Wright On: College football is assaulting my sensibilities

Travel anywhere you wish, go to the mainland, visit other countries, you will never see another sport quite like college football in America.

Lately, that has become a bad thing and not just because you’d be hard-pressed to name another sport anywhere that generates billions in television revenue and gives none of it to the people who actually play the game that generates cash flow. The money has always been there, the first college football teams, in the 19th and early 20th centuries paid players, often recruiting them just to play football, no need to attend classes or be an actual student of any kind.

Only the amounts and ever more inventive ways to disperse cash payoffs has changed over time, but the offseason news not about paying athletes in recent years has corrupted the sport more than money on its own ever has.

Specifically, in what other sport are the abuses, the physical assaults, the beatings, the rapes, perpetrated by the players themselves?

Last week’s announcement of the UH-Manoa 2016 football schedule should have been that offseason moment when you can look ahead with optimism and curiosity, maybe spend a few minutes online researching some opponents, but for me, the disgust over what’s happening at the University of Tennessee and some other places was enough to take the fun out of it.

At some point, name your subject, we all have a point of no return, a place where we realize we’ve seen and heard enough.

For me, Tennessee pushed me over the edge. The school is the subject of revived scrutiny over its handling of sexual-assault cases involving athletes. On Feb. 9, six women filed a 64-page federal lawsuit against the school, in which it said the institution botched women’s sexual-assault cases and condoned a culture in the athletic department that encouraged underage drinking, drug use, and sexual violence. All the women — former students — alleged the school did little to protect students who accused football and basketball players of sexual assault.

Last week, two more women joined the lawsuit. The allegation now is that the initial investigations revealed six athletes were found to have committed sexual assaults but were allowed to stay in school. I got to that point last week when another filing was submitted in an ongoing Title IX lawsuit against the Tennessee athletics department. The allegation is that current and former athletes, at least three of them football players (one played basketball, one was not identified), were not disciplined after an investigation by the school found they had committed sexual assault.

Any of this institutional smokescreen sound familiar?

It’s what they said at Florida State when star quarterback James Winston was accused of rape. With his DNA found at the scene, he admitted the encounter but called it “consensual.” Nebraska said it was an isolated incident when Lawrence Phillips was accused of attacking a girlfriend, an incident that concluded with her being thrown down a flight of stairs. Phillips was murdered in prison a month ago, but the concealment and downplaying of most of these sexual assaults by college football players allows the majority of them to simply continue their careers.

Other big schools with powerhouse football engines driving their athletic departments have been involved, so have smaller schools. Here is a smattering of other “isolated incidents,” cobbled together from an exhaustive investigative report by the magazine Mother Jones. These aren’t a tenth of the publicly reported assaults from a variety of schools, but they tend to follow a certain path of administrative silence:

Virginia Tech (1994) — Freshman Christy Brzonkala ran into a wall of obstruction when she told administrators she had been raped by two Virginia Tech football players. The school dropped charges against one player after he threatened to sue because the school’s code of conduct did not explicitly forbid sexual assault. His penalty was a “one-hour educational session,” the other player was suspended for a year — only to have the suspension dropped before football season started; Idaho State (1995) — Four Bengals football players were sentenced to community service and one-year of probation for statutory rape;

Appalachian State (1997) — A female student alleged she had been raped by six football players, but the school’s judicial board downgraded their offenses to “lewd conduct.” ASU Chancellor Francis Borkowski’s message to students that year: “If you are not in control of your life through indulgence in alcohol and drugs, then you are setting yourself up.”; Colorado (1997) — No charges were filed by Boulder police after a woman alleged she was raped by a football recruit at a party, because witnesses were deemed too inebriated to be trustworthy.

United States Naval Academy (2000) — Three football players were accused of raping a female midshipman who passed out at an off-campus party. They avoided prosecution in exchange for leaving the academy;

Florida (2000) — Offensive line recruit Jason Respert was accused of breaking into a female student’s bedroom and sexually assaulting her, but the charges were reduced to trespassing and simple battery. He went on to accept a full scholarship at Tennessee;

BYU (2004) — Four players were indicted and two more sent to trial in the gang rape of a fellow student. Although a teammate testified against them at the trial, the players were acquitted.

These are tip of the iceberg accounts, truly just a fraction of the campus assaults spread across the country.

Sure, we’ll hop back on the UH-Manoa football train before the season starts, after all, the Rainbow Warriors aren’t a part of the continuing attacks by college athletes on fellow students and others.

You could say our state school represents an isolated incident, and, in this context, that’s a very good thing, indeed.

Contact Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com with comments.