While some diehards out there might think this article will take a swipe the law school professor who called on his school to end its Power 5 football program, that’s not at all the point of this article because, to be honest, Kansas sucks at football and really should close up shop.
No, the lesson in hated sport of Lawyerball comes from Kansas’s neighbor to the north, where the Nebraska Cornhuskers had to cancel their season opener due to severe lightning. Obviously, the safety and well-being of the fans is the most important thing — because God knows the safety and well-being of the students isn’t — but the cancellation of a non-conference game against the designated cupcake Akron Zips has legal ramifications. Like many matchups between power schools and also-rans, this game carried a hefty purse, and as one would expect, also carried termination penalties.
But check out the provisions that would protect Nebraska from owing Akron a million in kiss-off money:
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Nebraska released the game contract with Akron as part of a records request. Here are the two seemingly most pertinent paragraphs. Warning: Legalese. #Huskers pic.twitter.com/1iZDeHPFQf
— Parker Gabriel (@ParkerJGabriel) September 3, 2018
Putting aside whether or not lightning meets any of these conditions, let’s take a critical look at some of the legalese in this contract and remember why people hate us.
“Hurricane, Tropical Storm”: Checking my meterological history, it appears that Lincoln, Nebraska, has been hit by hurricanes exactly never. Astoundingly, “tornadoes” which routinely carry area residents to the land of Oz aren’t on this list, but the prospect of a hurricane is.
“Invasion, Hostilities”: In fairness, this probably means they’d cancel the game even if North Korea landed in the Aleutians, not just that troops need to roll onto I-80. But they still played the Rose Bowl in North Carolina in January of 1942. Don’t wuss out.
“Rebellion, Insurrection”: Hey, when the administration pushes a “Make America Antebellum Again” worldview, maybe this isn’t as crazy as it sounds.
“Confiscation by order of government, military public authority”: Forget Philip K. Dick, if I want a window into a coming bleak dystopia, I’m going to Nebraska’s in-house counsel.
This is why people hate lawyers. And, yeah, boilerplate language is often silly — insurance contracts come right up to spelling out alien colonization — but if you can’t stipulate some simple, common sense exclusions and have an extreme catch-all provision to capture general wackiness, then we’ve lost as a profession. Having to explicitly identify everything just makes us look stupid.
But lawyers are chained to the past and refuse to get caught with their pants down by not including anything that could possibly come up. It’s why they generally traffic in well-worn models that others have used a million times. Indeed, Nebrasks probably yanked this from some other school’s non-conference scheduling agreement model.
Probably lifted from some other school that “occasionally suffers hurricanes.”