Posted by Hello, and welcome to the inaugural Dirtiest Program in College Sports Invitational. Today we have four premium matchups for you, including the #1 overall seed, the Baylor Bears.
How will this work? It’s simple — we’ll compare the sordid pasts of various college athletics departments, then using a top secret proprietary formula (it’s arbitrary), we’ll pick the more odious of the two programs. Winner advances, loser presumably cuts a plea deal. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Game One – Baylor vs. Yale
This definitely looks like a mismatch on paper. Baylor may have set a standard for misconduct that no other program can reach, but on the other hand, fuck Yale.
Baylor’s Crimes
First, it should be noted that Baylor is a Baptist institution, and as such, holds its students to the highest of Christian standards — which is to say that they believe rape is a form of premarital sex, and that all premarital sex is the fault of those foul Jezebel temptresses with their short skirts and vaginal pheromones.
So, in a way, Baylor was actually protecting all of those women they shamed into staying quiet about their sexual assaults, because if they’d come forward, the university would have had to tell their parents that they were promiscuous. Maybe Baylor shouldn’t be in this bracket at all! I smell an upset brewing!
Just kidding. Fuck this university in the ass with the devil’s dick made of bees.
Yale’s Crimes
If this were a different bracket — say, one with a broader scope — then Yale would have a strong claim to the #1 seed. After all, they gave the world Skull & Bones, as well as a Who’s Who of dipshit scum alumni, like both Clintons, both crooked-ass Bushes, that bearded yogurt pop Paul Krugman, and Samuel Morse.
DAH DIT DIT the fuck outta my face, Samuel Morse.
However, we’re only concerned with sports crimes, and Lord knows neither the Clintons nor Paul Krugman have ever seen the inside of a sports arena. In this regard, Yale has kept its nose pretty clean, most likely because nobody gives a shit about Ivy League sports, so there’s no incentive to cheat.
But there is the case of Jack Montague, former captain of the basketball team who was expelled for an alleged rape. Montague denied the charges, of course, and in an inspiring display of backbone, the university kept its star player on the roster until public pressure grew to be too much, at which point they immediately caved.
Is Montague guilty? We’ll never know (he’s a Yalie — the best you can say about such a man is maybe he hasn’t raped anyone yet), but the university certainly showed its true colors by taking the easy way out at every opportunity.
The Verdict
C’mon. This is a bigger blowout than Virginia-UMBC Georgia Tech-Cumberland. While Yale is a contemptible and detestable institution, its athletic department can’t compete with Baylor in terms of pure sliminess.
Bears advance.
Game Two – SW Louisiana vs. SMU
Whenever you think of “college athletic powerhouses,” no doubt the first two programs you think of are SW Louisiana and SMU.
Actually, you may not have even heard of SW Louisiana. Now, they’re just known as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Ragin’ Cajuns. Still haven’t heard of them? Ah, fuck it — there’s never been a school that mattered less anyway.
SMU’s Crimes
As you might already know if you follow college football at all, SMU is one of the few programs to ever be given the death penalty by the NCAA — and another thing you might know is that “SMU” stands for “Southern Methodist University.” Why, another Christian university? What were the odds?
Anyway, SMU got 86’d because they were too good at football, and it turns out that when a tiny Christian college starts pulling elite national talent, people get suspicious!
The NCAA punished them for their brazen habit of paying players, but SMU shrewdly crunched the numbers and realized it made more sense to pay fines and continue having a great football team than it did to comply with the rules. Eventually, the NCAA got fed up and ruled that they couldn’t have a team in 1987.
In an act of contrition, SMU not only complied with that ruling, but has symbolically upheld it by not fielding a team since then.
SW Louisiana’s Crimes
Hey, remember how I said SMU is one of the only schools to get the death penalty? Well, SW Louisiana is one of the other ones! Except probably no one noticed.
In 1973, the basketball program was disbanded for two years following a pattern of “massive academic fraud.” The school changed grades, altered transcripts, and arranged for ringers to take exams for players — you know, the North Carolina protocol.
Oh, and the school didn’t stop there. They also handed out cash, free gas, and borrowed cars to players and recruits alike. All the cheating paid off, though, as the school appeared in two straight Sweet 16s (back when the field was only 32 teams deep).
That’s it? Two Sweet 16s? I hope those boosters got reimbursed.
The Verdict
Nobody gives a shit about either of these schools, but I’ve at least heard of SMU, so they get the nod.
Game Three – Ole Miss vs. William & Mary
This looks like another blowout on paper. Ole Miss, irrelevant for most of its history (both the state and the school), has made a hard charge in the last decade or so, cramming centuries of grift and corruption into just a few years.
William & Mary, on the other hand, sounds like a shitty folk band from the ’60s that your dipshit English teacher would try to get you to be interested in by saying, “Actually, this song’s about marijuana!” Get the fuck outta here, Mrs. Whittington. Nobody cool smokes marijuana anymore.
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However, this one, like every football game in which Ole Miss is favored, actually ended up being surprisingly close.
Ole Miss’s Crimes
There’s a funny anecdote about former Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron talking about how, if the school had signed top recruit Joe McKnight in 2007, the NCAA would’ve suspended them on principle.
It’s funny because somehow Ed Orgeron turned out to be the smartest person ever affiliated with the university.
When Hugh Freeze was hired in 2011, he promptly went 6-6 in his first season…and signed the #5 class in the nation. There were three first-round picks in that class. He wasn’t even trying to pretend like he wasn’t cheating. Clearly, his whole strategy was to cheat like hell, and then get hired by a real school before the sanctions could come down.
And he would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those darn escorts.
When you get right down to it, Ole Miss’s only crime, like Icarus’s, is thinking that they belonged among the stars.
You’re trash, Ole Miss. Never forget that.
William & Mary’s Crimes
For this, we have to go all the way back to 1951, when sports were only used for taunting Hitler.
William & Mary was a prestigious liberal arts college, but, like Ole Miss, they had delusions of grandeur. They wanted to compete with the big boys in football, universities like Army, Harvard, Thremberton College, Finkel & Moreland University, Wharton, Wharfton, Wharftown, etc.
See? I told you sports were shit back then. Also I don’t consider Harvard to be a real university.
However, as any Notre Dame alum will tell you ad nauseam until you agree not to tell their dad that you caught them masturbating to Forbes, it can be difficult to get great athletes at schools with high academic standards.
So, like anyone who marries a Notre Dame grad, William & Mary simply lowered their standards. They altered transcripts for elite players in order for them to earn admittance, then continued to help them along academically for the rest of their college careers.
It was the 1950s. People took it seriously at the time. These were the same idiots that were up in arms to discover that a game show was rigged.
The Verdict
This is a massive blowout. Transcript-altering wouldn’t even occur to Ole Miss, mainly because there’s no need to have a transcript in order to get admitted.
Also, in the interests of complete disclosure, I should note that Ole Miss paid me $500 to help them win, just out of habit.
Game Four – Florida vs. Ohio State
Hey, it’s a rematch of the 2007 BCS Title Game! I’m assuming Ohio State won that one, because they always do so well in playoff games. (In their defense, though, at least they managed to score in 2007.)
Regardless of the outcome of this matchup, I’d just like to say that these are two of the most deplorable, disgusting organizations in the world, and I pray Kim Jong Un targets them both with nuclear weapons.
Florida’s Crimes
For most of this bracket, we use “crimes” in the sense that the school violated NCAA regulations.
Not with Florida.
These fuckers had a murderer on their team. Not at the time, of course, but not for lack of practicing. And he was far from the only piece of shit on the team.
They had a guy using a dead student’s credit card. Another texting his girlfriend, “Time to die, bitch.” And, worst of all, they also had Tim fucking Tebow.
Luckily for society at large, this band of miscreants was kept under the iron gaze of Urban Meyer, a man who would never allow misdeeds to go unpunished.
Nah, just kidding. He didn’t give a fuck. Most of these guys didn’t even get suspended. Maybe they ran an extra lap or two.
It’s that kind of tough love that enabled these guys to handle the rigors of prison.
Ohio State’s Crimes
Of all the schools in this bracket, Ohio State benefits most from the timing.
Because while every single person who has ever gone there is a colossal douchebag, they’ve somehow kept their noses relatively clean. That’s sure to change soon, of course, because they now employ Herr Urban Meyer, disciplinarian extraordinaire.
So, in a few years, expect to learn that J.T. Barrett is a serial killer or Joey Bosa bombed an orphanage or Gareon Conley is a rapist or…wait. Maybe it’s already started.
The only concrete things we have on them are Maurice Clarett taking a shitload of cash and cars, a bunch of players getting free tattoos, one of their other piece of shit coaches hauled off and punched a player, and Greg Oden feeding his dick HGH.
The Verdict
Right now, it’s Florida. Just wait for Meyer to work his magic, though. Ohio State could stage a massive comeback.
Can you imagine Ohio State pulling off a massive comeback, Penn State fans?