Michigan State Can't Beat Penn State, But Can Beat Engineers

Probably obvious disclosure: I am a Michigan fan and blogger.

Michigan State has a new tradition under Mark Dantonio, but it's not one in line with his gruff, no-nonsense personality:

Witnesses and students involved in the incident said a group of 15 to 20 men, who some described as MSU football players, stormed into the dormitory and hit and injured about seven students, some of them women.

Brent Mitchell, a communication junior who said he was sent to Lansing's Sparrow Hospital after being punched in the face, said some of the men wore ski masks, but others were recognized as football team members.

"I walked up and said, 'It isn't worth it.' A guy with dreadlocks hit me and in the scuffle slapped, hit females to get them out of the way," Mitchell said.

Fifteen to 20 football players wreaking havoc on mechanical engineers -- seriously, poor mechanical engineers -- is crazy enough. But would you believe almost the exact same thing happened last year?

[Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart] Dunnings said the incident took place at a party at a house that was "principally occupied by hockey players." Two men were "having a discussion about a female," Dunnings said, and that led to an altercation between some of their friends.

That fight ended and one of the people involved in it left and brought back some friends, Dunnings said. Heavy fighting ensued.

"And there were serious injuries to two people who really weren't fighting," Dunnings said of Sturges and another alleged victim. "I don't know how else to put it. They were just kind of there."

Michigan State hockey defenseman A.J. Sturges ended up in the hospital after getting sucker-punched by enraged freshman running back Glen Winston. Winston spent the summer in jail. When Winston got out of jail, he immediately walked onto a Michigan State practice field and eventually ascended to the starting running back spot. Karma tore his ACL midseason, but he remains a member of the team in good standing. Not one member of Michigan State's team got anything more than a slap on the wrist for descending on a party en masse and beating up anyone they could find, innocent or not.

 

Sturges was disgusted:

"This decision has established weak precedent for future athletes involved in violent crimes.

"Last October, I was assaulted by Glenn Winston. This was not a fight, or a disagreement. I was in bed in my room and came downstairs after hearing the commotion caused by three cars pulling up filled with screaming and violent people.

"I was standing in my front yard trying to figure out what was going on when Glenn Winston punched me in the head from the side. I never saw him. I did not have any chance to protect myself at all. Neither did his other victims."

It's extremely easy to draw a line from Point A -- Mark Dantonio does virtually nothing in the aftermath of scary beatdown delivered by various members of the football team -- to Point B -- football team decides Scary Beatdown II: You're Going To Get It, MechE is a good idea. They even kept the same vibe they did last year: the target of their anger wasn't even there, so they just ran around hitting people with graphing calculators.

But it's extremely hard to see anyone making that connection in and around Detroit. This fall, when Michigan sophomore wide receiver Justin Feagin was kicked off the team for a crazy caper that started with Feagin promising to get a local ne'er do well cocaine and ended with said ne'er do well attempting to burn down Feagin's dorm room, unbiased local columnist Michael Rosenberg jumped all over Rodriguez with a half-reported story originally titled "Win at all costs a poor formula for Rodriguez"; Winston walked out of jail and into the two-deep the same week and no one in Detroit bothered to notice.

If you don't live in Michigan, this might not be that interesting per se, but look at it as a story about the media: thanks to a southern accent and two guys in the NFL, one who got kicked off the team and one who didn't get in trouble in college, the line on Rich Rodriguez is that he skates around the edges of propriety. Thanks to a big jaw and a tendency to squint in manly fashion, Mark Dantonio is regarded as a paragon of virtue. Meanwhile, Rodriguez boots guys who get in trouble the instant serious allegations are leveled; Dantonio allows a convicted felon back on the team and on the depth chart. LeGarrette Blount suffered far more for a far less heinous act.

But these media images congeal and virtually no information will dislodge them. At least media that wears a bias on its sleeve, like yours truly, isn't pretending to be objective. You can read this and decide based on the links and primary sources, or you can read something that never links to a primary source and hides behind a false objectivity. In Detroit, this is a story about the decline of newspapers.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.