I know I said yesterday that I would be back with an installment of The 'Dawgs of Spring, our continuing look at the players to watch during spring practice. But sometimes life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. If you have email, and you are a college football fan, there's at least a 60% chance that someone has emailed you this picture from the blog brahsome.com. That is Clemson football commit Kenneth Page of Columbia riding along a rural road holding a plastic bag of what appear to be $20 bills wrapped in purple straps while wearing an orange polo shirt. My recollection from the summer in college when I worked as a bank teller is that purple straps equal one thousand twenty dollar bills. One thousand portraits of Andrew Jackson equals twenty thousand dollars, which might be just enough to sway the Signing Day decision of a four star offensive lineman (like, Kenneth Page for example).
I've thought of approximately 317 explanations for this photo, which seems to have appeared on Page's MySpace page (the kitten with a kalashnikov is a nice touch) for about a nanosecond before getting taken down. 314 of them are bad, bad, bad, both for Page and Tommy Bowden. The other three? I'm so glad you asked. Perhaps a) Page is an exceptionally successful amatuer treasure hunter in the Nicholas Cage/National Treasure mold, or b) perhaps he's D.B. Cooper's long-lost grandson, or c) perhaps he invested the earnings from his Christmas employment at The Gap in oil futures and sold at the top of the curve. Other than that? Bad, bad, bad.
I can't help but recall how astonished many of us were the past couple of years with some of Clemson's late season recruiting grabs. I'm not saying there's a correlation with this picture. I'm just saying that this picture is sure to have Mr. Page sitting in a chair with a tape recorder in front of it talking to a nice man from the NCAA. It also by the way should get his MENSA application shuttled to the bottom of the stack for the next twelve to fifteen years.
Something tells me we'll hear a lot more about this picture before all is said and done. I'm glad A.J. Harmon was not in the backseat with him, and I'm double-glad I'm not a Clemson football fan right now (or ever, really). 'Cause somebody's got some explaining to do. I understand that ACC/SEC football is a game that sometimes has a shady underbelly, and that's been the case for a long time. But this is truly beyond belief.