NEW YORK. Representatives of ten elite liberal arts colleges today announced that they will form a new athletic conference in the hope of drawing automatic bids to the Bowl Championship Series and the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament for their high IQ student-athletes.
"The TV money's there for the taking," said Dr. Sumner Farnsworth, an internationally-known nuclear physicist who will be the league's first commissioner. "All we've got to do is field the teams and we can fund a tenure-track position and a new particle accelerator at every school."
The Metrosexual Conference will be composed of New York University, Brandeis University, the University of Chicago, Case Western Reserve, Washington University in St. Louis, the Unversity of Pennsylvania, Carnegie-Mellon University, Reed College, Johns Hopkins and Georgetown. All are located in or near major urban areas, where the term "metrosexual" has come to refer to men with an orientation towards the arts and culture who are not necessarily ####.
Metrosexual League coaches say they won't be "in it to win it" and hope to instill more important values in their players. "Say we're down by five touchdowns to a Big Ten school with two minutes left," said Carnegie-Mellon quarterback coach and drama professor Patricia Highsmith-Jones. "Rather than throw some stupid, sectarian 'Hail Mary' pass I would like to see our guys reflect a little and maybe present a tableau vivant to the crowd on the futility of life and absurdity of the universe."
In keeping with Robert Frost's famous dictum that a liberal is a person too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel, cheerleaders for Metrosexual Conference schools will only cheer when their opponents score. "We need to be sensitive to the fact that our graduates will go on to earn a lot more money than kids at some of the cow colleges we'll be playing," said Highsmith-Jones. "When our opponents score, we'll yell, 'That's all right, that's okay--you're going to work for us someday!'"
NCAA officials promised to review the league's application carefully, but expressed concern that lowering the bar of athletic quality would encourage schools to engage in low-budget recruiting abuses. "Some of these kids with high SAT scores come from homes where a hardback edition of Dickens is a big deal," said Bob Saccomandi, an NCAA compliance officer. "Give them a cappucino and a ticket to a Belmondo flick and they feel like they got a muscle car and a freshman cheerleader for the weekend."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
