I am sure Barnett didn’t mean lousy at football = “rape away” or at least I hope not but what does seem to be saying is lousy at football = no respect. I’ve been around locker rooms all my life and it can be a harsh environment for less talented players. I submit to you, having been a player and coach, that it is the coach’s job to keep this in check. A good coach brings a team together despite their differences and makes the team better than the sum of it’s parts. He/She has to make it clear that this behavior will not be tolerated. Barnaett failed at this and his insensitivity is off the charts.
As for Black Oak, you fucking idiot, the reason that there is going to be an investigation is to find out what happened. Innocent until proven guilty and all that. The issue at hand and the reason he was suspended is his apparent insensitivity and possible cover up of the harassment/rape.
I’ve despised Barnett for years for his lack of character but never did I think he was stupid enough to do or say something like this. If there’s one good thing that’s to come out of this mess UC finds itself in now, it’s that the whistle has finally been blown on a guy that has no right being such an influence on young men and women.
Goodbye Gary. You’re going down, which is exactly where you should be.
[assertion based on wholly anecdotal information]
This is nearly standard practice on recruiting trips for the better athletes at I-A schools (although I think it’s usually coeds, not hookers, and it’s a bit more discreet). [/assertion]
I always thought that he was a good character person. Perhaps that is just the old mentality that if you are good at football nothing else matters.
The respect that I did have for Barnett evaporated in the matter of about 30 seconds when I heard what he apperantly said.
Right now he is on paid leave, oh my what a terrible penalty. Recruiting is done for the year and practices don’t start for a while yet. My WAG is that he is reinstated within 1 month, or he is fired. If he is fired he will probably be out of work for one season at most. He may be a good fit at any school that has employed Jerry Tarkanian in the past.
Oops, I didn’t get to finish my post – I was going to add, Gary, that if you had honored your 12-year, half-a-million $ contract at Northwestern that you signed, you wouldn’t be in this position now. Take over the job at Party U and is it any wonder you get dirty? Either you knew about all this stuff going on and you looked the other way, or you didn’t know, and you are the most clueless coach in all of college football. Are you a woman hater, or just an imbecile? Or both?
Barnett’s “blame the victim” tactics sound alarmingly like the response of Air Force Academy officials to widespread accusations of rape made by female cadets.
AF academy cadets are supposed to be some of the best and brightest young men America has to offer. Yet if the female cadets accusations are to be believed (and I do believe them) significant minority of our supposed best and brightest routinely rape women and get away with it. Now that the issue has brought negative publicity, officials have pledged to take the allegations seriously, but until now they’ve been largely swept under the rug.
An operative factor in both cases, I’m guessing, is an entitlement mentality - these guys are constantly told that they’re the best of the best, combined with a survival of the fittest-devil take the hindmost attitude brought on by stress and fear of failure.
Barnett’s an idiot, of course, but it seems like coaches and military officials always take this kind of attitude in response to these kinds of issues. Not, “If this is true, it’s terrible, and the offender will be punished severely,” but “The bitch had it coming.”
Are a substantial number of our elite atheletes and military men really just predators waiting to pounce, or is there some kind of training or education that can prevent this or reduce its frequency?
Oh, it gets worse. I heard on NPR this morning that the coaches at U. of Colorado women’s sports teams pressured scholarship students to attend the “parties” for the male students and to “be real friendly.” In short, they were pimping their student athletes for the football program.
Man, this is some sick shit. I hope to see a few coaches fired, maybe even jailed if all thes allegations turn out to be true. It’s an open secret that this kind of shit happens at lots of schools with big-time football programs, and I am only surprised that it took so long for things to get this bad, and to get reported. I’d like to see all college football programs subjected to EXTREME scrutiny on this issue.
The weird thing is, it’s not hard to find dates in a college environment, even if you’re kinda nerdy and/or geeky. It’s an ideal situation for dating, really. So you have to figure that the whole point of the “sex as recruitment tool” is that the football players got to treat coeds like hookers – and given that they were “introduced” to hookers, they pretty much knew how to treat a gal like a hooker.
Oh, I think we need to see some coaches, ADs and maybe even chancellors’ heads on pikes over this shit.
I heard on the news yesterday (sorry no cite) that she had gone to the coach Barnett and he had told her something to the effect of “tell who you want but I am supporting/backing my players 100%”
