A Detroit Lions Executive Might Lose His House Because The High School Built A Blue Turf Football Field It Can't Afford

We told you last year about a Detroit-area high school that rubbed Boise State the wrong way after installing a $400,000 football field of blue artificial turf. Boise State said everything would be fine as long as they didn't refer to it as "blue turf."

Turns out Oxford High School can't actually afford the turf to begin with, though that didn't stop them from installing it. Having only raised a quarter of the money necessary to pay the installation off, the AstroTurf company is due to come calling and may repossess the homes of five community members who put their houses up as collateral for the loan. One of those community members? Detroit Lions Senior VP for Communications Bill Keenist (who also serves on the Oxford school board). From the Oakland Press:

If the money is not repaid by Sept. 1, five Oxford community members who put their houses up as collateral for the loan face foreclosure by AstroTurf LLC, the Georgia-based company that built and installed the state-of-the-art field, one of only three like it in the United States.

The community members put their homes up after the school district was unable to pass a bond issue for the improvement. They also don't appear to have considered the most obvious route of recouping the cost, sponsorship, until recently:

The turf committee has openly admitted that they might have to consider selling naming rights to the field as another means of helping repay the loan.

Yes, perhaps they should consider having a name on the field before allowing some generous people's homes to be foreclosed upon (as stupid as those people may be for signing their houses over for a loan to install fake blue grass). You really should read the whole story, because it's a classic example of people who get a pie-in-the-sky idea, are met with numerous legitimate reasons not to go forward with it, and yet do so anyway. Oxford has until Sept. 1 to come up with the $300,000.

[ MIPrepZone.com]