot of stuff that has nothing to do with what I said. You’re not a mind reader you know.
I do think the catholic angle is interesting to discuss as just one aspect of this whole problem. If he is a man that has left his thinking on moral issues in the hands of the catholic church then clearly he will be influenced by how they covered stuff like this up.
Again though that’s just one aspect. Rape culture and Sport worship are other aspects of this. Discussing one aspect does not preclude discussing another.
Gotta wonder if “Coach Sac” has something on the school board members…
I’m guessing all he would really need is enough “accomplishments” (read “wins”) to shout down a bunch of bureaucrats who never saved any lives or won any big games. Pics of said bureaucrats with underage farm animals would be useful, but not necessary.
Louis
You’re a gentleman and a scholar :) I shall procure the ingredients for Dark and Stormys post-haste.
The Mellow Monkey @ 19;
Quoted for truth. We can all see how toxic and harmful religion is, but going down the route of claiming that it is the ‘root of all evil’ smacks of being a convenient excuse. I see religion as primarily a (particularly nasty) symptom of – rather than the sole source of – society’s problems. It is a symptom of the endemic irrationality in our society that leads us to a situation where our culture would rather deal in fantasies than in the evidence. It is a symptom of unearned privilege that places entitled groups over less privileged ones on the arbitrary basis of tradition or appeals to the naturalistic fallacy. It is a symptom of a system that is predicated upon the erroneous belief that there must always be an overclass and an underclass in society in order for civilisation to function.
It is a symptom of the idea that there is such a thing as a disposeable class of person.
Treating the symptom may yield some benefits, but if the underlying problems are not addressed then little will ultimately change for the better. Even if belief in the christian god magically disappeared tomorrow, there are plenty of other faiths that would fill the gap. Even if all religion vanished overnight, there is still the problem of various superstitions and mystical woo. Even if all belief systems commonly identified as irrational went up in smoke, there are any numher of self described ‘rationalists’ who are adept at dressing up their bigotry against women, gay people, transpeople, the differently abled, ethnic minorites or whichever marginalised group one cares to name, as being ‘logical’. The example of the hyperskeptic who corrupts skepticism as a means of ignoring or silencing the voices of women springs to mind – the kind of person who responds to every experience of rape survivors by saying ‘yeah – where is your evidence for that?’ without taking into account that a lack of interest in performing academic studies in that field is part of the problem.
Pushing religion out of government and defanging it with regard to its usefulness as a justifucation for victimising vulnerable groups is only part (though admitedly an important part) of a much broader struggle to create a more just and equal society. I see no evidence that the Steubenville rapists were primarily motivated or enabled by religious beliefs, and indeed I can see no reason why the same problem wouldn’t exist to the same degree in a thoroughly secular society that was similarly infected with rape culture paired with a culture of privilege that puts sports stars on an undeserved pedestal that paints them as automatically beyond reproach.
Religion is like a secondary infection – it undeniably makes a bad situation worse, and can easily prove fatal in its own right, but treating it alone is not sufficient to fix all your problems.
There has yet to be any single thing about this Steubenville case that does not astound me. Like I referred to above, with appropriate dark humour, I’m not some merry naif, undisturbed by the occasionally horrific realities of the world, but this case is the “gift that keeps on giving” in terms of horror. There is no end to the forgiveness granted the perpetrators and apologists/accomplices in this case, and equally it seems no end to the opprobrium and hatred heaped on the shoulders of the victim. THE VICTIM! I still can’t quite get my head around the fact that the person receiving the bulk of the vitriolic barrage in the mainstream press and other venues is the person who was raped.
I need a lot more rum for this to make sense. I’m opening the vintage, overproof stuff. I may have to move to Advanced Swearing.
Louis
I’ll contribute a bottle or two of the good stuff. This topic really saddens me on so many levels: father, law abiding adult, teacher, and I hope, a decent human being.
I’ll bring some large glasses… And I’ll trade Cree curses for the equilivent in Swedish.
It’s a religion!
Also, everything you said in comment 13.
You know what pissed me off? Sky News’ story on the subject showed a sympathy-jerking picture of Richmond crying into his lawyer’s shoulder as he is sentenced. That really pissed me off.
@erikthebassist
Same story as me, only I dropped football earlier (middle school). I severely dislike it when people unreasonably dismiss the game itself (i.e., not the culture, but just how it’s played or the fact that it is played), but I will fully agree with any assessment of the awful culture that surrounds it, especially the absurd amounts of cash that get dumped into sports programs while arts and sciences programs are left to subsist on crumbs.
How is it that the football team gets a brand new, updated uniform design every two years while the band struggles with subpar quality instruments, if they have the appropriate instruments in the first place (when was the last time you saw a high school with a contrabass clarinet?)? Grr.
Now we’re talking!!!
Louis @ 33;
That we have seen victim blaming on such a vast and coordinated scale – going all the way from local thugs mocking and persecuting the victim to national media outlets bemoaning how much harm these events will do to the damn rapists as if the victim does not even deserve any consideration at all – demonstrates disturbingly well how deeply entrenched rape culture is. Precious little has really changed since the days when rape victims were forced to marry their rapists.
I am afraid that there is not enough rum or other intoxicants in the world to make this sick Steubenville horror show make sense.
Is that the discipline that lets you break a cinder block with a perfectly placed expletive…?
;-P
****
I’m sorry – as a teetotaler rum is of no use to me, and so bad attempts at humour are one of the ways in which I deal with just how very messed up the world really is.
Dear Gregory, we rum drinkers are very tolerant and accepting of others. Why, I have been known talk and drink with martini drinkers.
Hardly the only coach who tried to cover up a rape and be rewarded for it. Look at the career of Steve Alford. In 2003, when he was coach of the Iowa Hawkeyes men’s basketball team when one of his star players, Pierre Pierce, raped a fellow student. Steve Alford, in his role as a member of a christian athlete organization, tried to keep the victim from pressing charges against Pierre Pierce. Yes, it is exactly as disgusting as it sounds.
Alford was forced out of Iowa and ended up ai New Mexico State. And, just recently, he got the head coaching job at the most legendary university in college basketball, UCLA. And very few people seem to know about his attempt to bully a rape victim into silence and protect his star rapist player.
And, yes, Steve Alford played for that fine coaching legend, Bobby “If Rape Is Inevitable, Relax And Enjoy It” Knight.
Rape Culture? What fucking Rape Culture?
Stevenbelgium:
You mean, “I honestly don’t know”? So you were Just Asking Questions, eh?
There is no specific connection between being Catholic and behaving in the manner in which the coach has behaved, any more than there is a specific connection between being Muslim and being a terrorist. If you raise the specter of correlation/causation but not provide any reasoning for it other than “I’m just sayin’,” you look like an asshole.
Fucking callous misogynist arses. There is not enough rum in the world. Fuck.
The victim is of less than no consequence, the rapists and their supporters take less than no responsibility. How can they not have so much as an inkling of how wrong this is?!?
“But why is the rum gone!?”
“Rape culture, that’s why.”
Gregory, #39,
Thanks for reminding me! [/sarcasm]
I’m not having a go at you of course, even after the teatotal confession, I might look at you sideways for a bit for that though ( ;-) ).
I, of course, am entirely with you. We militant man hating mangina feminazis must move in lockstep, naturally. Precious little has changed. Maybe it’s just me, a weak and feeble human being, but I seem to be able to manage “incoherent rage” every time Steubenbville comes up and little else. I think I need to use that rage constructively. I am buggered if I know how precisely, I’ll blame the rum for that.
I have to wonder what horrors lurk in the minds of people who reach for apologetics of all things when confronted by the demonstrable fact that a young woman was raped, dragged from place to place and the town where this happened did not merely cover it up, but blamed her for being so gosh darn rapeable by its heroes.
Nope…still incoherent rage.
I can handwave up some suitable pseudo-psychobabble, but at the end of that process the issue that floors me is this: A person is confronted by an undeniably terrible event, they are faced with two basic choices, either acknowledging the reality of that event and thus facing their fear, or being so afraid of something in facing the reality of that event that the eternal internal mental whips that will inevitably result, these are HUMANS after all, seem like the better option. I’ve never understood the idea of “comfortable denial”, denial hurts. You know you are in denial to some degree, you have to carry the burden of something you are denying. It’s why we have psychotherapists!
I have no end to this rant other than: GAH! So I’ll leave it there and move rumwards.
Louis
Thumper1990, #44,
Truest thing anyone has ever said, ever. With knobs on.
Louis
P.S. It appears to have been applied to the brandy, whisky, whiskey, gin, vodka, tequila, zivania, palinka, ouzo, pastis, vermouth, anisettes, unicum, jagermeister, schnapps, beer, perry, cider, mead, wine, cannabis, various benzodiazepines, uppers, downers, ‘ludes, LSD, DMT, Salvia divinorum, psilocybin (natural and synthetic), cocaine, morphine, heroin, laudanum, more phenethylamines than anyone has known or loved, khat and indeed my last lingering supply of home made, special hash vodka with mushrooms made in 1999 and so lethal that it is a “one sip whitey”.
Still, I can just about remember the details of this case. I think perhaps it’s time to break out the serious stuff.
I’m converting to Christianity. I mean, I’ve tried some shit in my time, but I’ve never seen a geezer walk on water. That stuff has to be MENTAL!
They should change the name of the town to Stupefyingville.
Louis @ 45;
Yeah – sorry about that. Rape culture really is nothing new.
Don’t worry – I am used to it. I have often been told what unnatural critters we teetotalers are. Too many of us in one place are apparently a herald of strange weather patterns, unexplained lights in the night sky, (un)natural disasters, and the conservative lying down with the liberal progressive…
;-P
I have no clue how people like that think, other than that the inside of their heads must be really scary places. I suppose that victim blaming is just so much easier than accepting that their precious ‘heroes’ are repugnant, predatory peices of humanoid excrement who are exemplars of nothing more than what a decent human being should aspire to avoid becoming. If their almost deified heroes are such, what does it say about them?
Unfortunately, this relies on the assumption that these aresholes actually see rape as a terrible event – all too many of them have probably convinced themselves that the victim was ‘asking for it’ or was otherwise complicit in what happened to her, or simply believe that a little ‘consent absent sex’ (urghh – now I feel dirty) is a small price to pay to keep their precious football stars happy. We now that there people out there who see women as sex toys and/or incubators rather than people – perhaps there are more people like that out there than anyone wants to admit. Perhaps people like that hold power in a great many towns like Steubenville…
Damn it – this kind of thing is almost enough to make one reconsider one’s dislike of alcohol.
I think I’ll come to the corner as well, but as a non-rum drinker, I shall have to bring the local tequila, some citrus and a fruit press. I can offer up Spanish curses. Some of them are quite beautifully elaborate.
Stubbensville: Because my misanthropy apparently needed a boost.
Gregory,
Yesssss. Yessssssssss. Feeel the hate flow through you. It makes you powerful. Come to the Drunk Side. Use your inebriation.
Louis
Louis @ 50;
Now I am imagining some combination of Star Wars and the Drunken Master… a Drunken Sith Lord, perhaps?
Just for the record, if those rapist arsehats are found dismembered by a blade formed of some kind of high energy plasma, I officially didn’t do it…
“Symbolic of this unholy marriage of jock culture and rape culture”
Uhhh… can I just point out that “jock culture” essentially IS rape culture?
Beyond that, I’m joining the crowd with drinks…
I don’t know about that one. Many women athletes consider themselves “jocks” and it really is just about athletics to most. There is a subculture amongst some athletes obviously that is rape culture, but I wouldn’t say all of athletics is part and parcel of rape culture.
There are plenty of young athletes that are outstanding students and model citizens, women included. Many high school sports carry none of the bravado and machismo of the more “popular” sports like football, baseball and basketball.
“Jocks” participate in track and field, swimming, tennis, you name it. The problems seem to gather around the big three men’s sports and the popularity that comes along with that.
I don’t think we should go so far as saying all sports are bad, and to me, that’s what you’ve done here. If I’ve misunderstood your intent I apologize.
@Louis #46:
Recipe, please.
Pass that rum, my friends. But first, take a gander at this glimmer of hope —
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/07/opinion/mcpherson-men-domestic-violence
First : it’s okay to like football. Seriously. It’s okay to like sport in general, except Cricket, as Douglas Adams explained.
What it’s not okay to like is rape. rape, and those who either tacitly or openly approve of it, or make excuses for it.
It’s probably unhealthy to like sport to the point of painting your face and taking off work for games.
— just sayin.
This conversation reminds me of something that happened my sophomore year of high school. We spent one day in my English class running through some scenarios so we could think through and discuss the various moral issues at play. I don’t know if this was a school thing or a district thing or what, but I’m pretty sure my teacher didn’t come up with it all herself.
Anyway, one of the scenarios was: the boys basketball team has a tradition of, when they win a game, going to the girls in a certain section of the front row bleachers and kissing them. At one game, some girls are sitting in that section and get angry and refuse to go along with the kissing.
I don’t remember how many students participated in the discussion, or if I was really as alone as I am in my memory, but I remember arguing with a boy who said if they didn’t want to be kissed, they shouldn’t have sat there. And I didn’t think it was right for these girls to be denied good seats because of a practice that wasn’t right to begin with.
When I’ve thought about this in the past, I’ve been angry at that attitude. But this conversation got me thinking –
1) Is there any non-sporting context in which this scenario would have been even a little bit plausible?
2) Why didn’t the teacher weigh in on this? I get that the point was for us to think about these issues and discuss them, without the teacher telling us what to think. And for ambiguous situations, that’s a good plan. But what we’re talking about here is assault. It shouldn’t be seen as ambiguous. This was an opportunity to teach a lesson on consent, and it wasn’t done. Maybe an authority figure with a pre-prepared approach could have had more of an effect than I did.
AlterNet is reporting a similar case involving a star basketball player who assaulted two women students while the school admin did nothing or worse.
Just found that AlterNet article.
The school’s in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by the way.
Louis #46
Bloody hell… that sounds… interesting.
I did a thing at uni where I bought a big (I think 2L) bottle of cheap vodka, ground up an eighth, dumped it in there, and stuck it next to my bed. After that I just kept adding any stalks, seeds, leftovers etc. from the bags and… well, after a couple of months I tried it, and drinking it was interesting. Tasted foul, but one shot and you were fairly fucked. By the end of the year it was fucking lethal. I dread to think what it would have been like with shrooms in there :-/
Assuming that list is accurate… that’s impressive.
Rich Woods, #56, and Thumper1990, #60,
I’m going to be a good boy and move the discussion of recreational pharmaceuticals out of a thread about the hideous Steubenville case and into the Lounge where such frivolity properly belongs. I don’t want to sully this thread too much more with silly distractions, and I apologise for inadvertently doing so already.
Louis
@robro
Having read your article, three things jump out:
1- Why does it seem like so many more of these crimes are happening recently? It feels like there’s been a fucking spate of them, many ending in the victim killing themselves.
2- WHy the fuck does the fucking victim get bullied? why isn’t the fucking rapist bullied? That I could live with. What a strange culture.
3- From the article:
“For a second time”. So he’s had to go to Kent County’s Adolescent Sexual Offender Treatment Program before. And yet the School still hesitated to punish him in any way. What… the… fuck?
@Louis
Yeah, drailing seems to be a habit of mine lately :( I have to learn to use the Thunderdome.
@Stacy #55
That story cheered me up, so thanks for that :)
Then I read the comments, and now I need the rum again :(