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SL Xpress

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Everything posted by SL Xpress

  1. There is no grace. He's done a great job hiring assistants so far. Not impressed with this one, but there have been plenty of coaches I'm unimpressed with that end up being spectacular. Heck, for a while there Pete Kwiatkowski seemed like a big mistake. I was completely wrong there. Now I'm ecstatic we have him.
  2. Way too many realistic, haunted eyes kind of takes on this thread. I like seeing the true Aggies coming on to berate the 2%ers. Long time to go before the season starts. I'm hoping for more delusion as the season start approaches.
  3. I don't see a whole lot of naive optimism right now. I see a whole lot of the writing is on the wall regarding Rodney Terry. At most, I see some "I hoped he would work out but he has not. This has been a train wreck." It has felt like a train wreck from the beginning to me, but I'm glad we're nearing the end and we can move on. My gosh, I haven't been a drum beat of negativity on the basketball boards for the last two years. I just quit posting for the most part. No point in exposing everyone constantly to my conviction Rodney Terry was going to fail. But to me he was always going to fail. He's just not that smart, to put it bluntly. He's loyal. He means well. He certainly loves the University of Texas as much as a paid employee is able to. This job was always going to be too big for him. He was a great assistant for both Barnes and Beard. It's only through unusual circumstances that he found himself the head coach. When I start feeling really negative, I just quit posting. No reason for everyone to have to constantly endure those thoughts.
  4. I cannot say eternal optimism as a sports fan is one of my gifts. I remember in the late 2000s telling people our recruiting in football was not doing well regardless of the rankings, that we shouldn't be putting all our quarterback eggs in the one Garrett Gilbert basket, and that Mack Brown had gotten lazy as a recruiter and was insisting on doing it the way he always had even though the paradigm was changing, and I got a whole lot of, "can't you just enjoy what we have? Things are fine. We're competing for national championships every year. You're seeing things that aren't there." It's not like I can't be optimistic. I'm optimistic about football right now. I'm optimistic about the people we have involved in NIL. I'm optimistic about the next men's basketball coach we hire. I'm optimistic about the athletic department as a whole. But sometimes I see things and I can't shake a sense of impending doom, and that was certainly the case as Terry racked up win after win. Oh, well. It was a fun season nonetheless. I'm glad I got to experience it as a fan.
  5. Not to mention that sure was a fun team to follow. I'll take an Elite Eight for what has transpired since then. We'll move on to someone else. We just don't have many Elite Eights on our resume.
  6. Dabo Swinney at Clemson is always the first person who comes to mind. That was only the third Elite Eight Texas has ever made it to in the 64 team tournament era. Some credit has to be given to Terry for holding the team together that year and forging on under unusual circumstances. I never thought he'd be a good head coach on a permanent basis, but I have no qualms with CDC removing the interim tag given the team's success that year. I just know the moment he was promoted I dreaded the possible outcome. But permanent doesn't mean lifetime, so if I lived long enough I'd see another coach take the reins and see what they can do. And now we're almost there.
  7. Well, one thing for certain. SMU isn't hiring Chris Del Conte. There was a stupid discussion started, whoever that was.
  8. I mean, the same dynamic plays out during the season, too, so why not? There's a reason why the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders lists Battered Aggie Syndrome. It's a real phenomenon. Easily the most entertaining mental health disorder on the planet. Although, watching a group therapy session with Tourette's Syndrome patients is pretty good, too. But I don't think a thread about it could come even close to this one for making me laugh.
  9. This all felt very inevitable the day Chris Beard was arrested for domestic assault and Rodney Terry was made the interim coach. I made a post at the time that the team and staff he inherited was built for a deep NCAA run, but if they accomplish that, we'll be stuck with Terry as the permanent head coach and we'll have to start over in 3 to 4 years. That went over like a lead balloon, and rightfully so. But it's still certainly how I saw it, and it's exactly what has come to pass. We traded an Elite Eight run - of which we don't have exactly a plethora of - for at least two more years of disappointment. 3 if somehow Terry is able to pull a miraculous run to the Sweet 16, which I don't actually think there's any chance of. But if he slides into the tournament, will that be enough? The rest of the intervening time has been playing out the string. We'll see who Del Conte goes after next. Chris Beard was a home run hire if it weren't for the domestic assault arrest. Terry's problem is that he doesn't know how to construct a roster. In this day and age of NIL/portal, that's the chief metric. I mean, he has plenty of other issues, too, but that's the fundamental problem. People talk about the fact he's a good recruiter, but recruiting has not been an issue for Texas basketball under several head coaches. Even Wetlich could bring in talent.
  10. Who we are as in human beings? Because that's something every fan base does that thinks they would have had some kind of shot at a player. That's not exclusive to Texas by any stretch of the imagination.
  11. Texas has lost several presidents of the university. Cal Berkeley, Emory, and now SMU. It's not a premium job, mostly because of dealing with the politics in the state. Texas has never lost an athletic director to another school that I'm aware of. I'd have to go look up the guys who came before Dana X. Bible, and I'm not going to do that. This isn't A&M. Del Conte was never going to leave for the SMU job. Not sure why anyone even entertained the idea. It's a joke.
  12. I didn't even start the automobile comparison. I'm just saying comparing Texas and SMU athletic departments to Tudor and Rolex made no sense to me. It's more Rolex to Seiko.
  13. Yeah, it's not perfect. But there are also Land Rover models. The Land Rover models compared to the Range Rover models. They use some of the same parts, the same processes, and some people argue you're basically buying the same thing for a lesser price, when normal people feel like that's really a justification for spending less money. Same thing with Tudor/Rolex. The thing is, Rolex was started first, then Hans Wilford founded Tudor as a company specifically designed to sell very nice watches at a slightly more affordable price. Going back to the original athletic department analogy, Rolex is like UT-Austin, Tudor is like UT-Arlington. There's not really an equivalent car company. But to compare Texas and SMU athletic departments, a better analogy would be to say Texas is a Rolex, and SMU is some other nice but not exclusive brand. Frankly, SMU athletics isn't even that great, although they've had some recent success. Seiko maybe? SMU is the Seiko of athletic departments.
  14. I guess if we're married to car company analogies, the best one I can think of is Tudor is Land Rover, and Rolex is Range Rover. Doesn't work exactly, but that's the best I can come up with.
  15. That was not a long post. I'm typing on a message board. Not doing a case interview or working in management consulting. My father, who did work in management consulting, could make some unbelievably long posts, so I'm not sure what that proves. His posts were way more entertaining than mine, but he always did get his fair share of TLDR or the like. I thought the analogy was shit. There's an obvious reason people talk about Tudor and Rolex that way regardless of the merits of the argument. Also, Tudor is not a microbrand. Oh, and Del Conte is not accepting the athletic director job at SMU, which is the first step towards dumbness that led to the rest of this dumbness.
  16. But your post is an opinion. One anyone with common sense would agree with. Mine was a factual statement. There are a thousand watch brands you could have picked to make a comparison, but you named the two that were founded by the same person and are still owned by the same company. There's a reason why people talk about Tudor and Rolex that way. No one would talk about SMU and Texas athletics in the same kind of way. It's a strange analogy to me. I also don't know why you would associate micro brand with Tudor. You didn't state Tudor is a micro brand, but it's implied in your statement. The funny thing is, I am remarkably indifferent to watches, so I don't really have a dog in the fight. I just like to see comparisons make sense, and words used the way they're meant to be used. Which is very pedantic of me, but there are times I can't help myself, and apparently this is one of them.
  17. SMU and UT were founded by the same person and owned by the same company?
  18. If their offense hadn't self destructed at the beginning I think they could have made a game of it. Their defense looked way better before everything got out of hand than I thought they would. I don't feel like the score was as reflective of the difference between the two teams as it appears. But because that's what everyone expected going in, there's this collective nodding of heads, "See? SMU didn't really belong there." I mean, maybe they didn't, but it's because their offense wasn't ready for the big stage, not necessarily because they couldn't compete from a talent level. On the other hand, scoreboard matters.
  19. And an uninteresting hypothetical argument to boot. Unless you're someone with SMU affiliations with no realistic perspective on their actual place in the realm of athletics prestige. CDC can recommend an assistant for the job. If Hartzell wants a CDC clone that's the closest he's going to get. Personally, I think the Rice AD is going to end up being a good one. He hasn't been on the job long enough to make an impact yet, and it's tough sledding. SMU is a much better job than Rice from an athletics standpoint. Maybe in 3 or 4 years he'll have made enough of a difference bigger fish will come calling. But unlike CDC, he ain't getting a phone call.
  20. While accurate, it's missing a salient point. From what I understand OU and Texas got half portions as part of the agreement to move to the SEC a year early, not because they hadn't been in the league for a full year. As opposed to say, Washington, Oregon, Stanford, and California. Or even SMU, which gets nothing in terms of TV distribution money. They all get smaller portions for the life of the current TV contract as part of the agreement to take them on as conference members.
  21. No, I made an inconsequential comment about how inconsequential interest in SMU football is. Which is true. SMU is a small private school with a small alumni base. Since professional sports took over the interest of the average sports fan in big metropolitan areas - including Dallas - college sports can't really compete for eyeballs. Which happened about 60 years ago. Who gives a rat's ass if the phone call happens? It's a possibility the same way it's a possibility I could be railing Shakira this summer while she's in Houston.
  22. He's not talking about win/loss records. He's talking about people actually giving a shit. Sure, Texas people are arrogant. So are folks from SMU. Who gives a shit? All that arrogance doesn't put people in the stands or compel them to watch SMU play football on television. If OU, A&M, or Arkansas were to play SMU next year in Dallas in a real stadium, I guarantee you the stadium would be more than 50% the opponents' fans. No one really gives a shit about SMU football. Maybe before the Cowboys existed, but certainly not since the NFL took over eyeballs. Even in their Pony Express cheating heyday, nobody came to the games. It's helpful they moved to that rinky dink on campus stadium that holds a baker's dozen for capacity. It's also helpful they're active in NIL. Maybe they can continue to be competitive. But the level of caring will continue to remain low. Part of it is institutional. It's a small private university. That's just how it is.
  23. You guys are off your fucking rocker.
  24. To replace Blake Gideon I don't think there could be a more apropos replacement than former Texas DB Craig Curry. I'm throwing his name in the hat.
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