Clempsun’s “Eff You” To Sic Willie

You gotta hand it to Clempsun University … they flat out played us, people.

Turns out some higher-ups at the University – no doubt irritated by our repeated references to the school’s agrarian roots – didn’t take too kindly to the detailed information leaking out of their private Trustee meetings and onto the pages of FITSNews.

For example, we reported last Thursday that head football coach Tommy Bowden would be fired if the Farmer football team didn’t win the rest of its games this season (click here for that story).

And following Clempsun’s loss to Wake Forest Thursday evening, we wrote a Sunday piece in which our sources on the Board told us that Bowden could be canned as early as today (click here for that story).

So when we got the call this morning telling us that Bowden had, in fact, been fired … which it turns out was 100% accurate … we were eager to get confirmation from the school and be the first on the block to run with the story.

Well, as ESPN football analyst Lee Corso says “Not so fast …”

After contacting the school and being told that we would be receiving a call from a highly-placed official who could confirm Bowden’s firing, we actually got a call from someone confirming the exact opposite.

Tommy Bowden was staying, we were told, as the $4 million price tag associated with buying out his contract was just too much for the Trustees to bear.

Less than half an hour later, of course, the story broke that Bowden was gone … and accompanying that news we received a less-than-polite “F*ck You” message from this Tiger official, who seemed quite pleased to have cost us the story.

“WTF?” we texted back incredulously.

“Its C-L-E-M-S-O-N asshole,” was the response, a reference to our tongue-in-cheek misspelling of the University’s name.

Oh well … you win some, you lose some.

We had the story right from the beginning, and we’re big enough to get over not being the ones to break it to the world.

So … who was the Clempsun official who deliberately misled us – on taxpayer time, no less?

Well, their name is … actually, you know what? We’re bigger than that.

We protect our sources around here, even when they pull crap like this just to spite us.

Oh, and it’ll always be “C-L-E-M-P-S-U-N” in our book, and IPTAY will always stand for “I Pay Ten Athletes Yearly.”

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