Good news, for a change. After Coach Tracy Claeys proudly supported his gang-banging football team, he got his just reward: he has been fired. That’s the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, the article ends on the really important tragedy: what about the football team?
Minnesota now faces an uphill battle as National Signing Day for high school senior recruits is less than two months away. The football program is in danger of losing several recruits and having to rebuild both the performance side and the reputation destroyed as a result of the alleged incident. But in the bigger picture, administration has delivered the message that whatever happened in the alleged September incident will not be tolerated now or ever again.
With Claeys, the Gophers won nine games in 2016 for the first time since 2003, when they finished 10-3. They also won a bowl game for the second straight year.
Rebuild your reputation by suspending all football games for at least a year. That also solves the problem of rebuilding the performance of the team — maybe they can focus on their studies for a while.
Alleged incident? Be honest enough to call it simple the incident. It happened, Nobody is in the criminal justice system, although they should be. The writer needs to go back to school and learn how to present facts.
PZ, the word is gang rape, not gang bang. Please don’t conflate sex with rape.
Focus on their “studies”? Surely you jest.
For too many alumni and students, the success (and here success is defined by win/loss record not on developing humans for living in this world) of the football program is considered more important than the actual reason these institutions of higher learning were founded and exist. Until that changes football will continue to corrupt higher education.
These programs should be spun out as independent operations with no ties to the universities. This will hurt cash flow for some schools, improve cash flow for others, and help the institutions focus on their reason for existing: educating students.
@whywhywhy
I agree 100%.
It’s time to get NFL and NBA farm teams out of colleges and high schools. I suspect college sports teams, are not the profit centers administrators and alumni groups make them out to be. Athletic “scholarships” demean deserving students trying to get an education. The NFL should fund its own football training college. We need to get this parasitic monstrosity out of the educational system
whywhywhy & flange,
Could not have said it better. It makes absolutely no sense.
You want football removed from schools? In other words, you want corporations to pay their employees a wage, and give them legally-required benefits? What kind of commie pinko are you?
USA: Where we force you to work for free. Centuries of experience at it!
flange, #5
They’ve portrayed them as profitable? They consistently generate massive losses for schools.
Greta Samsa, #9:
They portray them as profitable all the time. Right now, my school is building a $200 M on campus football stadium. So far, they’ve argued that the students wanted it (independent data collection shows that not even the athletes particularly do), that it wouldn’t be paid for with tuition as the alumni would cover all of it (they came up $120 M short), that it would bring new students to the school (no data thus far, but what anecdata I have suggests that people are avoiding it), that it would only shut down city traffic for six days a year and would thus have a negligible effect on the larger city, and yes, that it would be profitable (independent data collection suggests that it’s not likely to happen) because more people would come to this stadium than the one that already exists about two miles off campus.
It’s not even a particularly known football school, the team has never been particularly good or popular, etc. This still happens. The schools with more entrenched football teams are that much more likely to portray them as profitable, and to shield the coach and players from the consequences of their actions.
As Giliell says, “gang bang” is a porn category involving consensual group sex and rape is what these men have committed.
Yes, let’s all rearrange our definitions around terms the sexual exploitation industry has co-opted in one of its many examples of mainstreaming rape culture.
While “gangbang” is actually most salient as “a name for a type of group sex consenting people (usually women), generally with the assistance of their partners, are known to organize among friends or drawing on vetted selections of the membership of certain subculture communities,” I’m glad someone other than me noticed the kink-shaming and slut-shaming splash damage in the choice of…
This-space-reserved-for-god fucking damnit….
Oh yes.
is the point of this thread
“…whatever happened in the alleged September incident will not be tolerated now or ever again.”
Without a doubt the greatest collection of weasel words I’ve ever seen in a single clause.
I assume you’re now going to go back through 15 years of Pharyngula history and present this same sneer at anyone else who called out language that was harmful in a way orthogonal to the main thrust of the post?
Didn’t think so.
Seriously, what the actual fuck? There is absolutely no conflict, none, in acknowledging that the woman in question did not consent to the physical act of copulation with multiple men, without using wording that taken at face value serves to gaslight any other woman who ever HAS consented to group sex with multiple men about her own lived experience, especially given the harm done by cultural shaming of women for having sexual interests A) at all and B) that are “unconventional.” The gaslighting language adds nothing to the condemnation of rape, and arguably detracts something.