Hope You Bet the Money-Line on the Mercenaries
Blueblood University newcomer F. M. “Follow the Money” Freebooter led the Mercenaries to a second half comeback as they cashed in with a dramatic 83-82 win over his last team, the UCon Soldiers of Fortune in Blueblood’s DraftKings’s Pavilion on the school’s scenic campus.
Freebooter, with crazed Mercenary partisans waving large denomination bills, the team’s new logo, banked in the winner from the right wing with two ticks on the clock.
After the Soldiers failed getting up a final shot, Freebooter’s new teammates, some after introducing themselves, swarmed F.M. until celebrating fans showered bills on the court. All of the Mercenaries then scrambled for their share.
Freebooter, who began the game repping UCon, entered the transfer portal at halftime.
The Blue Chipper’s renowned for free-lance Euro-step finishes and long-range launches. At halftime, he switched out the Red, White, and Blue Soldiers’ uniform with the number 100 on it he had embraced two games ago after transferring from the Bet-the-Over State College Bookies. He racked up twelve points and two dimes for the Soldiers during the first twenty minutes.
Wearing Mercenary Green and Gold with a new number, $10K, Freebooter tallied seventeen points and six rebounds in leading his new team’s second half comeback.
Former Soldiers’ teammate Horace “Hired Gun” Legionnaire, smarting after assuring his NIL supporters to bet the money line in private pre-game correspondence, said his teammates wouldn’t miss F.M.: “The man’s a volume shooter. Steals ‘tunities’ to tout my brand. Didn’t call bank on that last jack. See ya’. More NIL alum love for me and my boys.”
Legionnaire famously offered a NIL supporter naming rights to his first-born child, soon to be delivered to his friend.
Blueblood Coach Ward “Wealth” Gapp retorted during his post-game presser, streamed exclusively on Blueblood’s Let-Them-Eat-Cake Conference Network: “Whining about sour grapes. We’re glad to have, uh, Freebooter, yeah Freebooter, another player who represents our school and its ideals dead on.
“I say to haters from UCon, who I’ll hear from with this week’s online death threats, bring it on. You didn’t see me griping last year when my own son used the transfer portal to move to Podunk U., where he thought he’d get more playing time and could party more. Even though it meant I would have to support him financially. It’s a new world. Love it, or leave it.”
In-game transfers are newly allowed by the NCAA as another “step forward” in response to the 2021 Supreme Court Decision that, in the name of freedom and love of money talking, unleashed the Wild West world of today’s collegiate basketball.
That ruling, according to oft-quoted influencer A. Peal Reason, allowed “student-athletes” to capitalize on their Name, Image, and Likeness to harvest a share of the money rained on universities by well-heeled alums to “buy and enjoy success.” He maintains they were used to that in the rest of corporate American culture “where the powers-that-be bet the over in the over-under odds setting the rules for our great society.”
“NIL,” according to Professor Isaiah Progressive, now a non-tenured Philosophy adjunct at Blueblood, “might have been better used to reward equally all student-athletes who get scholarships and intend to finish school. Cross Country and Lacrosse athletes put in time for the glory of the university too,” he remarked, not realizing with his Platonic head in the clouds that revenue streams are the lifeblood of contemporary universities.
Progressive added, “Subsequent conference realignment, mega TV and streaming rights deals, prioritizing winning over other academic needs, and surrendering concerns about maintaining academic standards and integrity all followed suit.”
He concluded his voice-in-the-wilderness utterings with a further harangue: “The business/sports cycle has come full circle. That was obvious when an anything-for-a-buck presidential candidate, famously as me-first as these players and institutions, insisted that down ballot candidates pay him if using his Name, Image, and Likeness in ads and on their correspondence. You’d think he was a porn star.”
The object of his venom, who bankrupted a University named after him, probably because it didn’t have a sports team, will probably tweet a response within the next news cycle. Of course, trumping that, he also bankrupted a so-called professional football team.
DraftKings’s Pavilion — the name was chosen after a bidding war that included the likes of Vice Media, Monsanto, FanDuel, and the Chinese marketing giant Temu — sits on the site of the former ivy-covered Liberal Arts Building, judged superfluous in this AI, tech-driven world and following the selling of the naming rights to the school as a whole.
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