Since turnover at the top is constant, they’ve only been on the job a week or so. The massive ongoing athletic scandals they’ve inherited take up all of their time. If they do get a moment free, it’s taken up with trustees screaming at them that they want a one hundred million dollar new stadium.
Turnover at the top level of the proprietors’ coaches is equally constant. The five million dollar a year coach they hired a few months ago just beat up one of his players and then got drunk and crashed his Porsche. If they let him go, they owe him a three million dollar buyout. Even if they pay it out, he’ll sue the school for defamation or something, and that’s one more layer of litigation on top of deep hardened lava flows of sports-related litigation.
Naturally, his stadium is empty. More precisely, it’s half empty at the start of games, and then, by the second half, it’s almost entirely empty. The team actually wins a lot of its games – the proprietor is totally stumped as to why no one shows up. He’s only just begun running a failing sports factory. He doesn’t understand.
But here he is – new guy on the block – and he’s being interviewed by the local booster press. Which asks him about the empty stadium.
Here is what he says. Here is what the new president of Florida Atlantic University – the school so desperate to get naming rights to its new stadium that it signed a deal with a prison – has to say about that.
Unacceptable. Do you hear? I, the latest proprietor of this desperately failing endeavor, declare here and now that empty seats are unacceptable. I will do such things,– What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be The terrors of the earth.
July 28th, 2014 at 11:32AM
Perhaps they could fill the seats with felons from the prison? Just issue muftis to replace the colored clothing?