Welcome to the 21st Annual Wriphe.com Batman and Football Month! It may be the last.

"This should be the time we're excited. Instead, we have this ridiculous confusions and sense of chaos. It's kind of sad, to be honest."

—Donde Plowman
University of Tennessee Chancellor
SEC Executive Committee President

It's not an exaggeration to say that college football is being strangled to death by the same greed and corruption currently eating the corpse of the rest of the American Experiment. This has been a long time coming. The schools themselves have been exploiting their "students" for income and fame for decades, and now everyone wants a piece of the action. College football alone generates billions of dollars a year, so in theory there should be plenty of Golden Goose to go around. But America has never been particularly good at sharing wealth equitably.

The current imbroglio is that LSU wants to put on their team former players who washed out of the NFL. No player has moved backwards from the NFL to college since the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States banned "The playing of those ineligible as amateurs" in 1906. The IAAUS became the NCAA in 1910, and lost its ability to enforce amateurism in college sports in 2015 (O'Bannon v. NCAA) because it made money selling player likenesses to a video game company without giving any of that money to the actual players. We're still feeling our way through the fallout.

LSU is a voluntary member of the SEC, which maintains that its players, if not strictly "amateurs" in the traditional sense, should at least never sign contracts with professional leagues. LSU, on the other hand, seems to think that if United States law says they can play pros, they should play pros, any prior agreement they made to play by the SEC's rules be damned. For some people, winning is the only thing. Nuclear weapons should be kept away from these types of people.

The SEC being among the four most powerful and influential of conferences means essentially that all of college football is currently involved in this game of chicken. Is LSU really going to violate previous agreements (and face future financial sanctions) to put professional players on the field? Is the SEC willing to forfeit games (and the accompanying cash) to stand on an increasingly archaic principle?

The State Court of Louisiana is supposed to weigh in on Thursday. If history is any judge, they'll only make things worse.

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FYI: My power is out again. Are we having fun yet?

UPDATE: Fixed. And in just under six hours this time!

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To quote FoxNews.com from March 11, 2003:

Chairman of the House Administration Committee Bob Ney, R-Ohio, ordered cafeterias Tuesday to rename "French fries" to "freedom fries" in a display of congressional pique at French intransigence over war with Iraq.

To quote FoxNews.com from March 1, 2007:

Former Congressman Bob Ney reported to a federal prison Thursday morning to begin serving a 2 1/2-year sentence for corruption, a fall from grace spurred by gifts from now imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Obviously, these two stories are completely unrelated, have no relevance to recent events, and have been presented above for historical reference only.

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"What can I blog about today?" I asked the universe. The universe gave no immediate answer, so I put The Boys in the Jeep to make our regular daily visit to Dad and The Girls.

As I paused at the stop sign at the entrance of their neighborhood, to my great surprise, Dad's dingy white cargo van came into view. Only it was coming from the wrong end of the street and was totally unable to maintain a lane, slamming its passenger mirror into a mailbox before swerving past me and continuing back the way I had come up the busy road into town. I turned around and followed the van, contemplating my best course of action to resolve this situation without anyone getting hurt. Fortunately us all, Dad seemed to wise up and pulled the van to a stop on an unmarked gravel driveway. "What are you doing?" I asked when I reached his door. "I don't remember," he answered. The Girls just wagged their tails.

I called my aunt who lives down the street, and she arrived to help me transport Dad, The Girls, and The Boys back to his house, where I sorted out Dad's handful of daily medicines (which he hasn't been taking reliably since last Saturday) and ordered him to bed to resolve this latest bout of parasomnia that sometimes accompanies mistakes with his anxiety, kidney, and heart pills. Then my aunt and I went back to recover the cargo van. Barely had I turned the engine over when I was engulfed in the flashing blue lights of the county sheriff's department and a United States Marshal.

"What can I do for you?" I asked when the Marshal reached my door. He answered, "You can tell me what a stranger in a windowless white van is doing on my private property." Dad couldn't have known, right?

I relate this story only as a public service announcement: Never ask the universe for some entertainment. The universe has a very sick sense of humor.

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I'm dogsitting two young poodles who have a very different idea than I do about when bedtime and breakfast should be. Who will win this battle of wills? I will, but maybe only because I'll eventually be too tired to wake up and let them out.

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