Are you ready for some football litigation?

Even though we're about as far as you can get from the start of NFL 2011, two items crossed my eyes today which kept the No Fun League top-of-mind for me, both in a weird sort of way.

First was hearing, on a local sports radio show, that the U.S. Supreme Court decided yesterday not to review, thus leaving undisturbed, the lower-court dismissal of a class action lawsuit brought by a New York Jets season ticket holder against the New England Patriots, and the Hoodie himself, for the 2007 "Spygate" incident where New England was caught videotaping Jets signals during their home opener, in an effort to steal signs and gain a competitive advantage. The league itself fined the Pats and its coach significant jack for the infraction, and stripped the team of a first-round draft pick the following year, but that wasn't enough for a certain litigious Jerseyite who sued for millions in class damages for rigging the outcome of games the ticketholders had paid for:

"We do not condone the conduct on the part of the Patriots and the team's head coach, and we likewise refrain from assessing whether the NFL's sanctions (and its alleged destruction of the videotapes themselves) were otherwise appropriate," Senior Judge Robert E. Cowen wrote for the three-judge panel that rejected the last appeal.

Mayer and his lawyer, Bruce Afran, both worked for consumer advocate Ralph Nader earlier in their careers and considered "Spygate" a consumer-fraud case.

Making the case close to home for me is this: Brucie (as we knew him) was a year behind me in high school, and he was our senior-year news editor on the school paper, ascending to editor-in-chief the year after we graduated. He wound up on the same path I did, but with the likes of Spoiler Ralphie in his path, I'm glad I wound up closer to a decent pursuit of justice than this case presented.

Not that the Supremes don't have better things to do. I read today about a case that they did accept for decision, which is right up there with last term's dreaded Citizens United ruling in its potential for handing our electoral system over to the über-rich lock, stock and bank account. It's reported here, and it's scaring the shit out of me. Follow the logic, if you dare: the state of Arizona, that bastion of liberal Democrats, enacted a public campaign financing law. In essence, it levels the playing field between rich candidates and not-so-rich ones, by enabling the latter to catch up with the unlimited coffers of richer opponents. When the (oh, let's face it, we know who they are) Republicans exceed a certain level of private fundraising, Arizona's matching funds kick in, funded entirely through voluntary contributions by voters on their tax returns, and enable the less-well-funded candidate to spend public funds to compete against the rich guy's private funds.

Got that? Note the uses of the words "voluntary" and "compete," real basic Founding Father-type values. Also note that Arizona voters, sick of scandal after scandal involving privately funded campaigns, enacted the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Act by popular referendum.  Ah, but teabaggers hate democracy when it actually works against their interests; their straight-faced argument to the high court, and I swear I am not making this up, is that "the public matches damage their First Amendment free speech rights by effectively forcing them to compete against the state for dollars once it starts doling out the matching funds to their opponents."

In other words, they don't want poorer people banding together voluntarily, raising so much money that it "chills" rich peoples' and corporations' First Amendment rights to outspend them.

Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with.... Eurasia.

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Sorry. This was supposed to be about football.

I had a client in today, who was interested in an apartment building that just went through foreclosure. Part of my research was finding the foreclosure notice for that piece of property, which is not the one I am about to talk about. Rather, my eye just happened to catch the names in the notice one column over in the Law Journal where these "tombstone ads" of foreclosure sales are suitably buried:



That is how properties are "marketed" for foreclosure sale in this state, in a sea of legalese. Making this one far more interesting, though, is who the defendant is, and why he's being foreclosed on.

The property owner is (or at least shares the fairly unique first and last name of) a longtime starting defensive back for the Buffalo Bills. He was a first-round draft pick out of The Ohio State University in 2006, and is one of the relatively few halfway-decent veteran players on our almost-defunct NFL franchise.  He also just finished the final year of his contract with Da Bills, and pretty much announced (through Twitter, as these things are now apparently done) that he was ending his contract-extension talks with the team in the middle of last season and would be testing the free-agent market for the über-millions typically offered by Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder to halfway-decent players after their draft-era contracts expire.

Just one problem. The league is in the middle of a major labor dispute, and teams are outright prohibited from signing other teams' free agents until a new agreement is either signed or imposed.  So apparently, old number 20 might be so short on cash right now that he couldn't pay the obligation resulting in this foreclosure. And it's not even his mortgage, but the monthly homeowners association fees for his near-the-stadium property.

I've heard stories about current NFL players trying to borrow major amounts of money- as in six-figure amounts- from fellow players because they saved none of their bling despite this strike/lockout/goat rodeo having been well publicized for months before the end of the prior bargaining agreement. This dude clearly was a few dollars (and, likely, it was only a relatively few) short of a full huddle when he got into THIS mess.