Legally speaking, your football team sucks

Some sports teams are undeniably awful. Like, say, all the professional baseball and football teams in the Bay Area.

But how would your favorite shitty team's shittiness hold up in court? Does it take a transcendent form of suck for a jury to find a team worthless?

Say hello to Duke football! The Blue Devils recently backed out a contract to play a four-game series with Louisville. The Cardinals responded by filing suit, although the contract between the two teams required a $150,000/game penalty by Duke only if Louisville couldn't find a replacement of "similar stature" to Duke.

Now, last season Duke was outscored 398-215 by its opponents, en route to a 1-11 record. (Thank you, Northwestern!) They averaged a pathetic 2.0 yards per rushing attempt, and managed to make only 3 field goals all season. So perhaps finding a team of "similar stature" might require Louisville to survey Kentucky Pop Warner teams at most.

And Duke's attorney wasn't ashamed of it:

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 [Louisville] 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.

The court got it. Summary judgment:

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...

So, look up Raider Nation! At least your boys only go to court when they're trying to move stadiums.

(Photo credit: joeosb on Flickr. And yes, Duke had a QB named "Asack.")