The Purple Martin School of Football

Working at Enema U is like eating fish; enjoy the meat and try not to choke on the bones.  My wife, The Doc, is always telling me that I would enjoy movies more if I had a “willing suspension of disbelief.”  If you work for the state, you need a willing suspension of logic and reason.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job.  I know of nowhere else in the world where I would be paid to read books and tell stories to people who have each paid extraordinary sums to hear me talk.  (You can get a front row seat to hear Paul McCartney perform for less money than it costs to hear me explain the causes of the Mexican American War.  'Maybe I’m Amazed'.)

Years ago, for unknown reasons, our state legislature decided to start a bad football team.  Inadvertently, they attached a small university to this team.  For years, the university tried to stay out of the way of the team, teaching quietly in some corner of the campus not currently needed for the newest set of offices for the coaches.  Now, suddenly, our football program seems to be dying.  All the other teams have quite literally taken their balls and gone home.   Our ball-less coaches, like our teams, are at a total loss.

Even as I write this, the university’s top administrators, Moose and Squirrel, are meeting with the legislature in Santa Fe.  “Save Our Host!” they plead.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t look good.  It seems that all the other universities  decided to reform the various athletic conferences, and as they took turns choosing who got to play ball with them, we just stood there smiling nervously.  They picked the fat kid who looked like three grapefruit in a sock.  They picked the short little kid who threw like a girl.  Hell, they even picked the girl.  Eventually, the only kid who hadn’t been selected was us, the short fat girl who couldn’t even throw like a girl.  No one wants to play with us.

Most people would admit defeat.  (Why not--our football team has been setting an excellent example for fifty years.)  Enema U could either drop down a division, drop football, or perhaps even decide that the primary mission of a land grant university in a poor state (so poor that even our cocaine addicts can only afford to buy rich people’s snot) is to actually focus on education.  Most people would do just that, but not Enema U.  We have a PLAN.  Other teams will want to play with us if we have a better stadium. 

Now, don’t jump to conclusions.  We don’t need—at least I sure hope we don’t need—a bigger stadium.  We can’t even fill the one we have half-way.  We can’t fill it even though we let the students in for free. 

No, the stadium needs…something else.  If we fix the bathrooms, other schools will want to play with us!  So the university has asked the state legislature for $3.5 million dollars to fix the stadium bathrooms.  What in the world did we do in there that takes $3.5 million dollars to fix?  I know plumbers are paid better than professors (and deserve it — they get rid of what we are full of), but that must be one hell of a leak we have in there.  If we are selling that much beer, I don’t see how we could be losing so much money.

I did the math, and I have a suggestion.  If we get the $3.5 million, don’t fix the bathrooms.  Put the money in blue chip stocks and just spend the income the fund generates each year.   There are few home games, and low attendance.  We could easily afford to give every fan at the game $5 in exchange for a promise to just hold it in until they get home.  That’s not even counting the money we will save on water.  Eventually, when we finally drop football, we’ll still have the $3.5 million.  Who knows, we might buy a few books for the library.

Besides the bathrooms, the university is also asking the legislature for an additional $2.5 million to refurbish the press box.  One shudders to imagine what is wrong in there, but it must require the services of the Ghostbusters.  Still, even after we chase the evil undead hell-hounds out of the press box and back to the College of Education, there would seem to be more than enough remaining money to install a steam room and a wet bar.  Possibly, even a brass pole for the cheerleaders.

Naturally—and I bet you saw this coming—I have a suggestion.  Actually, it’s pretty much the same suggestion.  Let’s invest the $2.5 million, too.  At an average of 6 home games a year, we could afford to bribe the reporters, forever, over $20,000 a game to just stay home and falsely report that we win the games.

About the only other way we could win is to put snipers in that press box.