Heisman promos have begun in earnest, with Memphis sending out souvenir Nascar cars for DeAngelo Williams and Minnesota pimping for Laurence Maroney and others. This flies in the face of recent findings by Clark Haptonstall, a doctoral candidate at Florida State University who studied the voting patterns and motivations of Heisman voters and found the impact of promotional campaigns amounted to the empirical equivalent of approximately jack shit. (Apologies: we checked FSU’s published dissertations, and Haptonstall’s study must be in the review process, as it’s not listed in the collection.) Memo to Heismanpundit: if you’d ever had a craving for a cushy job where you work nine months a year and command exorbitant consulting fees, your time is now, since this is proof you can evidently write a thesis on anything. Has anyone explored the underappreciated but textually-rich multiverse of video game studies? We think we’d be an ideal candidate for such badly need inquiry…

A simple child’s game? Or Sisyphus for the postmodern man? See, we could make that shit up all day.