I, personally, am Jewish, and plan on spending tomorrow with a some similarly religioned friends watching basketball and eating Chinese food. But I understand a bunch of y'all are probably, you know, not Jewish, so, enjoy your December 25ths. Make 'em merry.
Northwestern, as you mighta heard, is short on ticket sales, so there's been a lot of talking on the NU interwebs about people who can't make it - or can, but are feeling generous - buying tickets and donating them. It's a nice move: it's hard to stress how important selling our ticket allotment is for NU's future bowl hopes. Jim Phillips most likely convinced the Outback Bowl to select us by saying "hey, we might have terrible attendance, but we can sell bowl tickets", so unless we sell our 12,000 seats, NU loses that argument for every bowl game from now until we start accepting 8,000 students a year like every other Big Ten school, which is supposed to happen fall of the year Cubs win the World Series, which is tentatively scheduled for the year Hell sends a snowboard team to the Winter Olympics or six years after your great-grandkids die, whichever comes second.
Basically, it's giving $70 dollars for the future of Northwestern athletics. And that's something we can all get behind
However, I'm a little bit weirded out by the concept of the way this has been handled. First off, if I had 70 bucks right now to give away, quite frankly the last place I'd think about giving it to was the NU athletic department, not because I don't love NU sports, and not to sound like some annoying self-righteous prick, I can think of a million more deserving places to give it away to. And secondly, I've heard of five separate cases of people who entered into a raffle for NU students that the athletics department sent an email about last week, and, well, all five people I've heard of entering it won four tickets. (Did anybody enter this raffle and not win? Tell me if you did.) Surely, those people are grateful for the free tickets, and I'm grateful if you're somebody who bought them, but of those 20 tickets people generous ponied up 70 bucks for, 15 of them are probably going to be scalped away in front of Raymond James Stadium next Friday.
So here's my suggestion: if you have 70 expendable dollars this holiday season, I'm hoping you also have 20 expendable dollars this holiday season. Watch this relatively funny video, and donate a goat. It'll make me/you feel better about yourselves. I'm seriously hoping I can get at least one of you punks to click through and donate something, so, please, do so.
In closing, if you really need to read something I wrote over the next two days, I contributed to a post bout why to hate Iowa over at From the Rumble Seat, SBNation's Georgia Tech blog, so, there's that. But for now, Merry Christmas to all y'all. Peace.