Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.
It all starts with a parking boot.
You know college football’s getting close when a player gets arrested, and you know it’s going to be a good year when the player is arrested for swinging a tire iron at the parking boot affixed to his car until said parking boot shatters. Agiye Hall, thank you for the unofficial kickoff to what we can only hope will be a very Agiye fall.
This is, one hundred percent, the best case for Texas. So far. You didn’t bring Hall in to keep things quiet. You didn’t bring Hall in to keep his head down and catch passes. You brought Hall in with the hope that he would be himself, and who is Agiye Hall? By all indications he’s an extraordinarily talented receiver with a mischievous streak, which is probably why his charge was literally “criminal mischief.”
For those unfamiliar with Hall, he exited Alabama last spring after an underwhelming freshman year. A top-100 recruit, he wasn’t a primary option in the Crimson Tide’s offense, and at one point responded to this by tweeting, “nah, calling it quits” on the heels of a blowout win over Mississippi State. He didn’t, at the time, call it quits, but come April, he was suspended for what Nick Saban described as a violation of team rules. Now, he’s at Texas.
Clearly, the man is going to get up to things. And if those things involve beating a parking boot to death? Well, back when our cultural ancestors did that, we called it the Boston Tea Party. The risk with Hall is that he’ll go the Antonio Brown route, which runs along no rails. As long as he’s breaking boots, liberating tires from the oppressive constrictions of the University of Texas at Austin’s parking cops, he’s not on the Antonio Brown route. Which is why we called this the best case. You know Agiye Hall is going to engage in some shenanigans. What you hope is that those shenanigans are ridiculous and harmless and infrequent enough that he only spends two or three games a season in street clothes.
We don’t know what this season will hold for Texas football. We don’t know who will start at quarterback, we don’t know if the offensive line will be any good, we don’t know if the team will provide any shred of hope for 2023, or if all of the efforts in the hope department will have to revolve around Arch Manning. What we do now know is that in the litany with which we remember this Longhorns year—the one that last year peaked with, “a coach’s girlfriend’s pet monkey bit a child”—we will begin with the parking boot.
Welcome back, college football.
