Monday, February 25, 2008
Question for Kelvin Sampson
Exactly which part of "no phone calls" did you not understand, Coach?
Saturday, February 09, 2008
The Very Last Super Bowl Question
Now that all the questions about Tom Brady's ankle, and Tom Brady's girlfriend, and his coach's early departure, by one second, from the game ("maybe he was trying to beat the traffic," the Giants' Eli Manning suggested on the Letterman show), and the guy that caught the pass with his helmet and little else, and what the best Super Bowl commercial was (my vote is for "none of the above"), only one major question lingers.
How the hell can you have a University of Phoenix Stadium?
I mean, the University of Phoenix is a virtual university that has no actual athletic programs, no actual classrooms, no actual campus in the broad, lush-green-mall sense, and, in my opinion, no actually credible degrees. Yet, there it was on Super Bowl Sunday, the University of Phoenix Stadium.
Crikey, as the late Steve Irwin used to say (before he was "the late"), how can that be? The implication, which the Fox broadcasters never clarified (but, let's face it, that's not exactly Fox's metier, clarifying things), was that this was the place where the University of Phoenix Virtualosos (or whatever a virtual football team would call itself) played their home games.
Actually, if I may now use that word in its original sense, the answer is pretty simple -- and emblematic of modern American culture -- all the University of Phoenix owns is the naming rights to the stadium, at a very actual hefty sum of more than $150 million.
Once you know that, then it all makes a degree of sense. The only problem is the misleading impression that the online university perhaps has a football team to call its own. A similar problem does not exist with sports venues like the RCA Dome (RCA doesn't field a football team there, presumably called the Electrons) or the soon-to-be Lucas Oil Stadium (hey, maybe the Oilers are coming back?).
And now you have, not the rest of the story, but the rest of the answer to the very last Super Bowl question of 2008. See you next February at DeVry University Stadium and Diploma-Factory Park.
How the hell can you have a University of Phoenix Stadium?
I mean, the University of Phoenix is a virtual university that has no actual athletic programs, no actual classrooms, no actual campus in the broad, lush-green-mall sense, and, in my opinion, no actually credible degrees. Yet, there it was on Super Bowl Sunday, the University of Phoenix Stadium.
Crikey, as the late Steve Irwin used to say (before he was "the late"), how can that be? The implication, which the Fox broadcasters never clarified (but, let's face it, that's not exactly Fox's metier, clarifying things), was that this was the place where the University of Phoenix Virtualosos (or whatever a virtual football team would call itself) played their home games.
Actually, if I may now use that word in its original sense, the answer is pretty simple -- and emblematic of modern American culture -- all the University of Phoenix owns is the naming rights to the stadium, at a very actual hefty sum of more than $150 million.
Once you know that, then it all makes a degree of sense. The only problem is the misleading impression that the online university perhaps has a football team to call its own. A similar problem does not exist with sports venues like the RCA Dome (RCA doesn't field a football team there, presumably called the Electrons) or the soon-to-be Lucas Oil Stadium (hey, maybe the Oilers are coming back?).
And now you have, not the rest of the story, but the rest of the answer to the very last Super Bowl question of 2008. See you next February at DeVry University Stadium and Diploma-Factory Park.
