The Oklahoman with a truly grim Christmas morning read:

Other workers at the state Department of Human Services have been caught physically abusing children in shelters, taunting mentally disabled adults, stealing from the elderly or sexually harassing co-workers.

These people are the upstanding citizens we employ in the State of Oklahoma:

One worker was disciplined for instigating fights between teenage girls at a group home.

Workers at the state’s two centers for the mentally disabled have been disciplined for cruelly teasing residents, falling asleep on the job, showing up drunk to work and spending time on a state computer looking up porn.

Oh, and sexting:

One employee was having an affair with a co-worker and misusing the state computer to send her sexually explicit messages. He was caught when he emailed a sex message to a supervisor by mistake.

The story doesn’t include this photograph of Serenity Deal that’s included in the Tulsa World’s copy of the article:

The picture was taken after Deal was returned to foster care by her father after an overnight visit. Both the father and Serenity said the injuries came because he dropped her. DHS eventually placed Serenity with her father full time, leading to her death.

Forgive me for linking to Deadspin, but it’s a decent article on putting so much energy into keeping fans apart from one another and not enough keeping them away from the players.

Interestingly, Tulsa had a similar incident this year.

Amazing

Wake up and fight

Pat Forde at Yahoo:

When I was working for ESPN.com in 2008, we arranged an all-access piece with Tulsa for its game at Arkansas. Graham was the coach at Tulsa and the Golden Hurricane were undefeated and ranked 19th in the country at the time – largely because Gus Malzahn was orchestrating an explosive offense. I had full access to Tulsa starting about 24 hours before kickoff – team walk-through at the stadium, meetings at the hotel, on the sideline during the game, in the locker room both pregame and postgame.

Leading up to the game, Graham made multiple mentions of his faith. He led the team in the Lord’s Prayer before taking the field. And when a defensive back blew an assignment on the first series, Graham F-bombed him as viciously as any coach I’ve seen since Bob Knight.

OK, so he’s hardly the first coach to play both sides of the piety-profanity line. What happened postgame is where I lost respect for him. When Tulsa lost a game it should have won (30-23), I was stopped at the entrance to the locker room by a nervous graduate assistant.

“You can’t come in,” he said.

“Yes, I can,” I said. “We already worked this out. Win or lose, I’m in the locker room.”

“No,” the GA said. “Coach Graham doesn’t want you in here.”

The whole thing is a devastating must-read.

Only a year after making his dream to coach at BCS program come true, Todd Graham is bolting for another “dream,” coaching Arizona State. Kicker? He broke the news to his team and staff via text message:

“I have resigned my position at Pitt in the best interest of my family to pursue the head coaching position at Arizona State,” Graham said. “Coaching there has always been a dream of ours and we have family there. The timing of the circumstances have prohibited from telling you this directly. I now am on my way to Tempe to continue those discussions. God Bless. Coach Graham.”

I’m sure having to confront recruits and assistants he lured to Pitt and tell them he was leaving after a year is the more realistic reason for why he sent the text message.