We promised you a 100,000 seat stadium. We promised you seven home games and Big Stenography Conference glory. We promised you five-star quarterback recruit Chef Faymield. We lied, of course, but fortunate for us we also promised a no refund policy on our tickets.
You seek answers, and we here at the University of Alaphama, America’s newest and brightest institution floating in Lake Erie, on a man-made island off the scenic coast of Ohio, are here to deliver those answers.
First of all, let us admit to the scandal. The administration of the University of Alaphama commissioned the school’s marketing department to fabricate the appearance of a Division I football team in order to raise funds for a state-of-the-art library intended to create meaningful academic progress here on our humble, 100% tax-funded little island of Offshore Ohio.
To that end, we lied about everything. There never was and was never going to be a stadium. We thought a coach named Urban Legend was a pretty obvious tell, although it was impressive that the media dug up a very real and terrible domestic violence scandal against the one actual human being here at the university who we assigned to Urban’s staff.
In order to stay true to the whole charade, that employee has been suspended indefinitely, with pay, until the media puts more pressure on us to fire him.
If the fake head coach wasn’t enough, we called ourselves the University of Alaphama Crimson Tide Pods. How was that not a dead giveaway?
Which is to say we believed you were all in on the ‘scandal’. We thought you understood exactly what was going on. This was all a big marketing ruse to raise funds for a state-of-the-art library, in line with the university’s mission, stated in our school motto: Come to Alaphama and actually learn instead of wasting your time watching the lame younger brother of professional football.
The scandal resulted in an average of 80,000 tickets sold to each of the seven home games. At $50 a pop, that has given the university $4-million with which to build a new library, complete with comfortable and spacious study rooms, lightning fast computers, thousands of books, top-of-the-line librarians, and all the other resources the low-income, high-potential students here at the University of Alaphama need to not just succeed, but to excel in their pursuits.
Yet most of you remain furious, demanding either your money back or, more ideally, for the University of Alaphama to actually create its fake football team.
To your fury we say, huh? This scandal was not based around paying players, providing players with strippers, coercing attractive and sexually inclined students to sleep with our athletes, covering up domestic abuse, covering up sexual abuse, faking grades for athletes, making up classes entire to pretend our student-athletes are actual students, or giving another second chance to the coach who somehow has had a kid die from physical exertion every spring camp.
No, this scandal was about using the American profit machine of football to prove a point and raise necessary academic funds for a university struggling to provide meaningful opportunities for our country’s overlooked low-income students, who deserve the same chance in life as everyone else.
We did this because no one was donating money. Perhaps that’s because we’re a new school located on a man-made island off the scenic coast of Ohio, but the minute we mentioned we had a football team, you’d be shocked at how quickly people snatched up those tickets or sent in donations meant exclusively for the football program. In addition to the aforementioned ticket sales, we raised over $5-million through charitable donations.
Call us liars. Call us cheats. Uselessly demand your money back due to our no refund policy on both ticket sales and charitable donations.
But, if you can find it in your hearts, rest easy knowing that instead of funding what is essentially athletic slavery for young men, you’ve allowed the University of Alaphama to create the sort of library that raises us into the rare echelon of universities where meaningful learning and scholarship is simply a tuition we’re now able to cover through academic scholarships for all and a hungry ambition away.
So keep pining over Big Stenography Conference glory if you must, but also be proud of yourself for unwillingly supporting the academic pursuits of all the students here at the University of Alaphama. For once, you’ve chosen to care about a school for its academics first, its sports second. That’s unprecedented in our day and age. That’s a step in the right direction.
We thank you dearly for aiding us in this scandal and await the FBI’s ruling as to whether or not it’s good to take advantage of people for positive institutional gain (we are not so quietly optimistic about our chances, if only because our university president, Jumbo Fishest, plays regular rounds of golf with the lead investigator presiding over the case).
Always and forever: Roll Tide Pods!