All you Bearcats fans can breathe a little easier now. Bob Huggins will stay in Cincinnati at least another year. Thank God! Who knows, maybe if Huggins would have left for West Virginia, one of his former players might have graduated.
Which brings me to another point: Be cool and stay in school. Do I sound like an ABC after-school special? Maybe I don’t even need that slogan. Names have a powerful impact.
Thank God I’m not Dontonio Winfield, Kenny Satterfield, Corey Benjamin, Tremaine Fowlkes or Ed O’Bannon. Praise Jesus I didn’t wake up as Andy Katzenmoyer, Lawrence Phillips or Ickey Woods.
A couple years back, Woods was selling meat door-to-door in my neighborhood. Pork chops, porterhouse, T-bone, ground beef, hamburger helper … he went from Super Bowl stardom to sirloin streaks! Winfield recently landed himself broke and in a Cincinnati jail.
What is so terrible about going for a college degree, especially you Cincinnati Bearcats? You guys get to go to college for free, eat for free, get a crowd of basketball groupies to fulfill all your carnal needs and have Dick Vitale rage about your diaper dandiness.
More importantly, you can work on a backup plan when you blow out your knee in the first professional preseason game of your career.
All these guys see is the dollar bills. They set up these big press conferences for ESPN to tell the world that they’re ready for the next level. College is great, but Momma needs a house, right? Well, if Momma has waited 19 years for that big house, then she can wait a couple more.
It’s when you find out that you’re ordering your footlong hot dogs from them that the story truly becomes sad. Knowing an opportunity was there and it was skipped over for a quick tour. Knowing that a guy like Woods could experience something like the Super Bowl and end up where he did for a while just has to be the most deflating feeling in the world.
Now there is controversy that LeBron James should be able to skip his senior year of high school for the NBA. There’s something about an 18-year-old with a $10 million shoe contract and another multi-million dollar NBA contract that just sounds destined for destruction.
But James’ mom just might need that new house, right?
