Duke Has The Worst College Football Team In America, As A Matter Of Law

The University of Louisville recently sued Duke in Kentucky state court, alleging Duke breached a contract to play a four-game series against Louisville. Duke pointed to a provision in the contract that stated Duke it would be liable only if Louisville was unable to find a replacement opponent of “similar stature." Duke explained that, as a matter of law, its football team could not be any worse, so any replacement team would satisfy the terms of the agreement.

At oral argument, a Duke lawyer said:

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 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.

On summary judgment, the court agreed:

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. . . Duke won only one football game, and lost eleven, during the 2007 football season.

(HT: WSJ Law Blog.)