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WBT

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  1. 15 minutes ago, Bill Lumbergh said:
    26 minutes ago, Tex Long said:
    Speaking of USC, did Bru McCoy ever mention problems with coaching as one of his reasons for returning there/

    I don't think he did, but it hasn't escaped me that his position group is rumored to be the one with the most discontent among current players. Wouldn't be shocking if that was a part of it.

    Exactly, it's just assumed with meh

  2. 5 hours ago, aggie08 said:

    And, hey, if you really like Episode 4 but would prefer if they remade it with brighter colors, better effects, and used Ctrl+F to replace all instances of "Rebellion" with "Resistance" and "Empire" with "First Order", then TFA will fulfill your needs nicely.

    Also if you didn't like the happy ending and fulfilling character arc resolutions of Episode 6 it does a proper job of fucking them all up.

    • Like 1
  3. On 11/23/2019 at 9:30 PM, Caddox said:

    I still believe he was a good hire, in that the information available to the college football world pointed to the very reasonable possibility for big success. Here was the thinking as I understood it by the men that were arguably most responsible for hiring him (Mike Perrin and his support system of donors, many from Houston):

    1. He (in our eyes) successfully translated Urban Meyer's program to his first job at U of H. 

    2. Urban Meyer legitimately learned certain power spread concepts from Tom Herman, but more importantly Tom Herman learned Urban's whole philosophy and successfully forged the two together, resulting in national championship level success using two different QBs. 

    3. Tom Herman showed a deep understanding of the modern recruiting landscape, especially in the field of engaging 7 on 7 teams and creating unique and impressive environments for recruit visits but especially official visits. 

    4. Herman had clear and very positive ties to both the state and the school. 

    5. Herman communicated very specific program changes he felt were needed at Texas to interested alums while at U of H. He basically told us well before he got hired that we were wayyy behind in the facilities and infrastructure race. He had the same type of communication with U of H and Fertitta that was well received before he was hired there. By all accounts, Herman implemented the changes he suggested at U if H successfully. He backed his talk up when he told Fertitta they're wasting their time unless they do certain things. 

    6. The timing was very good for it all to come together. We had trouble hiring someone during the previous search and it was a rough spot to be in. As a result, we got bent over by Charlie fucking Strong on the contract. 

    7. D/FW donors weren't as influential during that period, as they were largely responsible for both the debacle with Mack at the end and the Steve Patterson. They basically had to sit that round out and just support the decision. Those two groups don't play that nice and the D/FW crowd had recently blown it big time in multiple ways. Fwiw, I don't really know where other areas of the state fall into this dynamic (I'm getting all of this from the houston side, and a tiny amount from the dallas side.) Also, I'm not saying D/FW folks didnt want Herman, a FW guy was super involved in the whole process. Just saying I think it's relevant that Houston was kind of on serve. 

    8. I've realized this is way too long and Im just trying to make myself feel better, and no one is going to read this. 

     

    It was pretty apparent at the time that this is how it went down and it raised huge red flags about our hiring process, especially #5 and #7.  We didn't conduct a search.  We didn't interview promising coaches that succeeded beyond what would be expected of them based on their program/conference.  Our Houston donors were sucked in by ego-stroking (your donations to fix facilities are all we need!) and the idea of access.  Herman's lobbying for the job while still employed at cougar high rubbed me the wrong way and should have been a red flag.

    • Like 1
  4. hat-2-1024x683.jpg

    Spoiler

    JACOBSBURG, Ohio — “Where’d you get that thing?”

    “Dang, it’s got teeth!”

    “Can I touch it?”

    Matt McKivitz rattles off a string of encounters in which curious strangers approached him over the past four years. Known to some as the father of West Virginia’s senior left tackle Colton McKivitz. More broadly recognized as the long-bearded fan in the coonskin cap — and sometimes coyote — he eagerly embraces his role as the program’s middle-aged mascot.

    Regardless of which furry conversation piece adorned his head at any given game, one thing remained constant: He had trapped it, shot it and skinned it himself.

    That authenticity only made the hats, and his whole mountain-man persona, more alluring. In a Stillwater tailgating lot, an Oklahoma State fan stepped out of her Escalade and asked, “Will you sell me that hat for $400?” She was particularly incentivized by belonging to a women’s tea club that offered members a prize for the most unique hat.

    At Texas’ Darrell K Royal Stadium, the Silver Spurs spotted Matt in the hat and asked him to take a photo with Bevo.

    Then there was the drunken woman on another road trip who started off fondling the hat and quickly moved to rubbing his beard as she whispered, “You are soooooo medieval!” Matt politely extricated himself from that situation by nodding toward his wife Wendy, patiently waiting for her mountain man a few feet away.

    Colton may have 47 career college starts plus a promising outlook for next spring’s NFL draft, but it’s the guy in the critter lid who’s constantly posing for photos and attracting the TV cameras for cutaway shots. “Yeah,” Colton said, “Dad definitely thinks he’s more famous than me.”

    A fellow team parent once texted from the Milan Puskar Stadium box seats and said, “Get up here. There’s a man who says he’s gotta have that hat.” Matt made his way up from the bleachers for a negotiation cut straight out of the Champlain fur trade. “Gimme $200 and it’s yours,” he said. They exchanged hat for cash on the spot.

    Several ex-players purchased coonskin hats from Matt, and he made one for former offensive line coach Joe Wickline.

    The McKivitzes have befriended several of the actual Mountaineer mascots, and Matt makes for one heckuva doppleganger, with fans frequently prompting, “You ought to be down there on that field!”

    On Saturday, he actually was on the field, joining Wendy in escorting their son for a Senior Day walkout. Matt wore his signature coonskin hat.

    “Of course he did,” his wife said.

    hat.jpg
     
    (Courtesy of Dale Sparks / West Virginia University)

    At the McKivitz home in rural Jacobsburg, Ohio, about a two-hour drive from Morgantown, there’s a “Flying WV” flag jutting off the front-porch column. Matt throws open the door and says, “Come on in, ol’ buddy,” even though it’s the first-ever meeting. He’s wearing a long-sleeve camouflage shirt — also featuring the West Virginia logo — and has a spit bottle tucked into the back pocket of his blue jeans.

    Inside the house, he points toward a pan piled high in meat appetizers with toothpicks.

    “Grab yourself some and try it,” he says.

    Smells good. What is it?

    “I’ll tell ya after you eat it,” he says.

    At this point it’s impossible to forget Colton’s joke about his dad’s philosophy on hunting deer, squirrels and everything in between: “If it’s shot, it’s getting eaten.”

    Turns out to be bacon-wrapped duck. Just the right twang of saltiness mixed with sweet from the duck being soaked in apple juice and Coke. It’s delicious. (Matt plans on taking the rest to Morgantown for the Oklahoma State tailgate.)

    The warm welcome extends from two eager dogs, a chocolate lab named Lizzy and a 3-year-old yellow lab, Rosie, who Matt identifies as “Colton’s college girlfriend.” Rosie has split time between the homestead, where there are acres of woods out her backyard, and the Morgantown apartment where Colton lives.

    They tried taking her hunting as a puppy, where she laid on Matt’s chest behind a duck blind. Once the guns started booming, however, Rosie made tracks across his face, bolted under the netting and waited out the shooting across a slough. As hunting instincts go, Matt says, “she’s a really fine lap dog.”

    And the McKivitzes’ den is a really fine exhibit of Matt’s taxidermy. After Wendy acquiesced by allowing him to have “one wall” for his mounts, he hung the heads of 10 bucks and two gobblers above their sectional.

    “Just about out of space,” he says.

    Down a narrow set of stairs, however, is the basement, which is truly Matt’s space. Work shelves. Fleshing tools. Tanning oil. Acid bottles. Epoxy. Polyurethane forms for deer. A plastic bin containing various sizes of glass eyes for different animals.

    “Sometimes Wendy gets mad because there’s meat hanging off the ceiling,” Matt says, though his basement is tidy this day. Two cured raccoon hides hang from hooks alongside a lengthier gray one. “That’s a coyote,” he says.

    For now, taxidermy remains a hobby, albeit a well-regulated one. (He keeps paper work on all the mounts he constructs for friends and family members.)

    The whole process of preparing the hide takes about a week. Because raccoons are especially greasy, he pressure washes them to break down the fat and muscle and make it easier to scrape away. Every speck of meat must be removed. Then it’s three days in brine, rinsed, bathed in acid and washed again.

    Once the hide is stretched over the skull form, the artistry begins. Inserting jaw sets. Angling the eyes. Using clay to fill in gaps. Using Bondo to shape the ears. Gluing or stitching multiple hides together, sometimes needing as many as three for one hat.

    hat-3.jpg
     
    (G. Allan Taylor / The Athletic)

    His basement shop features several mannequin heads, one adorned with the coonskin cap destined for Senior Day. It’s been with Matt for three years.

    “This ol’ boy, he’s been through a bunch. He’s getting pretty beat up,” Matt says. It travels in one of Colton’s duffel bags that occasionally gets crunched in the overhead bin on flights.

    “The real fun,” Matt says, “is getting him through security at the airport. You’ll see the bag start going through the scanner, and then it stops. Then it backs up, goes again and stops. The TSA person just looks and looks and the line just keeps getting longer and longer.”


    There’s a picture of Colton, maybe a few days shy of his third birthday, holding his first catch. “A little bluegill,” Wendy says.

    He killed his first buck when he was 6 and has been at dad’s hip through deer season ever since. Plus turkey season, dove season, squirrel season, etc. Lately they’ve taken to duck hunting, because they can talk freely and “enjoy each other’s company,” Colton says.

    Now he’s majoring in wildlife and fisheries resources, and last year’s decision to put off entering the NFL draft was based partly on a desire to finish a senior internship in which he compiles data on fish from the Monongahela River and area ponds

    He inherited his love for outdoors honestly. Matt recalls his own childhood, “always wanting to be in the woods, because that’s where I went for my solitude.”

    The taxidermy interest surfaced early too. Matt was around 10 when he and his dad went into a little bait shop.

    “There was a guy who did taxidermy in a tiny room upstairs, and I said, ‘Can you show me how to do that?’ He looked at me funny, but told me to give him my phone number.”

    A couple weeks later, the taxidermist called and Matt came running, initially learning how to preserve hawks for museums.

    Soon after, Matt noticed three baby raccoons dead on the road, “so I grabbed them.”

    He ordered a plastic form and began his first solo project with mixed results.

    “My mom comes downstairs, and there I am mounting a raccoon on her dining room table,” he said. “She flipped out.”

    On one of his early experimental mounts, he also learned the hazards of leaving even minuscule flesh inside a raccoon’s nostril. After a couple weeks he realized, “It ain’t supposed to smell like that.”

    A couple decades along, Matt’s work is refined and even celebrated. When fans see his raccoon hat snarling, they tell him, “That’s what the Mountaineer mascot needs to be wearing. That thing’s got an attitude!”


    Occasionally, opposing fans see the cap and bring some attitude of their own.

    After West Virginia’s victory at Texas Tech last season, Matt and Wendy were walking to a fast food restaurant near the stadium when a few guys in a pickup truck pulled around and hit the brakes.

    “They yelled, ‘You think you’re something strutting around in that hat? I oughta drag your ass back to West Virginia behind this truck!’

    “Well, I got into it with ’em — you bunch of blankety-blank so-and-sos — and I probably needed to apologize for what the people inside that Chick-fil-A heard over the drive-thru speakers.”

    At FedEx Field, during the spirited 2017 opener against Virginia Tech, Matt noticed a woman cutting not-so-friendly stares at his furry cap.

    “She kept getting drunker and worked up enough beer courage to say, ‘That’s a disgrace on top of your head.’ When I said OK, she went, ‘Maybe you didn’t hear me — I think that hat is disgusting.’

    “So I told her, ‘Well, those are some pretty fancy leather boots you’ve got there. And I think what you did to that cow is disgusting!”

    hat-4.jpg
     
    (Courtesy of McKivitz family)

    Most interactions, however, have been pleasant. Some even spawned lasting connections.

    Trisha Trylch operates a Budweiser kiosk near the parents’ will call gate at Milan Puskar Stadium. Three years ago, when Colton was seeing his first action as a redshirt freshman, she noticed Matt in his oversized coyote hat, with pelts that dangled nearly to his waist.

    She left the beer tent to chase after him.

    “I told him I had to have that hat, and I wanted to know where he got it,” Trylch said.

    By the next home game, when Matt delivered a freshly stitched coyote hat of her very own, Trylch was elated. She began wearing it to her teenage son’s travel hockey games — partly “to embarrass the hell out of him” but mostly to mess with the parents at the Pittsburgh rinks.

    “Some of them can be snooty,” she said. “So I’ve had the most freaking fun wearing this thing — coming in with a dead animal strapped to my head. I ham it up and tell them I named it Cujo and ask, ‘Do you wanna pet the puppy?’ They don’t know what to think.”

    Matt would always stop for a hug and photo with Trylch, but he noticed something wrong the following season. Trylch was on the verge of tears when she relayed that her coyote hat had been destroyed.

    Greta, her German shepherd, had chewed the paws off.

    “I guess she was eliminating competition,” Trylch said.

    So Matt made a replacement coyote hat. That one’s still around, but when he learned months later that Trylch’s husband died of a stroke, he wanted to do something else for “a super-awesome woman who’s a real sweetheart.” He offered his sympathy by bringing her a third hat, this one a raccoon version.

    “I named that one Rocket,” she said, “It’s bad-ass.”

     

  5. 26 minutes ago, Landomatic said:

    A hell of a coach at a mid-major G5 program who used to work for Urb, huh?  What could possibly go wrong?

    Hire that guy...again.

    He's about to win a P5 league and is the best hope of keeping OU out of the playoffs this year.  If he was 10 years younger he'd be the guy I want.

  6. Quote

    Big 12 Bowl Partners
    Once the CFP has filled its bowl slots, Big 12 bowl partners will make selections from the remaining bowl eligible teams. Following is the order of selection. A bowl may pick from any available teams when it reaches its spot in the selection order.
    Valero Alamo
    Camping World
    Academy Sports + Outdoors Texas
    AutoZone Liberty
    Cheez-It
    SERVPRO First Responder

    Looks like the Big 12 bowl eligible teams and final records will be:

    OU 11-1

    Baylor 11-1

    OSU 8-4

    Farmageddon winner 8-4

    Farmageddon loser 7-5

    Texas 7-5 or 6-6

    TCU 6-6 if they can beat WVU

    Ordinarily we're picked a spot or 2 higher than the final standings because we travel well but this year I'm not sensing a lot of enthusiasm surrounding the program.  If Camping doesn't pick us, I bet the Texas bowl would pass.

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