Some high school seniors in HIlliard, Ohio pulled off a new rendition of an old trick at their school’s football game.  In a nutshell they tricked fans of their rival school’s team into holding up black and white plackards in three sections of the stadium that spelled "We Suck" instead of the promised "Go Darby" (see video below). A similar trick was pulled on a much larger scale, and stage, at the 1961 Rose Bowl and in 2004 at the Yale-Harvard game.

The kids who planned this little senior prank said they expected punishment, but they got more than they bargained for.  Three days of in school suspension and a ban from all school activities for the remainder of the fall semester.  I buy the three days of ISS but banning them for the rest of the fall?  This is one of those pranks that should be held up as the right way to carry on a long-standing tradition of senior prankage.  No one got hurt, no animals were treated cruelly or unusually, and they didn’t damage any property so why the extreme punishment measures?

By comparison let me share some high school pranks from my day:

• My freshman year the seniors planted a tree on the fifty yard line of our arch rival’s field the night before the big game.
• That same year another school painted our school’s press box.  This was considered a particularly big deal since every summer the rising seniors painted the press box themselves.
• If I remember correctly my brother’s freshman year was punctuated by the hanging of an animal, I believe a goat, from the school’s flag pole.

Property damage and animal cruelty were features of these pranks.  By comparison the kids in Ohio pulled off a prank that was benign and actually required a lot of thinking.  I expect they’ll go on to achieve greater things than any of their school’s butt-puckered administrators have.