In olden times, a father’s main duty to his son was to teach the necessary skills for surviving in a cruel world: shooting a buffalo, planting stuff, skinning the family’s pigs, and whatnot … but those were the old days. Today a father’s duties are less clear. With no need to hunt (when I can buy a nice ribeye at Randalls), the Old Man taught me a skill that’s a necessity to the modern sports fan. It requires sharp mental acuity, rabbit-quick reflexes, the ability to adjust to fluid and chaotic conditions, the knowledge that even the best will fail, to take failure and to learn from it, and nerves of steel. What he showed me was how to avoid hearing the score of a game waiting to be viewed later on videotape or network tape-delay.
On the weekend of the Texas-OU game I’m committed to taking my daughter on a college-hunting trip. This in itself is a mistake my Dad would never have made. Important games were clearly marked a year in advance, with engagements planned around these dates. I’m shamed by this lapse, but there it is. With no panic, I scrambled. I improvised. My wife will tape the game, but even Kelly, who’s witnessed the freakish ends I’ll resort to in avoiding a score, she’s still skeptical. Did I really expect to spend 12 hours on Saturday, at a Division III football game with the PA announcer blurting out scores, in airports, passing television after television, hearing people cheer and talk, avoiding the radio and idle talk with chatty strangers, most bound for Austin — did I really think I’d avoid the score?
I do, and I did, but Lord knows it wasn’t easy. By 1am, when we arrive in Austin, I’ve put in a full day’s work. Twice at the airport I put my hands over my ears, began humming like an insane person and lurched away from nice ladies talking to my daughter. A normal teenager might’ve been mortified but, like Kelly, she understands her Dad. Both conversations begin with the words,” Are y’all from Texas?” Both times the next sentence was, “Wasn’t that a great game?”
And for 55 minutes it was. It ended abruptly and shockingly at 3:30am (10 hours after it did for you) with the same two startling events coming in rapid sequential order: Nathan Vasher inexplicably catching a punt on his own 3-yard-line and, a second later, Chris Simms handing the ball to a grateful Sooner linebacker. A tight but winnable game is lost. In no particular order I offer some observations:
1) Simms is well into his junior year but has yet to prove he’s a big-time quarterback. If you hooked Mack Brown up to a polygraph and asked him, “Are you totally sold on Chris Simms?” and he said yes, I maintain the needles would jump off the page. Simms didn’t play a bad game; the four interceptions are misleading. But he didn’t play a good game either — rather a safe and cautious Trent Dilfer kind of game. His one long downfield throw from the muzzle of his vaunted arm was badly underthrown and intercepted. He was, without any question, outplayed by OU’s second-string QB.
2) Brown was outcoached by Stoops. The strutting Texas offense had not a ripple of creativity. Not playing Cedrick Benson was a mistake. There were no worries about Ricky Williams or Earl Campbell being freshman. Oklahoma did just enough on offense — a shovel pass here, occasional but devastating use of the option, and Jason White’s spontaneous scrambling — to keep the Texas defense off balance. Simms is 20, big, strong with two good knees, yet he’s virtually never a threat to run. Never. Is this Brown? Is it Simms? A college QB who won’t or can’t run is very rare and very, very predictable.
3) I’ve never seen players play harder than they do for Stoops.
4) Comments by Coach Brown and the Austin media about how, “At least this year’s an improvement” struck me as quite odd. Please recall that last October UT was a huge favorite against OU and this year a favorite still … yet they lost both times. This moral-victory stuff is embarrassing. Maybe legit for Mike Leach at Tech or Terry Allen at KU, whose programs are crap today and yesterday with nowhere to go but up, but not in Austin.
5) UT has become totally BillSynderized … and this isn’t a good thing. You won’t find a story in the country today that won’t mention UT’s wretched non-conference schedule. ABC’s Gary Danielson and Brent Musburger noted this to a national audience repeatedly. It won’t go away. Texas played a good game and has nothing to be ashamed of, but how can the non-Orangeblood public objectively judge them? If they finish 10-1, they won’t stop hearing about losing to the only good team they played. This nicely defines BillSynderized. Brown has got to drop the Directional Universities from the non-Nebraska-Kansas State years and play some respectable teams, or reap and deserve skepticism about his own.
6) The heavily publicized best receiver corps in the nation, B.J. Johnson and Roy Williams, were rendered useless and invisible in Dallas. Again, Stoops’ creative use of his talent — switching his best receiver, Andre Woolfolk, to play against Williams and consistently using top players on special teams — demonstrates why Stoops is the best coach in the country and again begs the question: Are Johnson and Williams that good, or is Texas Tech that bad?
This article appears in October 12 • 2001.