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.

***************************************************************************

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

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