And please be aware the school doesn’t have a refund policy.

Yeah, I’d say this is how you know you’ve got an attendance problem.

A Rice ticket office employee once summed up the meat of the issue when he spoke of summer season ticket sales.

“We rotated football players, especially the starters and youngsters who were well known, coming into the office and making calls to previous and prospective ticket holders,” he related. “By the late 1980s, the fan base was shrinking so much that we were caller [sic] the older season ticket holders first before they became too ill to attend the games.”

He’s not an attorney, although he plays a tight end on TV.

Between Crowell’s dismissal and my moroseness over what I suspect college football’s powers that be are cooking up for us, I figure we’re all more than a little down in the mouth.  We could do with a little cheering up about now.  I can’t arrange a group hug and I can’t think of a way to pass around a big enough bottle of 20-year old Pappy, but I think I’ve got something else that might do the trick.

And that would be the story of one Fred Davis, a Washington Redskin in his day job and ace legal defender of Fred Davis otherwise.  If a story the Washington Post titled “Fred Davis accused of throwing juice on a woman his body guard claims is a pimp” (h/t Chris Brown) can’t get your juices flowing, Jack, you dead.

If anything, his story is better than the Post headline indicates.  Sure, the gory details are as salacious as you’d hope, but the real hilarity comes from both parties’ decision to take Peoples Court-style justice to the DC Superior Court.  Yes, they’re both representing themselves.  And they’re spectacular.  My absolute favorite part of the story comes from Davis’ former legal advisor (now there’s a job you couldn’t pay me enough to take):

“It’s just all made up and flagellant,” Davis told the judge during his closing argument. (Davis has no formal legal training, according to Jean Kuei, Davis’s former attorney.)

No shit, Jean.  I never would have guessed.

The trial is scheduled for March 11, 2013.  Mark it on your calendars.  Outside of Mike Leach getting Craig James on the stand, there isn’t much other litigation I’m as eagerly looking forward to as that.

By the way, fair warning:  I am so using “It’s just all made up and flagellant” as my new catch phrase.  In fact, you don’t know how close I am to replacing the blog motto with it.

Anyway, enjoy.  I hope this makes up for some of the gloom and doom.

The meaning of a meaningful regular season

A lot of playoff proponents mock the worry I and many others have about how an extended postseason would dilute the significance of the college football regular season.  How can we be serious, they say, about claiming every game counts when each week a powerhouse team takes on 1-AA Podunk State A&M?  Aside from the obvious rebuttal – ask Michigan about that – it’s a distortion of what we’re talking about.  Let Bruce Feldman explain.

The reason why so many people are skittish about a playoff was because they know that college football has, by far, the best regular season in sports. Every game can matter in a way they simply cannot in other sports. And the connectivity that inspires from coast to coast is a very cool dynamic about this sport. Last year’s Oklahoma State-Iowa State Friday night game was a great example of that. That game mattered to a lot of folks outside of just Oklahoma and Iowa. The drama and anticipation kept building as the Cyclones upset bid mounted. People could see the potential of the Cowboys’ dream season getting ruined that night. They also knew how that would impact other programs.

You don’t get that in other sports when you can have a 9-7 team win a Super Bowl.

No one inside the sport wants to risk spoiling that aspect of college football, and if you get too big of a playoff, you will end up with a handful of teams that simply had too many stumbles in the regular season…

Granted, there are many playoff proponents who don’t consider that a bug, and that’s cool.  Just don’t justify an enlarged postseason field by brushing aside my concerns.  The reality is that you risk turning college football into something a little more like every other sport out there when you grow the size of a playoff.  And I don’t want college football to be more of the same.

The “downside” to Jerry Sandusky

It’s getting harder and harder to give anyone in Penn State management a pass for Jerry Sandusky.  Including a certain former head coach:

According to CNN sources, e-mails show that vice president Gary Schultz, athletic director Tim Curley, and president Graham Spanier had initially settled on a plan in which they would speak with “the subject” — Sandusky — as well as his Second Mile charity and the Department of Welfare.

Those emails took place 16 days after McQueary offered his account. But Curley backed out of that plan in a second e-mail exchange.

“After giving it more thought and talking it over with Joe [Paterno] yesterday,” CNN quoted Curley from an obtained e-mail, “I am uncomfortable with what we agreed were the next steps. I am having trouble with going to everyone, but the person involved.”  [Emphasis added.]

And how prophetic is this?

“I am supportive,” Spanier was quoted as writing. “The only downside for us if the message isn’t heard and acted upon, and then we become vulnerable for not having reported it.”

Yeah, that would be a bummer.  Some people really need to fry over this.  Or perhaps be taken off a pedestal.

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UPDATE:  And don’t think Spanier didn’t keep worrying about it.

https://twitter.com/CharlesRobinson/status/219124568302960641

And that’s all she wrote.

The Crowell era at Georgia is over.

Crowell was dismissed from the team, it was announced at about 5 p.m. on Friday. That was about 14 hours after the star-crossed tailback was arrested on three weapon charges, including two felonies.

“We have a dedicated and committed group of men who are working hard to prepare for the coming season,” head coach Mark Richt said in a statement. “Our total focus will be directed toward the team and this effort.”

Not much softening of the blow there.  I wonder if Richt is calling anybody to help his former player land elsewhere.

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UPDATE:  Okay, there’s this.

One silver lining: No more debate over whether Branden Smith or Isaiah Crowell needs to change their number.

— Seth Emerson (@SethWEmerson) June 29, 2012

Nerds gotta go sometime.

Admittedly, these would probably freak me out.  But I’m thinking strategically locating some of them in the Level 600 bathrooms for the November 24th game with an appropriate message might be adequate payback for this.

“It’s been a lot of ups and downs.”

True ‘dat, Isaiah Crowell.  Thanks for the memories.

Looks like Georgia will be relying heavily on a true freshman running back again this season.

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UPDATE:  I hope there isn’t another shoe waiting to drop.

https://twitter.com/ESPNChing/status/218698660664446977

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UPDATE #2:  Cops can be such assholes.

As he came through, an officer smelled an odor of marijuana. They did a consent search on the vehicle. No marijuana was found, but a handgun was found below the driver’s seat. It had an altered serial number. The gun was a black Luger 9 mm.

According to the police report, Crowell denied knowing the gun was there. He acknowledged it was his car, but said “other people drive the car,” according to the report.

“I asked, other people like those guys in there now, and he said no, other people,” the officer said in the report.

While Harrow was being searched, an officer asked Crowell: “Why are you so nervous?” The report goes on to state that “the officers provided supplemental reports about the behavior and demeanor that Crowell displayed while I searched the vehicle.” Those supplemental reports were not immediately available.

“Why are you so nervous?”  Gee, officer, I can’t think of a reason in the world why I’d be nervous watching every person in the car being searched by armed police looking for drugs who’ve found a gun in my car.  Not a one.

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UPDATE #3:  The Right Hon. Justice Mark Bradley has issued his ruling in the matter.  It’s exactly what you’d expect – although the gratuitous Damon Evans reference adds a nice touch.

Slurp.

After wading through Kevin Scarbinsky’s fellating of Nick Saban, I wonder if college football shouldn’t save us all a lot of time and trouble and just set up a four-team playoff to determine Alabama’s opponent in the title game.

Friday morning buffet

Yeah, you made it.  Today’s buffet, no surprise, features plenty of playoff seasoning.

• Heismanpundit gets mocked here on occasion, but I don’t see anything wrong with his post decrying the creeping NFL-ization of college football.
• Here’s a preview of the Georgia-Florida game from the Gator perspective.  Somebody hasn’t heard of Artie Lynch.
• Is there more to winning football games than running the ball, stopping the run and being on the plus side of giveaway-takeaways?
• Hopefully you’re not this naive, but if you’re still wondering who’s really driving the conference expansion bus, let Chuck Neinas clue you in:  “Our television partners agreed that the only new member that would enhance the Big 12 value for television was Notre Dame.”
• Mark Richt is okay with a four-team playoff.
• You can have a four-team playoff with deserving teams, or you can have a four-team playoff with Big Ten participation.  But evidently you can’t have both.
• Ivan Maisel has two reasons why that 12-year playoff time commitment may not be as strong as they’re trying to make it sound:  “You have to think that the need for more money will arise in that time. And after a few years of team No. 5 screaming about being left out, the need to quell controversy will arise, too.”
• Gus Malzahn grabs another former SEC running back.
• Mack Brown thinks the new playoff money is another good reason for increasing player stipends.

Musical palate cleanser: nothin’ but the dog in me.

This seems like such a no-brainer for Saturdays in Athens.

If you can’t bring “Dooley’s Junkyard Dogs” back, you could do a lot worse than “Atomic Dog”.  It’s better than 90% of the stuff they pump out on the Sanford Stadium PA.

And how great it would be to hear 90,000+ going “bow wow wow” – get on it, McGarity.