All That and a Bag of Mail: Fatherhood, the BCS Lawsuit and Hat Etiquette

I totally agree but wondered, does that apply to Vince Young?

As a preliminary, I know nothing about fashion. I wear shorts, flip-flops and t-shirts 90 percent of my waking life. Having said that, people who wear hats on their heads facing anything other than straight ahead or straight backwards are guaranteed to be tools.

Guaranteed.

Did it surprise anyone when the guy who ran from the foul ball and let his girlfriend get hit was wearing a baseball cap sideways? Of course not. If you'd given me a lineup of 10 people, I could have picked out the guy who was going to let his girlfriend get hit by the foul ball solely based upon how he was wearing his hat.

If I had a daughter and a guy showed up to take her out with a sideways hat on, I wouldn't let her go.

In fact, I'm convinced that businesses could interview for positions available for recent college grads by not asking a single question, and simply placing a hat in a chair. Ask one question, "How would you wear this hat?"

Bang, you eliminate everyone who would do the company wrong without even having the interviewee open his mouth.

Now, on to Vince Young. VY has adopted a subtle modifier of the sideways hat that is nearly as infuriating as the complete sideways look. Namely, he tilts his hat so slightly to the left or right that you always think it's an accident. Like you should fix it yourself. I saw him leaving the locker room once and I thought about letting him know his hat was crooked.

I feel confident that had VY modified his hat to either straight ahead or straight backward, he wouldn't have gotten pulled during the Steelers game.

Jenn B. writes:

Clay, on Friday Night Lights and Mad Men, settle a debate, is Don Draper or Tim Riggins cooler?

Both men are amazingly cool, arguably the two most entertaining characters on television today. (Although Buddy Garrity may be my favorite character to watch on television. I absolutely love him).

I've made the statement that if I could be any fictional character on a TV series, it would be Tim Riggins. Given the fact that Riggins just turned himself in to serve a jail sentence at the end of season four, this makes no sense. Effectively what I'm saying is that I'd like to go to jail just to be Tim Riggins.

That's how cool Tim Riggins is.

Don Draper is cool, but he's also an awful father. Now that I'm a dad, I can overlook virtually any character flaw: money laundering, bootlegging, alcoholism, drug dealing, philandering, being a mob boss. But the one thing I can't overlook is awful fatherhood. I'm fairly confident that Riggins would be a good dad.

So I'm rolling with Riggins on this one.

Ben D. writes:

Clay,

College bowl games are tax exempt, non-profit corporations but clearly do not conduct their business as a typical non-profit company would. In your legal opinion, is there something to the complaint filed by Playoff Pac against several big bowls?

You've written about the absurdities of the BCS before, so I'm dying to read what you have to say about it now.

In reading the complaint, I don't think the bowls that were sued spent money in a way that is that much different than what the vast majority of nonprofit entities would spend money on. There's an illusion out there that nonprofit entities are better stewards of their money than for-profit entities. The reverse is often true. So nothing in the lawsuit is shocking to me. (Note: this is also true because I've read an advance copy of Dan Wetzel's Death to the BCS that has many of these figures only in much greater detail).

What the lawsuit further develops for me is something I've come to believe: the biggest issue with having a playoff is political more than it is economic. Namely, the people who are making money off the current structure -- and believe me there are a ton of people -- will fight to the death to protect their vested interest in the present system rather than let a new system emerge.

That's even though a playoff would bring in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars more in revenue every year than the present system. But, and this is key, the winners in that system would be different than the winners in the present system. And if you've got a rigged system that you benefit from, you're doing everything possible to keep the status quo in existence.

Simply put, tt's not enough for something to make sense once politics gets involved, it has to make sense and the people who stand to gain from nothing changing have to be overcome. The people who stand to lose are much better connected politically, fight harder and longer, and will derail any process that knocks their hands out of the metaphorical cookie jar.

Should the head of the Sugar Bowl, Paul Hoolahan, make in excess of $600k? Of course not. I have zero doubt that I could do his job every bit as well for a third of the money. So could several thousand other lawyers throughout the southeast. But is Hoolahan the most overpaid nonprofit executive in the country?

Not even close.

Keep in mind that Urban Meyer coached in last season's Sugar Bowl and makes over $4 million a year to coach a team that is, ostensibly, part of a nonprofit entity as well. I think what lawsuits like this one may do is raise further issues about the nonprofit status and tax exemptions afforded to $100 million athletic departments across our country.

Focusing exclusively on the non-profit structure of the bowls is a little bit like the NCAA catching one kid out of every thousand who cheat on the SAT. Yeah, you might be right that something is wrong there, but the issue isn't individualized. It's systematic.

Follow Clay Travis on Twitter here. With All That and a Bag of Mail returning for the football season, you can e-mail him questions at Clay.Travis@gmail.com