If it’s not over until the fat lady sings, Craig James better stuff a rib eye in Adele’s mouth. The Texas Republican primary is being held tonight for the Senate seat that the former ESPN blowhard has so righteously coveted, and to put it as nicely as possible – he doesn’t stand a f*cking chance. According to the latest public poll, the frontrunner for Kay Bailey Hutchison’s seat is David Dewhurst with 46% of the vote.

James? He’s got just a little catching up to do.

In all fairness to James, what nobody has really talked about during this specific Senate campaign is that his opponents have spent more than $25 million, more than any candidates for any U.S. Senate seat this election. Dewhurst, the lieutenant governor of Texas, has spent a considerable amount of his own money, while Ted Cruz has substantial backing from the Tea Party.

James, on the other hand, is liked by nobody, so he doesn’t have any money. After tonight he won’t have a job, either, which means that somewhere Mike Leach is just laughing and laughing.

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If you’re not familiar with the story of U.S. Senate candidate Craig James, it really is quite a tale of scandal, intrigue and unbridled arrogance. Just to catch you up to speed with a dummy’s version – James was a talented running back and attended Southern Methodist University in the heyday of the program’s paid player scandal, and his NFL claim to fame was being ousted by Peyton Hillis as the last white running back to rush for 1,000 yards in one season.

After his short NFL career ended in 1988, James spent the next 20 years as a college football analyst, bouncing around networks, but always having a connection to ESPN, where he would eventually end up. In fact, he thinks so highly of his broadcasting skills that he founded the Craig James School of Broadcasting. And apparently the first lesson you can learn there is how to coddle your underperforming son and use your TV power as leverage in creating and promoting a scandal against a college football coach like Mike Leach.

In 2009, Leach allegedly forced Craig’s son, Adam, to sit in a dark electrical shed as punishment. Leach was eventually fired, and Adam later admitted that he was never forced to sit in a dark shed, was actually told not to sit in that shed, but he did so anyway because he thought it was “funny.” Alas, that is not a story that Craig will ever tell, because he stands by his version and believes that recaps like mine are pure propaganda in a vast conspiracy against his good name.

Or so he basically said in a recent interview (with his daughter) about his current 2012 U.S. Senate campaign, in which he is polling a whopping 4% among voters. Because if you want people to like you, go back to the ground zero of why people hate you.

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