Might as well blaze through these negative Division I teams on a Friday afternoon, and do I ever mean blaze. Work is hectic and the threat of losing funding and being out of a job in a month has been dangled over my head as a carrot to chase that I will never catch, and it is a quiet Friday afternoon at the ol' government bureaucracy, with a long holiday weekend coming, so why worry about the future? Fuck the future! It is college football kickoff weekend, the NFL is less than a week away, I don't have to work on Monday and I will still get paid, which is really the dream of every American - to get paid for doing nothing. We have become a nation of useless fat asses, but we know how to make snarky remarks about trivial shit, so let me do my thing America...
#1: DUKE BLUE DEVILS (22-95, .188 winning percentage) - I was surprised to see Duke was the worst team in all the land over the past decade. I mean, I knew they were terrible. Steve Spurrier launched his coaching career pretty much by magically helping Duke win 5 games in a couple seasons in a row, which was considered amazing coaching upness at the time. Living in ACC country, near UVA, I understand that Duke is a special breed of lower echelon team, that when your own team start running neck and neck with the football Blue Devils, it's a major red flag that your program needs an adrenalin shot to get off of the life support its on that you may have let your guard down and not realized. Usually, there's one ACC coach fired every two years simply for the fact his team is not clearly better than Duke. Seriously. But I did not know they were the worst in the country, even more terrible than Sun Belt bottom feeders. It sort of shows you why Coach K is a worshipped false god at that little bastard university in Durham, and why he can do no wrong, even though the rest of us see him as the snake-souled weasel he truly is. But at Duke, they have nothing else athletically to feel anything unshameful about.
#2: EASTERN MICHIGAN EAGLES (26-91, .222 winning percentage) - The Mid-American Conference is a ragtag collection of directional state universities that tend to do battle on ESPN2 on mid-week showcases during the season. Even though it's one of the lower rated DI conferences, you still for whatever reason see a lot of their games on cable TV. Probably because it's like a Big Ten B-league, to sort of whet your appetite for the big boys on Saturdays. Midwestern people are weird. They play cornhole instead of horseshoes, and the land is flat and forever so that there's no hollers or hills to hide in, which instills in midwesterners a long, slow personality. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, it's just very alien to me, and I tend to want to fight people when I'm out there, because it's just weird. Then when I am riding home on the Greyhound after some small town has bought me a one-way bus ticket back to Virginia along with a threat to be arrested if I ever show my face in town limits again, I cross from Ohio into West Virginia and the land start to heave like a woman's breasts and I can let my breath out because I realize I am home, where people are like me, and I can be myself, and a bunch of ignorant assholes in cowboy boots won't try to force me to live within their socially confining norms.
*: WESTERN KENTUCKY HILLTOPPERS (11-37, .230 winning percentage) - The Hilltoppers didn't qualify to be an actual member of this Shit List because they've only been in DI for four years, after being a pretty successful Division IAA member for a long time. You subtract their initial 7-5 outing at this level, and their cumulative record is that much more embarrassing, with only four wins the past three years. And oddly enough, they are jumping into the Sun Belt Conference rather than the more appropriate Mid-American Conference, although if I were from Kentucky, I too would associate myself with the south and not the midwest. But the jump by a team like this that was good at one level to a higher level to not be good, but cash those whore-ish "come lose at our stadium" fill-in-the-gaps of the non-conference schedule games with power teams, I don't know... I don't quite see how that serves the student body.
#3: BUFFALO BULLS (30-89, .252 winning percentage) - Another MAC team, already. The funniest thing to me is that the Buffalo University moniker is Bulls, instead of Bills, and both teams are terrible. Somewhere in upstate New York, there are men who torture themselves by tailgating all day Saturday, drinking themselves to a violent stupor, and watching the Buffalo Bulls suck it up on the field, and then repeat the process on Sunday for the Bills. Upstate New York is a strange and terrible place. I have been there, and drank amongst them, and written cell phone numbers of fellow wayward travellers on the back of missing prostitute flyers outside of bus stations in a number of towns up there. In fact, Jerry Jukebox, I know you probably don't have internet access, nor would even know where to find this site if you did, but if you have somehow become internet savvy and google your street name, Raven Mack is still out there, bro. My post office box has changed from 569 to 270, but hit me up sometime. I still have the other half of that one thing. Hope you're good bro.
#4: ARMY BLACK KNIGHTS (31-88, .261 winning percentage) - The U.S. Army sucks. We are starting wars in Libya and Syria, to go along with Iraq and Afghanistan, with our internationalist creep into Africa just beginning, as Sudan and Somalia are right there for the fake terrorist threat taking as well. Did you know the alleged Libyan rebels are Al-Qaeda trained, and connected to both the CIA and MI6? Did you also know they are currently rounding up black people in Libya and putting them in internment camps? That's the rebels doing that, not Gaddhafi. Gaddhafi is actually a hero to the African people, and really to all of us, not the obscene terrorist he is made out to be. But how dare he want to use oil profits for anything other than corporate gain? That asshole!
#5: IDAHO VANDALS (32-88, .267 winning percentage) - Ahh, the meager Western Athletic Conference, home to a ragtag assortment of second-rate western state universities that apparently do not realize football is played with more than seven people at a time. Idaho has stormed out the gate with a loss last night to Bowling Green in a battle between lesser conference lesser teams, so it looks like more of the same in Idaho. As we start our parade through the WAC (four teams on this list of Division I's worst), it is mind-boggling that they could all be so terrible. Honestly though, I would rather a team called the Vandals be the good one from Idaho than the stupid Boise State Broncos.
#6: UTAH STATE AGGIES (31-85, .267 winning percentage) - The Aggies are another WAC bottom feeder, which I guess has so many bottom feeders they can't technically all be on the bottom. I have nothing negative to say about Utah State though, because that's where my boy Chris Cooley of the Washington Redskins came from. Simply because he is a straight shooting solid bro, I can only assume this is a straight shooting solid school. So they get a pass.
#7: VANDERBILT COMMODORES (33-85, .280 winning percentage) - Do Duke and Vanderbilt play every year, as the only school still trying to maintain academic integrity in a southern football conference? Because if not, they should. I guess you'd have to throw Northwestern into that mix as well. The funny thing is, when you figure in the fact that half of the SEC made up up this morning's best teams list, and you subtract the Commodores' conference record, they're probably an almost above-average football team. But the SEC is brutal. I have always been for a playoff system, and one that only allows no more than two teams from any one conference, because I think the great fallacy with the NCAA tournament in basketball is that the 5th or 6th best team in a major conference is somehow automatically more deserving than the best team in a shitty conference. But man, when you watch SEC games on TV week in and week out, that's a tough fucking row to hoe. LSU is a national title contender to start the season, and has 7 of their games against preseason Top 25 teams. Vanderbilt, without even looking at their schedule, I guarantee plays at least four. Good luck Vandy, I hope you ruin somebody's decade.
#8: UNLV REBELS (35-83, .297 winning percentage) - A Mountain West team, in case you are like me and still basically jumble all WAC and MWC teams into one clusterfuck. It's our east coast bias. I cannot imagine anyone being a successful blue-chipper at UNLV for football, as the school's only a short city bus ride from the Sunset Strip, and I would imagine all sorts of sketchy activities galore being it is Las Vegas. Actually, if you've ever wandered off the tourist track in Vegas, and ended up near UNLV, it makes the national powerhouse basketball years even more questionable, not in a bad way, because I don't mind sketchy. And there's something inherently perfect about weird old Jerry Tarkanian and his collection of thuggish but loveable misfit players being the best, and probably circumventing NCAA rules or having illegal organized crime fingerprints somewhere on the program. I'm not trying to be libelous here, I'm just saying... And it's fine, because if you have to dabble in the criminal arts, I'd want somebody like Tark at the helm. He looks like he knows how to navigate a multitude of personalities.
#9: NEW MEXICO STATE AGGIES (36-85, .298 winning percentage) - Back to the whack WAC attack, with a second team named Aggies. Being they are both on this list, I somehow do not imagine the New Mexico State Aggies/Utah State Aggies fall interstate fall showdown for some sort of trophy like a bronze donkey or hunk of urethaned rock from Bryce Canyon is all that an extravagant affair. Although one can never tell, as the combination of higher education and heavy alcohol consumption can often magically create parties out of nothing.
#10: SMU MUSTANGS (38-82, .317 winning percentage) - As Miami struggles to excuse itself from transgressions with a snitch Ponzi schemer, SMU is often brought up as the last and only time a football team has gotten the death penalty. They've never recovered from it, and that was twenty years ago, so it literally was a death penalty. Although for whatever reason, as the Big 12 contemplates replacements for Texas A&M, SMU's name keeps coming up, which makes no sense. You already have a shitty B-level Texas school in Baylor; why would you add a second one?
#11: TEMPLE OWLS (38-80, .322 winning percentage) - Ahh, Temple, Division I's notoriously worst team for years, until Al Golden resurrected them from the dead. This is a Temple team that was bad the Big East said, "Yo, sorry bro, but you gotta go because you're fucking up everybody else's good time," and was relegated to the Mid-American Conference. But they've partially turned it around. I mean, they're not tearing anything up and having massive celebrations in the streets of Philly or anything, but they've had two winning seasons in a row, which is a big jump from just a few years back, where they had a 4-42 record over the course of four seasons.
#12: BAYLOR BEARS (39-79, .331 winning percentage) - Refer to #10 for more on Baylor. Anybody good in west Texas is still going to get pilfered by the Big 12 heavyweights like Texas and Oklahoma, and whatever crumbs fall through the cracks are going to be gobbled up by A&M and now even TCU. Baylor will always be fucked, and it serves them right for letting the feds torch all those innocent kids and women out at the Branch Davidian compound.
#13: SAN JOSE STATE SPARTANS (40-80, .333 winning percentage) - One final WAC team for you, and one that I did not even know existed. I'm not sure I've ever seen this team play before, but most of my college football awareness is from reading newspaper agate like an obsessed idiot savant on Sunday morning's when I was a preteen. Maybe this is a new school, created out of nowhere to serve a growing California population, and to further capitalize on the always booming industry of higher education, which is a money-grabbing scam like all other major industries you are made to believe you cannot live without.
#14: FLORIDA ATLANTIC OWLS (24-48, .333 winning percentage) - Florida Atlantic has only existed for the ten years that compile this record, and only the last six have been at the Division I level. You know, in the lower division lists which will go up beginning of next week, or maybe some tomorrow if I think about it, I made the cut off for eligibility be seven years. I must've had lesser standards when I made this one, because the Owls have only been in the Sun Belt for six. I guess Division I has lesser standards too though, if there is a Florida Atlantic/Florida International game most likely trying to include itself in rivalry week at the end of November.
#1: DUKE BLUE DEVILS (22-95, .188 winning percentage) - I was surprised to see Duke was the worst team in all the land over the past decade. I mean, I knew they were terrible. Steve Spurrier launched his coaching career pretty much by magically helping Duke win 5 games in a couple seasons in a row, which was considered amazing coaching upness at the time. Living in ACC country, near UVA, I understand that Duke is a special breed of lower echelon team, that when your own team start running neck and neck with the football Blue Devils, it's a major red flag that your program needs an adrenalin shot to get off of the life support its on that you may have let your guard down and not realized. Usually, there's one ACC coach fired every two years simply for the fact his team is not clearly better than Duke. Seriously. But I did not know they were the worst in the country, even more terrible than Sun Belt bottom feeders. It sort of shows you why Coach K is a worshipped false god at that little bastard university in Durham, and why he can do no wrong, even though the rest of us see him as the snake-souled weasel he truly is. But at Duke, they have nothing else athletically to feel anything unshameful about.
#2: EASTERN MICHIGAN EAGLES (26-91, .222 winning percentage) - The Mid-American Conference is a ragtag collection of directional state universities that tend to do battle on ESPN2 on mid-week showcases during the season. Even though it's one of the lower rated DI conferences, you still for whatever reason see a lot of their games on cable TV. Probably because it's like a Big Ten B-league, to sort of whet your appetite for the big boys on Saturdays. Midwestern people are weird. They play cornhole instead of horseshoes, and the land is flat and forever so that there's no hollers or hills to hide in, which instills in midwesterners a long, slow personality. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, it's just very alien to me, and I tend to want to fight people when I'm out there, because it's just weird. Then when I am riding home on the Greyhound after some small town has bought me a one-way bus ticket back to Virginia along with a threat to be arrested if I ever show my face in town limits again, I cross from Ohio into West Virginia and the land start to heave like a woman's breasts and I can let my breath out because I realize I am home, where people are like me, and I can be myself, and a bunch of ignorant assholes in cowboy boots won't try to force me to live within their socially confining norms.
*: WESTERN KENTUCKY HILLTOPPERS (11-37, .230 winning percentage) - The Hilltoppers didn't qualify to be an actual member of this Shit List because they've only been in DI for four years, after being a pretty successful Division IAA member for a long time. You subtract their initial 7-5 outing at this level, and their cumulative record is that much more embarrassing, with only four wins the past three years. And oddly enough, they are jumping into the Sun Belt Conference rather than the more appropriate Mid-American Conference, although if I were from Kentucky, I too would associate myself with the south and not the midwest. But the jump by a team like this that was good at one level to a higher level to not be good, but cash those whore-ish "come lose at our stadium" fill-in-the-gaps of the non-conference schedule games with power teams, I don't know... I don't quite see how that serves the student body.
#3: BUFFALO BULLS (30-89, .252 winning percentage) - Another MAC team, already. The funniest thing to me is that the Buffalo University moniker is Bulls, instead of Bills, and both teams are terrible. Somewhere in upstate New York, there are men who torture themselves by tailgating all day Saturday, drinking themselves to a violent stupor, and watching the Buffalo Bulls suck it up on the field, and then repeat the process on Sunday for the Bills. Upstate New York is a strange and terrible place. I have been there, and drank amongst them, and written cell phone numbers of fellow wayward travellers on the back of missing prostitute flyers outside of bus stations in a number of towns up there. In fact, Jerry Jukebox, I know you probably don't have internet access, nor would even know where to find this site if you did, but if you have somehow become internet savvy and google your street name, Raven Mack is still out there, bro. My post office box has changed from 569 to 270, but hit me up sometime. I still have the other half of that one thing. Hope you're good bro.
#4: ARMY BLACK KNIGHTS (31-88, .261 winning percentage) - The U.S. Army sucks. We are starting wars in Libya and Syria, to go along with Iraq and Afghanistan, with our internationalist creep into Africa just beginning, as Sudan and Somalia are right there for the fake terrorist threat taking as well. Did you know the alleged Libyan rebels are Al-Qaeda trained, and connected to both the CIA and MI6? Did you also know they are currently rounding up black people in Libya and putting them in internment camps? That's the rebels doing that, not Gaddhafi. Gaddhafi is actually a hero to the African people, and really to all of us, not the obscene terrorist he is made out to be. But how dare he want to use oil profits for anything other than corporate gain? That asshole!
#5: IDAHO VANDALS (32-88, .267 winning percentage) - Ahh, the meager Western Athletic Conference, home to a ragtag assortment of second-rate western state universities that apparently do not realize football is played with more than seven people at a time. Idaho has stormed out the gate with a loss last night to Bowling Green in a battle between lesser conference lesser teams, so it looks like more of the same in Idaho. As we start our parade through the WAC (four teams on this list of Division I's worst), it is mind-boggling that they could all be so terrible. Honestly though, I would rather a team called the Vandals be the good one from Idaho than the stupid Boise State Broncos.
#6: UTAH STATE AGGIES (31-85, .267 winning percentage) - The Aggies are another WAC bottom feeder, which I guess has so many bottom feeders they can't technically all be on the bottom. I have nothing negative to say about Utah State though, because that's where my boy Chris Cooley of the Washington Redskins came from. Simply because he is a straight shooting solid bro, I can only assume this is a straight shooting solid school. So they get a pass.
#7: VANDERBILT COMMODORES (33-85, .280 winning percentage) - Do Duke and Vanderbilt play every year, as the only school still trying to maintain academic integrity in a southern football conference? Because if not, they should. I guess you'd have to throw Northwestern into that mix as well. The funny thing is, when you figure in the fact that half of the SEC made up up this morning's best teams list, and you subtract the Commodores' conference record, they're probably an almost above-average football team. But the SEC is brutal. I have always been for a playoff system, and one that only allows no more than two teams from any one conference, because I think the great fallacy with the NCAA tournament in basketball is that the 5th or 6th best team in a major conference is somehow automatically more deserving than the best team in a shitty conference. But man, when you watch SEC games on TV week in and week out, that's a tough fucking row to hoe. LSU is a national title contender to start the season, and has 7 of their games against preseason Top 25 teams. Vanderbilt, without even looking at their schedule, I guarantee plays at least four. Good luck Vandy, I hope you ruin somebody's decade.
#8: UNLV REBELS (35-83, .297 winning percentage) - A Mountain West team, in case you are like me and still basically jumble all WAC and MWC teams into one clusterfuck. It's our east coast bias. I cannot imagine anyone being a successful blue-chipper at UNLV for football, as the school's only a short city bus ride from the Sunset Strip, and I would imagine all sorts of sketchy activities galore being it is Las Vegas. Actually, if you've ever wandered off the tourist track in Vegas, and ended up near UNLV, it makes the national powerhouse basketball years even more questionable, not in a bad way, because I don't mind sketchy. And there's something inherently perfect about weird old Jerry Tarkanian and his collection of thuggish but loveable misfit players being the best, and probably circumventing NCAA rules or having illegal organized crime fingerprints somewhere on the program. I'm not trying to be libelous here, I'm just saying... And it's fine, because if you have to dabble in the criminal arts, I'd want somebody like Tark at the helm. He looks like he knows how to navigate a multitude of personalities.
#9: NEW MEXICO STATE AGGIES (36-85, .298 winning percentage) - Back to the whack WAC attack, with a second team named Aggies. Being they are both on this list, I somehow do not imagine the New Mexico State Aggies/Utah State Aggies fall interstate fall showdown for some sort of trophy like a bronze donkey or hunk of urethaned rock from Bryce Canyon is all that an extravagant affair. Although one can never tell, as the combination of higher education and heavy alcohol consumption can often magically create parties out of nothing.
#10: SMU MUSTANGS (38-82, .317 winning percentage) - As Miami struggles to excuse itself from transgressions with a snitch Ponzi schemer, SMU is often brought up as the last and only time a football team has gotten the death penalty. They've never recovered from it, and that was twenty years ago, so it literally was a death penalty. Although for whatever reason, as the Big 12 contemplates replacements for Texas A&M, SMU's name keeps coming up, which makes no sense. You already have a shitty B-level Texas school in Baylor; why would you add a second one?
#11: TEMPLE OWLS (38-80, .322 winning percentage) - Ahh, Temple, Division I's notoriously worst team for years, until Al Golden resurrected them from the dead. This is a Temple team that was bad the Big East said, "Yo, sorry bro, but you gotta go because you're fucking up everybody else's good time," and was relegated to the Mid-American Conference. But they've partially turned it around. I mean, they're not tearing anything up and having massive celebrations in the streets of Philly or anything, but they've had two winning seasons in a row, which is a big jump from just a few years back, where they had a 4-42 record over the course of four seasons.
#12: BAYLOR BEARS (39-79, .331 winning percentage) - Refer to #10 for more on Baylor. Anybody good in west Texas is still going to get pilfered by the Big 12 heavyweights like Texas and Oklahoma, and whatever crumbs fall through the cracks are going to be gobbled up by A&M and now even TCU. Baylor will always be fucked, and it serves them right for letting the feds torch all those innocent kids and women out at the Branch Davidian compound.
#13: SAN JOSE STATE SPARTANS (40-80, .333 winning percentage) - One final WAC team for you, and one that I did not even know existed. I'm not sure I've ever seen this team play before, but most of my college football awareness is from reading newspaper agate like an obsessed idiot savant on Sunday morning's when I was a preteen. Maybe this is a new school, created out of nowhere to serve a growing California population, and to further capitalize on the always booming industry of higher education, which is a money-grabbing scam like all other major industries you are made to believe you cannot live without.
#14: FLORIDA ATLANTIC OWLS (24-48, .333 winning percentage) - Florida Atlantic has only existed for the ten years that compile this record, and only the last six have been at the Division I level. You know, in the lower division lists which will go up beginning of next week, or maybe some tomorrow if I think about it, I made the cut off for eligibility be seven years. I must've had lesser standards when I made this one, because the Owls have only been in the Sun Belt for six. I guess Division I has lesser standards too though, if there is a Florida Atlantic/Florida International game most likely trying to include itself in rivalry week at the end of November.
