You don’t have to go to law school to know that Duke’s football team can legally be said to suck. But lawyers for the school, who did go to law school, proved just that in a recent court case.
 

The school faced a costly lawsuit after backing out of a contract to play a four-game series against the University of Louisville. The deal was that Duke would pay a fee of $150,000 per cancelled game if, and only if, Louisville couldn’t find a replacement team of “similar stature” to Duke.
 

As any football fan realizes, it shouldn’t be too hard to find such a school. It was just this point that the Duke lawyer brought up in the oral arguments. As printed in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, the 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. . .

Ouch. Duke fans know it’s true, but it still hurts to hear it.
 

To add insult to injury, the judge agreed with the indisputable suckiness, stating:

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.

Finally, Duke’s terrible, terrible record comes in handy.