Duke is Now Legally the Worst Team in Div 1A Football

Last year, Duke backed out of a multi-year agreement to play Louisville. The contract said that if Louisville could not find a replacement opponent of "similar stature" then Duke would have to pay them $150,000. Louisville wanted the money and sued in Kentucky Superior Court.

Duke defended by saying that EVERY TEAM in Division 1A was of "similar stature".

At oral argument, the Duke attorneys argued:

I think the Court can absolutely positively take judicial notice that Duke is probably the worst football team in Division I football. Everybody knows that. That’s no secret. The longest losing streak, the inability to ever win games. . .We certainly don’t have to go out and take six months of discovery to establish that for you. . .So the bottom line is how much discovery, if any, should anyone have to take, want to take or need to take to make the simple analysis of whether or not that was a team of similar stature? It’s judicial notice that they got beat by Utah. Maybe that’s part of the dispute – that they wish they’d played somebody weaker, like Duke which would have been an automatic W.

In its opinion, the court judicially agreed:

The term ‘team of similar stature’ simply means any team that competes at the same level of athletic performance as the Duke football team. At oral argument, Duke . . . persuasively asserted that this is a threshold that could not be any lower. . .Duke won only one football game, and lost eleven, during the 2007 football season.

How about posting that on the team bulletin board? Full story and video link to oral argument here.

[At Duke:] Rinnngggg. Coach, its for you. The New Jersey Institute of Technology says they are calling us out and want to play us next year.