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SL Xpress

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Everything posted by SL Xpress

  1. Mike Leach also had Cody Campbell and John Sellers on his roster. That looks like it might be one of the biggest parts of his legacy at Texas Tech.
  2. The witches in MacBeth couldn't have laid out foreshadowing future ruin any better than you and your Dad.
  3. Everything? No. A lot of it? Yes, yes it is.
  4. So with the preseason ranking, Sarkisian has now passed Mack Brown in terms of how many weeks ranked #1. Darrell Royal with 29 weeks. Fred Akers with 9 weeks. Steve Sarkisian with 5 weeks. Mack Brown with 4 weeks. It has been a rough 40 years, to be honest.
  5. Just to dovetail on this, because I feel like this is an important point regarding Texas recruiting. This isn't for a Texas Tech audience. This is for fellow Longhorn fans. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of the 70s and 80s, because that's it's own thing, but it did set a foundation for the pure as the driven snow approach the administration, the coaching staff, and frankly, all of us fans took regarding our football program. In the late 90s Mack Brown arrived and shifted the entire dynamics for how to recruit Texas. He locked the state down. Texas went on a facilities spending spree that no one else could even approach. Brown was a Svengali wizard with closing skills even Alec Baldwin could admire. But things changed towards the middle of the 2000s. There were mistakes made on the Texas side, so it's not all on every one else. But this is when 7 on 7s first becoming popular, where you were falling behind in development and exposure if you didn't participate. It was the beginning of the personal trainer era. All of this had been going on in basketball since the 80s, but high school football coaches had held on as the gatekeepers, at least in Texas, into the mid 2000s. Saban was the first to industrialize the new dynamic. Suddenly Alabama was tossing out 300+ offers per recruiting cycle, with the caveat that they weren't "committable" offers. To make it committable, you had to make it to one of the Alabama camps. How were you going to get to one of the camps? Well, Alabama would pay your way. This was the start of the paid unofficial visits, which are basically de rigeur and have been the worst kept secret in college football recruiting for a decade and a half. They would spread around hefty bonuses to third parties who could get talented players to their campus. Soon the whole SEC was participating in these shenanigans, and not long thereafter, the rest of the college football world as well. Especially Clemson, Oregon, and Ohio State. Mack Brown, and then Charlie Strong after him, refused to play this game. We wouldn't do anything to establish relationships with third parties because we still felt like the key relationship was with the Texas high school football coaches. We also wouldn't move up our recruiting cycle, because Mack Brown felt like kids should finish their junior season first. So not only were we not compensating players in the same way schools like Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State were doing, we also were refusing to work with third parties, we weren't willing to compensate players for visiting the campus on an unofficial visit, we weren't helping defray costs much less financially reward people for bringing talented players to campus. And in the meantime all of us - and I include myself in this - would feel good about how tight we were able to wear our halos. I remember the first time I had my road to Damascus moment was when it was apparent we had a legitimate shot at Saban. At the time he felt like he had no chance to compete with Bear Bryant's legacy at Alabama, but if he could become the first coach to win 3 national titles at 3 different schools, that's something he could be remembered for. It's laughable now, but at the time none of us - including Saban himself - understood the dominant run he was about to go on. I thought about it, and realized I wanted to win so badly in this new environment, that if hiring Saban was the price we had to pay, I was all in. Then Dodds and Brown managed to cockblock him, and the opportunity vanished. I remember when we were hiring Tom Herman, and I told a collection of hardcore fans that we were going to start working with third parties and paying for unofficial visits, and everyone was aghast. "Oh, we don't do that at Texas." Yeah, we don't, and we're getting our heads handed to us in recruiting because we don't. You have to make the decision whether you're willing to compete in the big time, and right now we are literally making the deliberate decision we don't want to. It's not possible to compete in this environment without working with third parties and without helping with unofficial visits. That's anywhere. I'll also say that the reason Texas is in the position it's in regarding NIL has very little to do with the coaching staff or the administration. People don't understand how hard it is to do anything from the grassroots level without buy in from the heads of the organizations they're ostensibly trying to help. It's one of the hardest things in human society. It's unbelievably hard. I'm not going to say the administration sabotaged NIL efforts, but they sure didn't make it easy. They saw it as a threat, not an opportunity. The folks who worked on NIL at the beginning are heroes to me. I mean that literally. I did nothing to help, but as a fan I get to reap the rewards of unending cold calling, unending hearing the word no, unending education of the stakeholders. Yes, we have a rich alumni base, but not that many of them wanted to invest in NIL. We don't have a Phil Knight $30 billionaire whale bankrolling our entire operation. Even now the administration would prefer in some ways to have the $20.5 million figure be the ceiling for payroll costs, but if we abided by their wishes we'd be ceding the field to the Texas Techs of the world. I say ad nauseum that you have to have the right coach. All the support in the world doesn't matter if the wrong guy is in charge. Neither Charlie Strong nor Tom Herman nor late Mack Brown would be successful in the current environment at Texas. It would simply buttress their collective incompetence. I feel like Sarkisian is the right guy. I can't say I felt that when he was hired. I certainly didn't feel that way after his first two years. But the way he's built the program, the way he's built his staff, the consistent development I see in Longhorn players in ways I never have before. The narrative he paints about changing the culture, with the GPA, the "way you are some of the time is the way you are all the time" line, the way he and his staff vet the players they go after. The work ethic. The transparency. The results on the field. I'm a believer. But without being willing to compete in the same way the programs around us are competing would tie the hands behind the back of whoever the head coach happened to be. I am grateful the people who are in a position to make these kinds of decisions are choosing the path they're choosing.
  6. I've been an obnoxious fan on many occasions. I'm not sure I've ever been more obnoxious than for this game. I went by myself. I was wearing a Tennessee Titans shirt with a big picture of Vince Young's face on the front of the shirt. I didn't have an amazing seat, but honestly, it doesn't even feel like there's a bad seat in the house in that stadium. In any case, it wasn't the worst seat. But naturally I'm surrounded by Texans fans. And I'm by myself. And I'm unabashedly loudly rooting for Vince Young every time Tennessee has the ball. People are climbing over their seats to talk trash at me, and I'm having none of it. I'm not a big guy by any stretch of the imagination, but there's something missing in my brain where I honestly don't understand consequences. I mean, I know they're there, but they just don't register. It's not fearlessness. It's obliviousness, which is not the same thing. So I'm doing my oblivious thing, talking all kinds of shit at the top of my voice - and I'm a pretty loud guy - telling anyone and everyone that Vince is going to win this game. When he scored that winning touchdown it's like someone let all the air out of a balloon in everyone around me. Just a collective, "Oooooooooof!" I know I've had moments of magical fulfillment in other sports settings, but no where where I felt like I was one against many. To be fair, there were plenty of people in the stands to see Vince, so I wasn't exactly alone. But in the area I was in I was the target of hatred. I made sure to rattle my keys and talk all kinds of shit at everyone there as they filed for the exits. It's something of a miracle I didn't get my ass beat that day. I certainly deserved it with my behavior.
  7. When I was a kid I lived at Astroworld. I'd get a season pass and then a bunch of Moms would take turns carpooling about 4 of us before the theme park opened and then pick us up after it closed. I didn't go every day, but I went a bunch. There's only so many times you can ride the same rides, and pretend like you're picking up girls who live on the other side of Houston that you will never see again, before a bit of hijinks ensues. I had several favorite pranks I'd pull. There were two sets of cars on their own tracks on opposite sides of the theme park. You rode them around on a cement track with a metal guard rail in the middle so you couldn't drive it off the track. There was one pedal, which you pressed to make it go, but if you let your foot off completely it didn't coast to a stop. It braked. It's amazing to me those things basically burned fuel all day long because they were never turned off, but different time. One set was a convertible sports coup. The other was a model T style. In any case, we'd get in one of the cars, drive about midway around the track, jump out and clamber over the chainlink fence. Then we'd run around a corner and peek back. Invariably, people would see us get out of the car and jump over the fence, but they wouldn't know what to do about it. So they'd sit there. Over a short period of time the cars would stack up not going anywhere behind the vehicle we abandoned. Eventually one of the underpaid teenagers manning the ride would wonder why isn't anyone going? Look around, see the abandoned car in the middle of the track, and have to run over there to drive it around so everyone else could enjoy the ride. I would laugh my ass off that no one would get out of their car and just go drive it around themselves because they didn't want to break the rules. There was also a fake mountain in the middle of the theme park. The idea of it was to have something that sort of emulated the famous Disney castle, that would be a landmark for the theme park as a whole. Only, Astroworld didn't have as much capital to spend as Disney, of course, so it was done on the cheap. There was a ride inside called the Alpine Sleigh Ride, which was ostensibly a roller coaster, but not really. They had some cheap animatronics that were few and far between that you could look at as the ride lazily went around the mountain. The appeal wasn't the ride, which was terrible. The appeal was the supercharged air conditioning in an attempt to emulate a swiss mountain. So people would ride it to get a break from the overwhelming Houston heat. Well, since the ride wasn't exactly dangerous, and wasn't really all that popular other than the aforementioned reason, security could be a bit lax. You weren't exactly fastened in. So we'd clamber out of the car halfway through the ride, and spend the next little bit jumping out from behind corners to scare the ever living shit out of people who were on the ride. Then we'd get into an empty car and ride it back down. You'd think we would have gotten caught after dozens of times doing this, but worker morale wasn't exactly top notch. They just didn't seem to care as long as we didn't hurt anyone. Fast forward a decade later. I'm serving in the Navy in San Diego. I convince some other sailors that it would be fun to go to Disneyland. I don't know how I did it necessarily, but I convinced 3 other guys to take the road trip to Los Angeles. While I understood the dynamics of Disneyland as a business venture, and that Disney had made a mistake in announcing the project so that third party developers bought all the land around Disneyland and locked it into a smaller footprint, I didn't really get what that meant. Disney didn't have enough land to keep adding rides. Any new ride they installed, they had to take one out. What this meant eventually is that they had to focus on a demographic, and the demographic they chose was the pre teens, It's a Small World animatronic type rides. We had smuggled a lot of booze in to the park and then mixed it with coke, so we were pretty sloshed and bored out of our minds. This is before the movies came out, so I had to convince my sailor buddies about this iconic ride we had to go on called Pirates of the Caribbean. It's still more of the same, but midway through I decide I'd relive my Astroworld glory days, and clamber out on the stage and start drunkenly dancing among all the robots. In case you weren't aware, even back in the 90s Disney's security protocols are a mite more stringent than Astroworlds. I immediately hear this voice of God cracking down on me, "Get back in the boat!" I scurried over properly chastened and leaped back into my seat. My friends and I were looking at each other thinking, "we're cooked now." As the ride is coming out of the tunnel heading towards the exit, I can see a phalanx of security personnel waiting. I have a feeling they might be there for me. So I look around at my friends and tell them, "See you guys later," climb over the brick wall next to us, and take off. A short while later I see my friends running around the corner laughing, "They thought it was the people ahead of us! They were excitedly pointing at us and we just ran!" Ah, different times. Can't get away with that kind of stuff any more, that's for sure.
  8. It was a huge waste of Earl Campbell's talent. Instead of lining him up 10 yards behind the line of scrimmage with a lead blocker allowing him to get a full head of steam, he was lined up a yard or two behind the quarterback and sent into the interior of the line.
  9. I mean, that's the purpose of it. CTJ is incredibly entertaining. He's leaned in to it because it makes the board dynamics fun. Good on him for doing so.
  10. I gave a book report on The Stand in 5th grade. My teacher stopped me about a minute in to it.
  11. Turn The Page, Fred. It was a godsend switching from the wishbone to the I-formation in Earl Campbell's senior year. I can't believe the series of events that had to transpire to make that happen. Running Earl as the fullback in the wishbone was a crime against nature. No offense to Coach Royal. But getting locked into that offense was hell on earth for the next 9 years. Then it didn't necessarily get better under McWilliams. The boosters pressured him to hire Lynn Amedee (huh, he recently died May 20) because Amedee ran an exciting offense at A&M with Kevin Murray at QB. Amedee's offense in 1991 is the worst one at Texas in my lifetime. When the boosters told McWilliams he had to go, he responded with, "I hired the guy you wanted me to hire." Then the Mackovic years came. And while the offense was exciting, it wasn't a winning offense nor a winning head coach. Just glad I got to live long enough to see the program where it is right now.
  12. Yeah, that wasn't exactly our dynamic. For one thing, my Mom eats men for breakfast. She has a beauty queen sort of charm about her, a twinkle in her eye, but she gets energy from destroying people. She just managed to destroy my niece (her granddaughter) this morning. It will be the wind beneath her wings all day long. Her problem was always being attracted to alpha males and then crushing their souls. Finally late in life she married a beta that became her favorite puppy to kick, and that worked out a lot better. And my Dad was awesome. Hilarious. Erudite. Took over pretty much any room he was in by his sheer presence. When the world wide web came about we started posting on the GoBig12. It was hilarious watching Dad become this larger than life internet personality. Not because it was some kind of surprise, but because that's how it always went.
  13. One of my treasured Disney World memories was travelling to Florida as a kid. My parents' marriage was on the rocks, although I didn't know it at the time. I just knew they had epic fights all the time. Two people who demand to get their way 100% of the time and the marriage doesn't work out. Who woulda figured? Anyway, this was kind of a last gasp to see if they could make it work. Narrator: They could not. My father's whole identity was giving off this Darth Vader type energy everywhere he went. It wasn't that he scowled. It's like his whole energy was this "I'm going to suck out your soul" type of deal. That's not all of who he was, but that was his default. So it's a family of four at the "happiest place on Earth" with Dad at the last place he'd ever want to be among people he felt were beneath him, with a wife who made him miserable, pretending to be the family man he never was, at the end of a miserable marriage with two kids in tow. The person playing Happy the dwarf decides this is the guy he's going to charm. He (could've been she, I don't know) spent the next 10 minutes grabbing Dad's hands and dancing in circles with my sister, Mom and I laughing hysterically, and Dad sending laser beams of pure hatred out of his eyes at this shit head who had decided it was his personal mission to try to evoke a smile out of him. Eventually Happy slinked off. Probably quit that day for all I know. PTSD related. This sort of thing happened somewhat often, so my reaction when it started was to grab metaphorical popcorn and think, "well, this is a train wreck. Let's see what happens!"
  14. They have. It's Sayin. But it's the typical head coach game being played. Keep the backup engaged. Push the starter to work harder. Show the team he earned it. Sarkisian did the same sort of thing with Ewers and Hudson Card.
  15. It's not about depth per se. Recruiting numbers at OL is because it's the hardest position to evaluate. A big part of the reason coaches don't recruit numbers high enough is because they don't want the dead weight on the roster. And who can blame them? But without the numbers you end up missing enough that inadequate players end up getting significant playing time. And the development time is so enormous. The best OL programs typically have guys who have been in the system. Like our group this year. But as has been pointed out by CTJ, the portal is more of a crapshoot for OL. Either you're possibly missing like OSU might have done with Ethan Onianwa (they have another transfer in Phillip Daniels from Minnesota who could be displacing him) or you're paying out the wazzoo for someone like Isiaih World from Nevada. The point is I do not believe we're recruiting enough offensive linemen, because some of them are going to miss regardless of how highly regarded they are. One or two more per year is 3 to 5 more during a development cycle. That's big. Also, I know churn is not the most pleasant topic, but with the presence of the portal counseling players out is a more seamless process for the guys who don't work out. I agree with the concept that only about 8 OL are going to be in the rotation in a given year, with injuries being a huge X factor.
  16. I enjoyed that article from Chip Brown. The quotes from his brother and Mom were terrific. But the starting five at Ohio State barring injury IMO are going to be McDonald and Williams at safety, Taffe at nickel, and Muhammed and Guilbeau at corner. But it looks to me like Littleton is going to see a lot of playing time this season, and could become a starter at some point.
  17. Day of should work.
  18. Not sure where to link this article, so I'm linking it here. Oh, and also on SEC Rant, because that's fun. The title alone is geared to infuriate people. Is Texas college football’s new Alabama? - The Athletic
  19. But at some point it's not necessarily about getting a starting NFL tackle. I know that's the aspiration at Texas, and it should be. But if you don't have enough bodies in the pipeline, if you're going to compete for national championships you better get them somehow. It's still a very legitimate point, and I'm not trying to argue it. It's also the easiest thing in the world to spend someone else's money. I have no agency in any of this. To me it makes sense to wait for chaos and then take advantage of opportunities if they present themselves.
  20. Chip Brown. Kirk Bohls. Geoff Ketchum. There are a couple of others with the same schtick. Heck, Bobby Burton when he founded National Recruiting Advisor always seemed to discount Texas affiliated players a bit to keep from seeming biased. Not to lump Burton with any of them, because he's always had an air of professionalism even before he tied himself to covering UT exclusively, and has kept it that way. I don't think there's another program in the country with more villain status people covering the program as their main gig. There are plenty of haters around the country. We're a polarizing program. But to have these talking heads represent us in talk formats everywhere as "Longhorn homers" when they giddily love planting blades between our shoulders simply as a point of emphasis to show they're capable of it is infuriating. I remember when the thin skinned Mack Brown was trying to control the narrative around his program early on, he tried to shut out media representatives from having access in different ways. Not overtly, but in subtle ways. He did a full on press with Chip Brown when CB was at the Dallas Morning News trying to ingratiate him so he'd only print a Longhorn slant on everything he wrote. There was a complete misjudging of character.
  21. I believe everything a coach says in a media availability literally. There's never any agendas involved. If he mentions him several times, then we see him on Saturdays being productive, then I'll believe it. Until then I'm going to assume he's giving a call out to be encouraging and to help keep Butler's buy in for the season. I will say there are players he mentions on multiple occasions and I do pay attention to that. For example, he keeps bringing up Ty'Anthony Smith. I don't think Smith is going to get starter snaps, but I do think he could play a bigger role this season than we generally think, and I think that primarily because Sarkisian keeps making a point to bring him up.
  22. No. If you watch the media availability where he said that, he was referring to going to the portal right now. "I'd be better off going to the co-op." He wasn't referring to the portal in general. He could very well believe that. Maybe him and Kyle Flood simply don't think there's a good payoff for a quality OL in the portal. But that's not what he said. Or at least, not the complete context for it. I will say this. The biggest issue as much as anything else since Mackovic was fired, is that the head coaches simply don't bring in enough bodies at OL. Certainly not enough quality bodies. The quality part almost goes without saying. But also not enough bodies period. OL is the hardest position group IMO to give a projected evaluation. Sarkisian and Flood reversed that quickly when they got here, but now we're moving towards the same dynamic. We're simply not bringing in enough OL in our recruiting classes. I thought we were going to have a group of 5 or 6 in this class, and maybe we still will. But our tackle group in particular is very thin. I'm not exactly a lone wolf on this. I see plenty of other posters making comments on it, so I'm not out here saying I'm seeing something other people aren't. I'm simply saying I agree with posters who look at our roster and depth chart and think there's something amiss with our talent acquisition strategy in terms of sheer numbers.
  23. To be fair, one of the things he would say is don't sign a contract with Texas Tech, because they'll just use sovereign immunity to get out of it.
  24. I mean, we don't know what the scheme is going to be when he gets to Norman, nor who will be running it.
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