Sorry, Football Scoop and Scott Roussel, But Butch Jones Should Never Coach Again

You know, I've enjoyed a Butch Jones-free life. It's been pleasant. No stupid gimmicks. No lies. No BS. But now that we're looking at the meat of the football season and the football coaching carousel is about to start up again, some benighted folks--and journalists--are going to do exactly what Scott Roussel did in his column today for FootballScoop.com. They're going to look at Butch Jones as a viable option for a major football program, especially now that Nick Saban has applied a bit of shinola to disguise the you-know-what that's currently "interning" at Alabama so he can milk every drop of cash out of the University of Tennessee.

And Scott Roussel, the president and owner of FootballScoop.com, thinks that Butch Jones should be a head coach again.

For someone who states emphatically "Butch Jones will be a head football coach again", I have a lot of questions. First off, has no one at FootballScoop been paying attention the past few years? Did you just miss everything that happened since 2015? Since that seems to be the case here, let me help you guys understand why Rousel's column was so ill-advised. Let's take a look at why the last man in America who should be permitted to be the head coach of any football program is Butch Jones. 

But first off...

You know, Scott...Butch doesn't seem to be all that impatient to get back into coaching. He's content with bringing Saban his coffee and polishing Bama helmets for $35k a year...and so would I be if I had a $6.82 million dollar buyout. 

Stop and think for a moment. Does it seem like he's chomping at the bit to get back on the field? 

No, and there's a reason for that. 

In order to start the new con game, you have to make sure the previous one is forgotten. You know, the one where every year of Jones's tenure at UT there were 25-35 players on the injury list by mid-October, leading directly to those end of season collapses of extremely talented teams. 

Many of those most promising players, the 4- and 5-star recruits Scott was drooling over now no longer play football at all. On any level. Why? Because the Volunteers football program was abusive under Butch Jones. He overruled team physicians and forced injured players to go ahead and play anyway. One of the best examples of this occurred during the 2016 Tennessee-Texas A&M game. Eight players went down in the game. 

Some never came back. Many of those departed players cited the verbal, mental, emotional, and physical abuse they endured under Butch Jones as the reason for their departure.

You think parents want to entrust their 5-star players to a coach whose primary concern isn't their son's health and safety? It doesn't matter if the recruiting classes were great if those players leave mid-career and go somewhere else. 

Or lose their future in football entirely.

Players have reported that they were used like gang members to keep other players in line. Some players who demonstrated too independent a thought process when it came to the health and safety of their own bodies were jumped on the practice field by his teammates while the head coach stood there and watched it happen. In fact, the head coach had ordered it to happen, like a Code Red from the play/movie A Few Good Men. 

Think that's a great look for your program?

Think...really think about that 2016 season, when Tennessee started off ranked in the top five in the preseason. Over the span of thirteen months--from the kickoff of 2016 to Butch Jones's firing in October, 2017--the Vols went from top-five, to a 9-4 season record, and then, incredibly, to the basement of everything with a 4-8 record in 2017. The first time in UT's history that the school was winless in the SEC, and a full one-third of the team had either left the program or were out with injury by mid-season for the third season in a row.

As for never losing to a bowl-eligible team, what a crock! Tennessee lost to bowl-eligible teams every single season under Butch Jones. Alabama. Florida, Georgia. South Carolina. Oklahoma. West Virginia. Did you miss those 4-7 losses UT racked up every year under Butch Jones?

Not a great job of research there, buddy.

Why is it that the University of Tennessee led the nation in transfer requests for several years? Think that speaks highly of Butch Jones's treatment of players? 

Think it speaks highly of his active obstruction in those requests, costing players not only time on the gridiron but time getting their educations? Many former players reported having their transcripts blocked and their eligibility as well for several years after leaving UT.

What good were all those top ten recruiting classes then? Matriculation doesn't result in a collapse like that. A coach's primary job is to make certain that the team has the right elements in place so the turnover between upperclassmen to underclassmen is seamless. But that didn't happen at UT. 

Why is that? It doesn't matter how great a Vols recruiting class is if the majority don't play for the entirety of their collegiate career at UT. Florida had a top ten recruiting class this year and lost many of those players before the season started. Did FootballScoop cover that? 

Everyone else did, and seemed to agree there was something wrong with the program in order for that to happen. Why wasn't the exodus of players from UT  given the same scrutiny? Did you cover that? 

Did you even know?

Why is it that through Butch Jones' five-year tenure at UT, the Vols consistently collapsed after three quarters only to lose the game in the final minutes? Abysmal coaching decisions. 

Why is it that the most loyal, steadfast fan base in America rose up in rebellion against their own school, forcing the firing of Butch Jones and a few weeks later that of then-athletic director John Currie? Does anyone with a functioning brain really think that was just an uneducated mob of fans raising hell for the fun of it? 

I hope not. It's never a good thing to insult your target market. Just saying. The uprising was spontaneous but it was also focused and well-directed, resulting in an event unprecedented in college athletics. That entire fiasco in the fall of 2017 originated with Butch Jones.

So answer me honestly: why is it that anyone, athletic director, fan, or sports journalist, would want to bring such a toxic element into their own football program? Oh and by the way, we're not just talking about Tennessee here. Maybe you should dig into what happened at the University of Cincinnati during Butch Jones's time there while you're at it, Scott.

Butch Jones left the University of Tennessee an absolute disaster between craptastic athletic training, the abuse and torment of his players, the exodus of talent from Rocky Top, and ruining the lives and futures of multiple great players. and one of the most humiliating episodes in sports history If Butch Jones legitimately had something to offer another program, he'd already be riding the coaching carousel (like Urban Meyer already is) and selling himself (again) as the once and future king of great football. 

But he's not. He's grinning like an idiot down in Tuscaloosa, acquiring that Alabama mystique while he milks the university whose football program he ruined of half a million dollars a month. He's not pimping himself because he intends to get every penny of that $6.82 million dollar buyout, thumbing his nose like a child from his bolt hole in Tuscaloosa. 

Nick Saban's Head Coach Rehabilitation program's court jester, who gives zero damns about coaching again until his internship and his buyout end.

After what Butch Jones did to the University of Tennessee, its fan base, and its athletes (which is the most important of the three) he should never be allowed to set foot on any football field in a position of authority ever again. If some poor wretched school does bring Butch Jones in to "turn around" their program, they are placing the eighty-five young men on their roster in the path of physical, educational, and financial ruin. Period. 

And those are the facts. 

I'd recommend you read two books that detail what was happening at the University of Tennessee football program, Scott. Maybe pass it along to your colleagues there at Football Scoop too. Pick up Mark Nagi's Decade of Dysfunction, and you'll get the background of the last ten years of horror on Rocky Top.  Then grab a copy (I'd be glad to send you one) of Empowered: The Fan ReVOLution That Changed College Football by UT Vol historian Tom Mattingly and Celina Summers. 

Read the interviews with players, alumni, boosters, UT officials, and fans. Actually learn what happened under Butch Jones before you start lauding him as a potential head football coach at some other school. 

Suggesting Butch Jones be hired to coach any level of football is the equivalent of handing a suicidal person a loaded gun and dropping them off somewhere in the middle of nowhere. A responsible person would never consider doing such a thing. 

Be responsible, and learn exactly what you're suggesting before you put it in print. At the end of the day, you're recommending that some other school lose its legacy and self-respect. But you're also recommending that a serial abuser be given exclusive access to the lives and futures of more young football players. 

Is that really what you want to be known for? Are you sure? Because if he is hired somewhere and more of the same happens, you'll bear a measure of responsibility for it. You may be one of those journalists who sat on his self-proclaimed throne when UT fans revolted and condemned us as ignorant, uneducated, ill-informed and so forth. I don't really know; I don't really care. But what I do know as a long-time writer, editor, and publisher is that you need to know what you're talking about before you put it down in print. And in this case, you patently had no clue what the reality Butch Jones created really was.

You should have known better than to be this irresponsible. You should have known to check out the facts. After all, you own FootballScoop, right? And you were a VP at the Shaw Group, a Fortune 500 company dealing with road construction, for eight years, right? You understand at least the concept of journalistic and corporate responsibility. Or, at least, you should.

But you didn't. That's the real football scoop here. Just...think about it. 

2018 Sports--Year of the Asshats

Sorry for the long layoff on this blog. 2018 was an extraordinarily busy year for me, with the release of 11 new fiction titles (oh my Harlequin--how hard it's going to be to say goodbye to you next month when your series is done! Until then, you can take a look at Dominic on his first book cover just for fun), two non-fiction titles, multiple ghost writing projects, and editing. I couldn't do a lot of sports blogging like I usually do on this blog, or write many columns for the Orange & White Report. Both of those circumstances will be changing in 2019, which is currently a "light" year for me with five fiction titles and two more non-fiction projects in the works. 

But that doesn't keep me from paying attention to what's going on. 

2018 was a tough year in sports. Aside from the continuing inactivity in sexual assault and abuses in programs like Baylor and Michigan State (the conviction and indictment of Larry Nasser, the physician/rapist in East Lansing was a brief high point for the judicial system and an ongoing disaster for the NCAA), other egregious nightmares were exposed. The death of 19-year old University of Maryland football player, Jordan McNair, was directly attributed to abusive coaching practices under former HFC DJ Durkin. What was great to see was that Maryland actually investigated the program; what was absolutely unbelievable was that they reinstated Durkin as head coach. The fan and backlash was so virulent that they fired him the day after they put him back in charge of the team.

Another tone-deaf administration undone by the anger of an educated fan base. 

Then, just twenty minutes up the road from where I'm writing this in the middle of the night, Urban Meyer's long-predicted and oft-expected end-of-the-road scandal reared its ugly head like a 17-year cicada. The former wife of OSU assistant Zach Smith revealed that not only did her husband abuse her physically and mentally, but that Meyer knew about the abuse for a decade and  had still retained Smith on his staff, giving him annual raises and promotions. That coaching relationship between Meyer and Smith had its roots in the dog-dirty Florida football program that generated the likes of murderer Aaron Hernandez. During his occupation of the Swamp, Meyer saw thirty-one of his players get arrested between 2005 and 2010. You'd think he would have taken away something constructive from the fiasco that accompanied his exit from Florida.

You'd think he would have learned that the quickest way to destroy a coach's legacy is to look the other way at criminal activity. 

But no. Zach Smith proved to be the rocks on which Urban Meyer's ship foundered, and while the embattled coach backslid into the same "health issues" smokescreen he'd used to exit Gainesville, stepping down at the end of the 2018-19 season with his reputation once more in tatters. 

And then, of course, new information was brought to light regarding the former head football coach at Tennessee, Butch Jones, in a book that has my name on the front cover. During the course of the months co-author Tom Mattingly and I devoted to research and dozens of interviews, we unearthed a slew of nasty stories about the abusive atmosphere Jones created--the abuse of players, the withholding of transcripts so players couldn't transfer, the reason for the staggering number of injuries the Vols suffered every year, the micromanagement that turned into a totalitarian regime, and the interference in medical protocols that resulted in players having untreated injuries once their playing days on Rocky Top were done.

In all these cases, a common denominator existed that tie the universities together. 2018 was the year of the fan, and make no mistake--that's not always a compliment. 

Anytime you've got someone in the media that breaks a big story, there's going to be a lot of backlash. As a writer, you try to prepare for that. I certainly tried to steel myself before Empowered was released, and I know that an experienced journalist like Brett McMurphy (who broke the Zach Smith case) almost certainly did as well. But in the sports world, there's really no way to prepare yourself for the ignorant fan or the belligerent fan or the stupid enough to call Paul Finebaum's nationally syndicated show and brag about poisoning the famous oaks at Toomer's Corner because Auburn beat Alabama that year Harvey Updike sort of fan. 

Surrender cobras...usually the first reaction of an asshat
fan when the game doesn't go their way.

2018 was a year in which the asshat fan thrived. 

Now sure--the asshat fan is just the leading edge of a fringe element in all sporting fandoms. Usually, we all believe the asshat fan is at that OTHER school or rooting for that OTHER divisional team. It's much more difficult to accept that your university is just as guilty of asshat fans as every other university is. And nowhere does the asshat fan thrive more than in big-money NCAA sports. 

When McMurphy broke the Zach Smith case, the response of Ohio State fans was immediate and extremely defensive. Fans howled at the media, especially McMurphy. 

They also howled at Smith's victim for a decade, his ex-wife Courtney Smith. As their anger increased so did the asshattedness, until much of what you saw on social media consisted of fairly serious threats against her--a woman who'd endured a decade of abuse from her spouse and with small children to raise. But many Ohio State fans were more concerned about the threat of losing their national championship winning coach. As Chris Thompson put it in his article for Deadspin: 

Probably no one in this story especially needs a rally of support on the OSU campus, and certainly not the guy collecting payments on a $6.4 million annual salary to sit at home and not do a job, while his employer tries to figure out whether he was apathetic about one of his assistants abusing and terrorizing someone. But sports fandom—all fandom, for that matter—is a fucking disease, and so here we are: some 250 deeply wacko Buckeyes fans gathered angrily outside Ohio Stadium Monday afternoon to chant and sing and wave signs in support of Meyer.

Bolding mine.

Sports fandom is a fucking disease. Sounds kind of harsh, doesn't it? But isn't it also an accurate diagnosis of the cray-cray that infests every fan base, from Little League to the NFL? I mean--take a look at the definition: 

fan²/fan/...noun

noun: fan; plural noun: fans

1. 
   
   

   a person who has a strong interest in or admiration for a particular person or thing.

   "football fans"

   
   

   synonyms:

   enthusiast, devotee, admirer, lover; More

Origin late 19th century (originally US): abbreviation of fanatic.

Abbreviation of fanatic. Might be something to keep in mind moving forward. All I know as the mother of a young woman who, like Courtney Smith, is enmeshed in the horror of an abusive marriage to a man more than twice her size and weight compels me to state unequivocally that there are no circumstances or situations where it's justifiable for one marriage partner to beat, choke, slam, slap, claw, or strangle their spouse.

Zero. None.

These men represent the worst of the bad. They not only supported an enabler of domestic abuse, but they hijacked a hashtag for victims of sexual abuse and tried to blame two entities for the scandal that had nothing to do with it: Paul Finebaum and ESPN. 

I'm sure that among the two hundred and fifty Urban Meyer fans who protested outside Ohio Stadium, a few probably agreed with the statement I just made. But those same fans were saying something completely different when they started their protest (a very amateurish copy of what happens when Vol Nation decides to take a stand on something, by the way). They were declaring to the world that domestic violence was less important to them than winning football games. They knew that Urban Meyer was the key to getting back into the College Football Payoffs--oops. Sorry. I meant PLAYOFFS of course--and they were unwilling to sacrifice him . So they sacrificed Courtney Smith, her children, and her safety instead.

This has nothing to do with our ex-wide receiver coach, or the accusations against him, with his ex-wife. I don’t want to talk about that! I don’t condone what he’s accused of, I don’t condone any of that stuff! This is not why I’m here. That’s not why I drove twelve hours and you guys are standing out in 95-degree heat—to talk about what he did or didn’t do.

That's what the organizer of the rally--tragically self-identifying as "Tennessee Jeff"--had to say in his opening statement. 

Sigh. Tennessee can't thank you enough, "Jeff".

Of course that's not what he wanted to talk about because he knew, way down deep in his two sizes-too-small heart that he was basically opening up an abuse victim to the worst kinds of online attention. He and the rest of the "protesters" stood around and talked and sang (Yes, I saw them. I was waiting for them to bust out "We Will Overcome" just to make their make-believe persecution delusions complete.) and talked some more, holding signs that were so gobsmackingly inane and devoid of awareness that even a certifiable cynic like me was stunned.

Yes, Virginia. There is a species of sub-human that is so ridiculously oblivious to how they make themselves and their university look. What? You want more of the surrender cobras? Okay. Here's one of my favorites. 

Of course this is the Tennessee-Georgia game from 2016. These UGA fans are watching the celebration after the Josh Dobbs to Jauan Jennings "Dobbnail Boot"Hail Mary reception  to win the game.

Naturally, Ohio State fans were terrified that without Urban Meyer, Ohio State would implode and the 2018-19 season--when they had legitimate playoff hopes--would end up as a disaster. I wasn't terrified about that. In fact, I was kind of hoping they were right. (I'm married to one of them, by the way, and it's hard to gloat too much about Urban screwing up yet again when one of them is snoring on the other side of the bed.) And while the season didn't implode per se, the disaster that struck the Buckeyes when they were blown out by Pursue enabled me to gloat just a little. 

I can't wait for Urban's health issues to miraculously resolve in time for him to head to another coaching destination so he can screw up their school in five years or so because that would get his scurvy carcass out of the state where I live. 

See? See how easy it is to devolve into asshattery? While fans from any other university wouldn't consider what I just wrote as asshat enough to be worthy of the asshat fan designation, folks who love Ohio State certainly would. We all are just as protective of our school's reputation as we are proud of their prowess on the field. To any other school, Tennessee's five and seven season in 2018-19 shouldn't create any kind of positive outlook for the program's future. But Vols fans do have something to be proud of: two of those five wins were against ranked SEC opponents, both of whom went to bowl games and both of whom won their bowls--Auburn, dominating the hapless Purdue (who beat OSU by twenty and ruined their playoff dreams) and Kentucky, beating heavily favored Penn State in the Citrus Bowl. 

So, yes. Every fan base has its asshats. But then you have the schools who habitually sit atop the football or men's basketball pyramid, and their asshattery assumes a virulent, shrill nastiness of manner that makes them universally loathed. You know who I'm talking about. Is there a school more arrogant about its men's basketball team than Kentucky? Duke, maybe. North Carolina, perhaps. UCLA has made a serious run at total asshattery, using methods that John Wooden would have never permitted. But in football, just take a moment to consider these asshattery candidates: Alabama. Oklahoma. Clemson. Notre Dame. 

Four teams that made it into the CFB Playoffs this year. 

I have a wide-ranging circle of friends within the comforting circle of football fandom. All of my Bama friends go out of their way to avoid being asshats, which is rather difficult considering the unquestioned mastery Nick Saban maintains over his program. When Alabama has a team that sports pundits are defining as the "best college football team ever" it's impossible for Tide fans not to talk themselves up. Here in a couple of hours, 98% of the Crimson Tide lovers online will be getting up and getting ready for work, maybe dropping an excited Tweet or two about the game tonight. 

But here we are...four in the morning on the day of the College Football Playoffs National Championship Game, and there's a faction online right this moment basically Tweeting nonsense just so they can type the following: #RollTide. They're also hunting for cyber-prey: basically people who hate Alabama that they can gang up on.

Yesterday, a lot of people were discussing my book with me, particularly the reported abuses Butch Jones had employed upon his team, staff, and assistants. The chapter where I go into that topic is the longest in the book. Tennessee's Hidden Nightmare: Player Injuries and Mistreatment. 

That chapter includes this young man's story. Watch Mykelle McDaniel tell what happened to him in his own words and then let me know how that story makes you feel.

You can view the rest of my interview with Mykelle here. 

Butch Jones turned a football program into a totalitarian regime. I interviewed multiple players and staff members, three of whom went on the record. Between those three players, the entire spread of Jones' tenure in Knoxville was covered, and the escalating severity of his abuses was never addressed by the university because there wasn't consistent leadership or oversight. 

There's not much difference between Jones and Maryland's DJ Durkin. Butch Jones spent the 2018-19 season as an "intern" at Alabama--an incredibly bizarre job title for a guy who'd been a head coach in the SEC just a year earlier. Saban recently brought the disgraced Maryland head coach, DJ Durkin, to Tuscaloosa as well. So I made the comment that all Saban needed was one more predatory coach and he'd have the classless trifecta. In pops a Bama fan, so rabid to defend Saint Saban that he accused me of making up these stories in order to exploit the Tennessee fan base and promote my book. 

This guy was supposed to be my friend.

Needless to say, I took exception to what he said so I verbally eviscerated him and kicked him to the curb, muting him when I was done. I'm not too proud to confess that I used language I almost never employ when talking online. But yeah...I cussed that you-know-what up one side and down the other. But , you ask? Because he cast aspersions on my work, publicly accusing me of making up sh*t so I could exploit the still-nervous Tennessee fan base and make money off them. Not exactly the approach a friend should take. Never mind the interviews online that corroborated the stories I'd published. Never mind the fact that we interviewed former players and staff, parents, journalists, physicians, donors and fans. 

Nope. I "invented" those stories as exploitative promotion tactics so I can make a fortune In and of itself, the idea that any author makes money off a book like this one is kind of ludicrous. Yes, we had an Amazon #1 Bestseller in both Football and the History of Sports genres. But we didn't start cashing six-figure checks. Believe me.

Fast forward twenty-four hours. Dude is still at it, cyber-stalking me to YouTube, where a video about my book and the exposure of Butch Jones's treatment of his teams had been posted by the world's favorite LSU fan, TJ LSU Dad. Bama fan proceeded to leave a comment on the video, saying that I was a "hag" and a Finebaum "wannabe" blah blah blah. 

LSU Dad doesn't go in for fake moral outrage, and as a LSU fan he doesn't have a dog in the fight. His reaction to my book and Mykelle McDaniel's filmed interview with me was exactly what I hoped a neutral party's reaction would be.

Yeah, this bushy-tailed squirrelly lover of the Crimson Tide is a bona fide pin-headed nincompoop for thinking that calling me a "hag" was going to hurt my feelings. You see...to me any CFB fan should be proud of their programs and their coaches--not just for the wins each season on the field, but also the wins off the field.  When the Vols run through the T each home game every season, I feel so much pride for our team and school that sometimes I tear up, especially if I'm on a rare trip back to Neyland.

Tonight, the University of Alabama will take the field for the national championship against Clemson, and right in their midst will be Butch Jones, the Bama "intern" who single-handedly destroyed the careers and futures of dozens of Tennessee players. That's nothing to be proud of. That's nothing to brag about. As a matter of fact, Butch Jones representing the University of Alabama in any capacity is just as egregious as Urban Meyer knowingly enabling a wife-beater throughout his career. Think about it--what does it say about Nick Saban when he's the guy who brought Jones on as a $35,000 per year staff member--carefully keeping Jones's salary well below the figure where he'd lose the $9 million of his buyout from Tennessee?

And what does it say that he's also poised to bring Durkin onto his staff as well?

No one was louder about Urban Meyer and the Zach Smith scandal than the asshats among Alabama fans. Their moral outrage when Meyer was only benched for three games was vociferous as they clutched their pearls in sheer horror. How hypocritical my latest cyber-stalker's behavior is now! 

You can't scream about Zach Smith and ignore Butch Jones on your own sideline.

I know what you're thinking, cyber-stalker. You're thinking that if roles were reversed, I would have accused you of making up bullshit for the money too. You're thinking that I would have responded worse than you did, cyber-stalking you as well. 

Well...no, I wouldn't have. 

Right now, UT is conducting a search for its new Offensive Coordinator. Several of the names that were brought up were names I found unacceptable for one reason or another. But one name in particular--Kendal Briles--had me writing this a couple of weeks ago in a column:

So as fans and supporters, we have to look at the story that Tennessee is considering Kendal Briles as its new offensive coordinator and make our own determination of what we think and how this news makes us feel--not just about UT but about ourselves. Make no mistake--bringing Briles to Rocky Top will once again expose the university and the fans to the ridicule and scorn of the national media and other fan bases. Deservedly, I might add. That move would make the idea of Tennessee "morality" into a national joke.

I was horrified, however, at how many of my fellow Tennessee fans were 100% behind the Briles hire at OC. Remember when I said that every fan base has its asshats? The University of Tennessee is no exception. We have idiots who suck up to recruits--basically "writing love letters" to them, as one of my friends sarcastically said about the worst such offender--and then, when the kid and his parents choose to sign with a different school, these grown-ass men (for the most part) suddenly nuke the recruit's social media feeds, screeching like crazy old ladies who shoot kids with BB guns if they set one toe too close to their pansies in the flower bed. 

Every member of Vol Twitter knows exactly which asshat I'm talking about. *waves to Sab*

We also, apparently, have fans for whom winning is more important than reputation or history or brand, and in places like Baylor winning is MUCH more important than the psychological, emotional, and physical health of those fifty-one rape victims or the thirty players that allegedly committed those rapes. Just like I said a minute ago: you can't revolt against the hiring of Greg Schiano on morality grounds and then welcome the architect of the "show 'em a good time" recruiting policy at Baylor, where recruits were taken to strip clubs, given alcohol, and allegedly provided with girls for sex. And just like when my cyber-stalker accused me of manufacturing the charges against Butch Jones--I discovered what had happened to dozens of Tennessee players by interviewing the victims just like the attorneys and Title IX enforcers and law enforcement discovered what was going on at Baylor by interviewing the victims. 

Of course, seeing as my cyber-stalker hasn't actually READ the book and the stories in question, anything he has to say is automatically null and void. Bashing a book's veracity just because you want the stories to be untrue is one step away from burning books, or banning them, or censoring them. 

2018. The year of the asshat fan has extended, sadly, into 2019. Here in about thirteen hours, the pageantry and hype of the last football game of the season will kick off and every football fan will be set up for four hours of the greatest sport ever existed (save for jai alai) and the subsequent drought once it's over. By this time tomorrow, every football fanatic in every fan base except for one (tonight's winner) will have their thoughts turned to next season. 


Tomorrow night, either the Clemson fans or the Alabama fans--whichever is victorious--will turn their attention to torturing every other school with gloats, boasts, brags, and for most of them a very real sense of joy at what their team has accomplished. Hidden in the depths of the winning fan base, however, are going to be the asshats whose online behavior cranks up in activity but plummets in class. They don't care that they're ruining the sport for everyone but themselves. They don't care that one day, their beloved coach is going to retire or go to the NFL or otherwise move on, and then their program will take a nosedive. That's the way that athletic success works. Winning programs move through history like a pendulum, and the bigger the swing into championship seasons, the greater the corresponding downfall of the program will be.  

As for my beady-eyed, bushy-tailed, acorn-hoarding cyber-stalker...

You may think I'm a hag. I don't look my best at times, but by God, I'm still walking despite being advised by my surgeon that I'll end up in a wheelchair within the next few years. I refuse to let my physical deterioration interfere with my professional goals, which are ambitious. So I defy anyone to come out of the last two decades I have--the automobile accident, the chronic pain, the agonizing repercussions of multiple major spinal surgeries--and have them looking like they could still win beauty pageants. At the end of the day, I don't give a damn if you and your Loser in 'Loosa buddy think I look like a hag. I'm a fifty-two year old grandmother of seven, and as long as my damn good-looking husband, who's worked his ass off since I was disabled just to keep our heads above water, is content then I could give two craps about what a man who's too much of a coward to use his real name or his photo in his profile.  

At least I don't brag if my name is mentioned on one page of Finebaum's last book. I sure as hell can brag that my name is on the spine of over forty books instead. 

At least I have the courage to squirrel out a story, even if that story damns my own school, and get the information out there because it's the right thing to do. 

At least I have the courage to use my own name on social media, and blog instead of hiding behind a ridiculous pseudonym like squirrel or chipmunk or raccoon. 

At least I have the courage to expose a squirrel's cache of wrongdoing, although more than one person warned me that if I got too close to the truth about one particular family I could be endangering myself. 

You can always tell if a person's really a rodent underneath their smiling facade, because anyone who cyber-stalks you as a result of your opinion--whether it's about football or politics or who gets to sit by the window on the plane--is nothing but a big fat rat. 

One of my other friends, Archie, had enough of the squirrelly way my cyber-stalker was acting yesterday afternoon. Keep in mind, this was twenty-four hours after the stream of abusive commentary began when I expressed my disappointment in Alabama for continuing its quest for a trifecta of low-class former coaches enrolled in Nick Saban's Reformatory. When he was done with the panorama of Bama non-gramma, Archie said this: 

You've made an ass of yourself trolling @CelinaSummers the past 24 hours chipmunk. I'll give you a few minutes to read this, then handle you accordingly. #DumbassOldGuy

I thought his remark was remarkably pithy. That's the downfall of every asshat fan. Eventually, you get called out by a total stranger for being an asshole. Not assHAT. AssHOLE. 

Sports are a huge part of our societal culture. Sports have been a form of entertainment since well before the first time two guys were thrown into an amphitheater with a couple of swords and told to fight for the amusement of ancient Rome. So maybe think of it this way as we move out of football season and into the heart of basketball season--

Don't ruin sports for everyone around you. Don't be the asshat who stands at the end of the bar, drunk as a lord, screaming curses at the big screen TV like the coaches or referees or players can hear you and ultimately launching your beer bottle at the TV if things don't go your way. Don't cyber-stalk someone who doesn't share your fandom for your school. 

Don't be that asshat fan. 

Because all too soon, football season's done and your basketball team is mediocre at best. 

Instead of being an asshat, try to do the right thing--and try to force the university you support to do the right thing also. Because this much I can guarantee you: having Butch Jones on your sideline tonight? That'll make people believe Nick Saban doesn't have one damn iota of common sense, as if the University of Alabama is condoning the abusive and predatory nature of Butch Jones. 

And karma, my erstwhile friend, is a total bitch.