On a dark and stormy night, I can conjure up Macbeth’s creepy crones clustered around a gurgling, crackling cauldron marked “Kansas University Athletics.” They’re going through the “Double, double toil and trouble” routine, tossing in the “Eye of a newt, and toe of a frog/Wool of bat, and tongue of dog.”

One of these “secret, black and midnight hags” wears a tattered tunic with an NCAA logo; the others display anti-Jayhawk mascots and monikers. No mystery about their intentions. If it walks like a Jayhawk, kaws like a Jayhawk, it’s to be hexed as such.

The scene is not encouraging to a KU follower wondering what the 2006-07 school year may produce, starting with the Kansas-NCAA face-off in August regarding real or imagined indiscretions the program committed.

Again, I’m guessing KU has done enough repair work that no major penalties are coming. But that “eye of a newt” element, “lack of institutional control,” looms as a troublesome “toe of a frog.” How much of that is new; can the Kansas officials convince the collegiate conquistadors it is remedied?

Then along with the problems of NCAA inquisition come the ordinary but mandatory aspects of producing teams that win key games, bring in the money it takes to keep doing so and regenerate a Kansas Nation spirit that now falls short of what dedicated loyalists would prefer.

The football team had a huge positive impact with its 7-5 mark and bowl victory. When Mark Mangino’s charges realistically can think about beating every Big 12 North opponent this fall, you know the batteries are charged. Sad thing is, the basketball team’s floppola via the Bradley Bungle let countless cubic feet of jubilant gas escape from the bag. The Jayhawk Nation is still grieving and grumbling over that.

Kansas basketball, with two 2006 league titles on the ledger, can be even better the coming season – if two of the new kids are as good as they’re supposed to be, if Brandon Rush more consistently does what he was recruited for and Russell Robinson, Mario Chalmers and compadres get even better. But there’s still a depressing climate of letdown that many haven’t been able to shake. You can feel it.

Baseball’s promising, softball, too, and there are other KU sports aspects that are alluring, even though track will never come close to the glitter and glamour it once had.

Those three harpies around the KU kettle represent opponents like Missouri and Kansas State, who will toss every distraction and dissonant element they can into the brew. So Kansas not only has the NCAA to deal with, but faces heavy static from formidable opponents in the year ahead. Throw in that scads of good people still are not sold on athletics’ point-happy money-raising schemes, and choose not to contribute for other programs as well. That’s more “wool of bat” and “tongue of dog” the crones have contributed and which must be countered.

With luck, Kansas athletics could have a 2006-07 year that will decimate the Macbeth Syndrome and leave everybody gurgling jubilantly. Let’s just hope we don’t wind up with a grieving KU fandom conversing with a Yorick-facsimile skull and uttering: “Alas, poor Jayhawk! I knew him : a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times : “

Wouldn’t cauldron contributors like Wildcats and Tigers love that epitaph?