Brent “Swingin’” Schaeffer, the transfer Ole Miss is counting on to show up and give them something resembling an offense this year, has still not completed his required coursework for the impending move to Oxford. Schaeffer only needs six hours of correspondence classes to complete his prereqs and should be in Oxford by the beginning of summer, according to his spokesperson/mother.

On a tangentially related note…reading back into the incident reports for both Schaeffer’s arrest and the Avery Atkins’ incident, this occurred to us: cell phones and text messaging have given the crisis management-impaired more fodder for wildly disproportionate responses to potential threats to their status. (Schaeffer’s case involved an argument over a cell phone, Atkins’ a text message that may or may not have been sent from his phone to another woman.)

For example, a normal person might have handled themselves thusly in the Brent Schaeffer situation:

Brent’s girl: Sir, I think that’s my cell phone.

Dude with phone: I don’t think so, ma’am. I bought it last week.

Brent’s girl: I think you’ve purchased stolen property then.

Dude with phone: Oh, my. Let’s call the proper authorities to clear this misunderstanding up.

Excellent crisis management! But let’s re-enact what likely happened here…

(The following is an EDSBS re-enactment. All participants are actors, and bad ones at that.)

Brent’s girl: I think that’s my phone, sir.

Dude: I don’t think so. I bought it last week.

Brent’s girl: Uh-huh. That’s my phone. Are you disrespecting me?

Dude: Wha–(Is brained by Brent Schaeffer before he can complete sentence and collapses bleeding to the floor.)

Not superb crisis management in that case. Since Myles Brand seeks to intervene in such vital areas as text messaging and offensive Indian mascots anyway, why has he neglected a crucial area as “Women and Digital Communication?” Important curriculum points would include:

–”Plausible Aliases: Never Break a Sweat While Never Breaking Cover”

–”Delete, delete, delete! The Beauty of An Empty Inbox.”

–”Case Study, Mike Vick: Hits and Misses from a Man With Two Cell Phones.”


Dos telephones por Senor Ron!