… just incredibly busy and preoccupied with real life.

But I am not too busy or preoccupied to like UConn +3 and Oregon State +13 today.

I might also like Texas -31 to run up the score on Rice. Maybe.

No maybe about Virginia Tech +1.5 on Monday, but that is AGES away.

Hopefully I will get back to blogging regularly again soon.

…but this is pretty darn funny.

Texas losing the game and finishing #2 sits very well with me. I’ve heard a lot of comments from Texas fans about how it doesn’t really matter, but it does.

On a superficial level, finishing #2 tells me that the voters saw the exact same game that longhorn fans saw and discounted the result (and the score, you little rat bastard) because of Colt’s injury.

On a more substantive level, where you finish the previous year has a lot to do with where you start the next, and correspondingly where you stay during the year if you take care of business. TCU fans can probably tell you a lot about that.

I almost wrote a ridiculously long comment to Fro’s post and then decided that was stupid since I could just write a long post in response.

Tuberville is going to turn Tech into Aggie Lite. They’ll pass a little bit and play great defense, but they won’t be constantly talked about on TV and they’ll probably muddle along in the middle of the pack for a while. I do think he is a good hire – he’s one of the best available coaches out there – and, ironically, Tech can thank Leach for bringing them to enough prominence that Tuberville would want the job and no one in the media is asking, “why would he go there?”

FWIW – Leach got railroaded because the administration was looking for an excuse and Adam James was handy. Anyone who says that he got fired for “punishing a kid for getting hurt” is a moron and is wrong on two counts:

1.) Leach was punishing the kid because the kid was a smug turd and as coach Leach had grown tired of his attitude and didn’t want him to be around practice if he didn’t have to be. Coaches do that all the time and, frankly, its their prerogative as the authority figure. Adam James wasn’t harmed by it, so the only real argument is the “humiliation” angle, which is BS because humiliation is a major part of group dynamics and leadership. The point of leading a team is that the members of the team need to be taught that the team is more important than the individual. How better to encourage the individual to be subservient to the team? Punish him for being too much of a individual. If you don’t want to be humiliated, be a team player and follow the rules and give your best effort or don’t play at all. I am fairly certain that Craig James, even as the stud running back back in the day, was occasionally punished or humiliated by his coaches in much the same way, and I’m fairly certain that if you got Craig James drunk (ie not being sanctimoniously phony on TV) he would still profess his love for his coaches at Stratford and SMU as “molders of men” or somesuch nonesense.

The moral of the story is that Leach called Craig James a “little league dad” – anyone reading this blog knows what that means – and Craig James abused his position at ESPN to get back at Leach and get him fired, which leads to the next point.

2.) Leach was fired because the administration was tired of HIS attitude. Just as Leach had the right to banish Adam James from the practice field, the administration was within its rights to fire the coach for insubordination to the leadership of the university, including the very public contract negotiations last year, but also including lots of other stuff behind the scenes, apparently. It was a clash of egos, but since Leach was the best coach they’ve ever had and very popular with the fans, the administration needed an excuse beyond not being able to get along with him.

Leach will go be a coordinator somewhere and put up big numbers and then will land as head coach at some middle of the road Pac 10 or ACC school and do for them what he did for Tech. Maybe not consistently chasing the MNC, but better than they used to be and popular with the media.

I also agree that the NCAA shitstorm is about to rain down on USC and California Pete jumped ship like the rat that he is.

As far as last Thursday:

No one can dispositively say that Texas would have won with Colt and anyone who does say it is wearing orange glasses. That said, the Bama fans who make the opposite claim – and there are quite a few – that whether or not the winningest college quarterback of all time played was irrelevant because the result would have been the same, are also in fantasyland.

It was pretty clear that Texas’s game plan, consistent with Muschamp’s stated defensive philosophy, was to let those running backs get all the yards they wanted and dare McElroy to keep up, which, based on the fact that he was sacked almost every time he dropped back to pass, seems a pretty valid idea to try.

Casting aside the fluke pick 6 and little Nicky running up the score at the end (when the result was already decided) to ease the redass of the freshman QB almost coming all the way back, the Bama offense managed 17 points all night in what was basically their perfect game. McElroy didn’t have to win it, but he couldn’t have if Colt had been healthy and Texas’s entire team hadn’t staggered around depressed for the last 25 minutes of the first half.

Then, once Gilbert got going and the team got some pep back on both sides of the ball, they started to come back and all of those people who say that Bama was just trying to be conservative in the 3rd quarter are fooling themselves. They went 3 and out three times in a row in the 3rd quarter, plus another 5 and out drive, and there was no way that McElroy could have “opened up” the offense even if they had wanted to. No way.

So yeah, Texas was ripped off. No asterisk or anything like that, injuries are part of the game and you can’t win them all, etc etc, but Colt getting hurt was definitely the best thing that could have happened to Bama and there’s no denying that by any objective standard.

As we have seen from the SEC and its fans, however, objectivity is sorely lacking. But to the victors go the spoils and Bama fans (not so much the sycophant SEC guys…) have earned the right to be loud and boisterous and point to a crystal football. There’s not much more to it than that.

The big silver lining for me is that now Garrett Gilbert has a more intense big game experience than any other starting QB in the country next year save Greg McElroy, who sucks, and those trips to Dallas and Lincoln and Lubbock won’t be nearly as scary for him as they would be otherwise. He is going to a be very good and I feel better about the Longhorns next year already. Awful for Colt, but better for next year’s Longhorns.

Speaking of next year… I’ll just write a new post.

When I originally linked to the story about the Yates basketball game, it was meant as an offhanded attempt at humor and I didn’t think much about it except in the sense of, “that sure is a lot of points!” Nonetheless, the story itself has unleashed a shitstorm in other quarters around Houston over Yates’s perceived poor sportsmanship, an argument which, now that I’ve learned some of the details of the game, I think I’m a bit sympathetic to.

I mean, details like 5 Yates players accounting for 138 points, 100-12 at halftime and the starters playing in the 3rd quarter, pressing and running when they were up by more than a 100, make me think that perhaps they were a bit out of line. It’s one thing to be really good, it’s another to beat an undermatched opponent senseless.

Some more thoughts (the comments sections are particularly illuminating, I think):

Yates takes heat after walloping Lee 170-35 (KHOU)

HISD Hoops Classic: A-Hole Coach 170, Lee High School 35 (Houston Press)

170 points in a game: record-breaking sportsmanship (Dallas Morning News)

Yates Lions, great team or playground bully? (FS Houston)

Rout in high school boys hoops game in Texas sparks controversy (USA Today)

In addition to all of these type stories, Charlie Pallilo was as argumentative and dismissive of callers as I have ever heard him yesterday in his criticism of Yates. Most of the callers were as dumbheaded and macho as some of the comments in the links above.

I’d post an audio clip if I could figure out how, but the whole show is podcasted each day and you can just go find it yourself if you are so inclined. I am particularly fond of the call with “Mouton” that starts around 28 minutes into the first hour (wherein Charlie’s credibility is challenged because he wasn’t a high school hoops star himself), but the game was apparently discussed for the whole show and I’m sure it was entertaining the whole time.

Good thing none of you regular readers care about your alma mater much anymore.