A woman secured a restraining order against six Minnesota players — one of whom was later dropped from it — after an episode in September in which she said she was sexually assaulted by several men, some of whom were suspended for three games by the university. The men have insisted the sex was consensual.
The whole team — and its coach — were blackmailing the University, threatening the loss of tens of millions of dollars of revenue from the Holiday Bowl, to go to bat for real-life gangbangers.
Coach Tracy Claeys' tweet was especially dense: "Have never been more proud of our kids. I respect their rights & support their effort to make a better world!"
Huh. How can a world where football players can rape women without consequences be "better?"
Answer: a world where Donald Trump is the president elect, and misogyny is the order of the day.
These punks took a cue from Trump. Instead of admitting wrong, they just blustered through. They thought that if they just screamed loud enough everyone would back down and they'd get their way.
If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency I don't think these idiots would have tried to blackmail the university. But with Trump as president, these football players think all women are fair game.
The boycott was short-lived. A couple of days later the players manned up and decided to do their jobs, instead of pissing and moaning about the unfair treatment of pampered players.
The team had thought their brothers weren't getting "due process." Minneapolis police had reviewed the case and decided not to press charges. They hadn't committed a crime, the team reasoned, so why should the rapists have to do the time?
There are several spheres of influence that govern human interaction: legal, moral, ethical, cultural, contractual. What is allowable in one sphere is frequently disallowed in another sphere. This is the source of society's many conflicts.
Football culture finds gangbanging bitches who implicitly asked for it to be perfectly acceptable.
The law, having insufficient evidence to press charges, has so far declined to indict the players (though this decision is under review at the county level).
Football fans are often the most religious and patriotic people; they love to talk about god and country. Many teams, especially in the South, gather for a prayer before each game. Christian morality dictates that gang rape is unacceptable on several levels: it is fornication, and having sex with a woman who just had sex with nine another guys is essentially the same as banging those nine other guys.
Ethically, the incident was clearly gang rape: it is impossible for a lone female to freely give sexual consent to ten hulking football players. The atmosphere of coercion is too strong to give any illusion that the woman had any kind of choice.
But more to the point, this gang rape was contractually banned. Football players are constrained by NCAA regulations.
One of the participants in the gang rape is reportedly an underage recruit. Providing sex to recruits is a recruiting violation. The university must sanction NCAA violations, or face serious financial consequences.
Also, while the contents of the team members' contracts have not been disclosed, it's not unusual for such agreements to include morals clauses, which allow termination of the scholarship after morally egregious conduct has been uncovered.
It's easy to see how these gang rapes occur. A player brings a girl to a party. He gets her drunk with vodka shots. They have sex. She's lying in bed, totally out of it. Another guy comes in and bangs her. And another. And another. Pretty soon there's a line.
In their minds, when a girl drinks with a football player, there's only one endgame: sex. Because everyone "knows" what football players are like. And if she did the first guy, she would do them all, because they're
team mates!
But Minnesota culture does not want their university to employ gangbangers. It's bad enough that the university's two most expensive teams — football and basketball — never win anything, but they've had one sex scandal after another, year after
year after
year, including another
basketball group sex scandal just this past February, and the
resignation last year of the former athletic director Norwood Teague for groping women.
Clearly the men at the U of M athletic department do not have their heads in the game: they're too busy harassing women to do their jobs properly.
But not everything is so grim in the U of M sports program: the women's hockey team regularly wins the NCAA championship, and the women's volleyball team has made three Final Four appearances in the last seven years. And all the players have decent GPAs, some in fields like chemical engineering, and they all graduate.
It's amazing what you can do with a little hard work and discipline. The guys should really try it.
