Craig James Concedes Election, Returns To Real Street

Back in December, I said Craig James had no chance of winning the Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas. I based my assessment solely on the timing of his entry into the race; three other men had been campaigning for the seat for the better part of a year. I thought James would get at most 10 percent even if he ran a good race.

But I had no idea just how spectacularly awful his candidacy would be. Remarkably, when voters did get to know him, they found out that they hated him. Public Policy Polling memorandums noted that “As Craig James has become better known, he’s just gotten more and more unpopular,“ and ”The only real chance Democrats have at winning this race is if the unpopular James somehow won the nomination.” The head of elections coverage at Daily Kos told me that he had never seen a candidate as hated as James. So nobody was surprised when James couldn’t even crack four percent in the May 29 primary.

If James had put more effort into the race, he might have done better, but his entire campaign seemed thrown together and half-assed. James most likely made the hasty decision to enter the race because, as was reported by Sports by Brooks, ESPN was not going to renew his contract. James had already hinted that he wanted to pursue a political career when his broadcast career was over, and getting dumped by ESPN wouldn’t look good on his CV. So he pulled a “you can’t fire me, I quit!” routine.

James probably knew that he could not win the race when he entered it. Assuming Brooks’s report is correct, ESPN told James that they would not renew his contract in 2011, and a quixotic Senate run must have appeared the best way to save face. And James appeared to spend as much effort running for Senate as he did trying to learn about advancements in college football offenses. For example, the only ESPN/football personalities to donate money to him were Mike Patrick, Jenn Brown, Eric Dickerson and Butch Davis. Why wouldn’t James press his connections in the broadcasting and football worlds further if he were giving more than a desultory effort?

And that’s it, the rest is just him talking in platitudes. The entire ad is just Craig James lecturing and not listening.

Former SMU Mustangs star and ESPN personality Craig James received only 4 percent of the vote in Tuesday night’s U.S. Senate Republican primary in Texas, finishing no better than third in any county in the entire state. His showing was especially bad in Lubbock, which was home to Mike Leach until James hired a PR firm to get the popular and successful coach fired.

Still, James says he’ll keep on doing what he’s doing:

Craig James, former ESPN personality, saw his fledgling political career falter on Tuesday, conceding in the Texas Senate race late in the day. He gained just four percent of the vote among the nine Republican candidates looking to replace the outgoing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. That was good for a fourth-place finish.

There will be a runoff between Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and former Solicitor General Ted Cruz on July 31. There is no word yet on whom or if James will announce his support for in the second round of voting.

Did Craig James actually only murder plus or minus 4.5 hookers while at SMU? Either way, you could say the former broadcaster and ongoing liar’s U.S. Senate campaign is about to be locked in an electrical closet and set to receive the death penalty.

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Wayne Slater catches Senate longshot Craig James trying to reconstruct the timeline of just when it was that PR firm was hired to get Mike Leach fired:

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Not only will U.S. Senate hopeful Craig James get trounced in the Republican primary vote -- he trails by 31 percentage points -- he also inspired this sentence:

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Is former football player and whooper Craig James actually ignorant about how people become who they are, or is he trying to take advantage of ignorance for the sake of lowering his impressive disapproval rating a tad?

Doesn’t really matter, though the latter’s probably worse. It doubly doesn’t matter what he thinks, as he’ll never be elected to do anything in the state of Texas after robbing a popular Texas coach of a job, starring for a Texas program just before it was nuked by the NCAA, and ruining many a Thursday night Big 12 game between Oklahoma State and whoever.

Craig James’ Senate campaign in Texas has a pair of big, Texas-centric scandals to overcome, leaving the former SMU star looking for a little help wherever he can find it:

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Don’t tell anybody I said this, but it sounds like Craig James was actually better off in the broadcast booth, where at least people knew who he was [emphasis added].

↵↵ht Blutarsky

Oh wait, what were you thinking of? Just this little old thing:

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ESPN’s Craig James is running for U.S. Senate, and thus has to start talking like a U.S. Senator. This is going to be pretty fun:

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You’ll note ESPN’s coverage of the news includes references to both the Mike Leach incident and Sherwood Blount, a prime SMU booster during the scandal that led to the school suffering the death penalty. Might as well air it all out now.

Of most immediate relevance to sports fans, this means Tuesday night’s St. Petersburg Bowl will be called by a team not including James, who’d been scheduled to analyze the battle between FIU and Marshall. He was also supposed to be in the booth for two other bowl games this season.

Sounds like Craig James has nothing but blue skies and opportunity ahead of him, once he’s able to overcome the setback of being both invisible and divisive to his potential constituents. Once these hard-working Texans get a glimpse of one of their own, they’ll surely wrench him from ESPN’s football coverage and send him somewhere far, far away from sports broadcasts forever.

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