The monkey\u2019s paw is the archetype. You make a wish, and it get interpreted in the most literal and damaging way possible. Wish for your loved one\u2019s suffering to end, and they die. Wish for vast wealth, and find yourself a drug lord with the DEA on your back. Wish for something you want, and get it in a way that makes everything worse.\u00a0You\u2019re not even supposed to tell your wish when you blow out the birthday cake candles, because then it won\u2019t come true.\u00a0All the stories work out like this. The Sorcerer\u2019s Apprentice. King Midas. Making a wish only gets you misery, so be content with what you have and accept your lot in life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Down South, they are pushing ahead with football for all they\u2019re worth. A thousand C-19 cases at the University of Alabama, sixteen just among the Auburn football players<\/em>, or even the plethora of issues at Vanderbilt – none of it is enough to make people say \u201chey let\u2019s call this off,\u201d even after the Big 10 [sic] and Pac-12 already have, along with just about everyone below FBS level (including the MEAC, the Ivy League and more). At some level, there is some kind of primal need driving the SEC and its cousins in the ACC and the Big [sic] 12 [sic], and if I had to narrow it down, I would attribute it to a line that literally came to me in a dream:<\/p>\n Football is huge down South because it\u2019s the most violent thing to which the Scotch-Irish can legally affiliate themselves as tribes.<\/em><\/p>\n And this is where you have the problem Vanderbilt football cannot escape. Only private school out of 14 in the SEC (which in retrospect never should have grown beyond 10 once Tech and Tulane decamped). Does not have the same sidewalk fan culture as any of the other 13. Plays in a metro area where there are actual major league professional teams competing for the dollars less than five miles away. Overshadowed by other teams in the same school in a way unlike any other SEC team bar Kentucky. Vanderbilt football\u2019s fans are few but mighty, but it\u2019s still not on a scale with even the Kentucky or Mississippi school football fandoms. And as a result, Vanderbilt doesn\u2019t generate the kind of income necessary to punch at equal weight with those programs. And as a result of that<\/em>, Vanderbilt doesn\u2019t have the kind of success on the field that would change minds about what Vanderbilt football is.<\/p>\n