Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.
Congratulations to Texas, who beat Texas Tech yesterday on the baseball field. 12-1! Great win! Really dominated, showed off that pitching depth, stayed within two and a half games of the conference lead.
Unfortunately, this happened this weekend too. Also, this.
College baseball’s funny, a small-sample season in a large-sample sport. There’s a reason the pros play 162 games of this stuff, and while the best college teams do win over 70% of their games (something that does not happen in the major leagues), one win or loss does not make or break you in the thick of the regular season. College baseball’s also emotional, though, and Texas is Texas Tech’s biggest rival, and Kurt Wilson just swirlied the Longhorns in Lubbock twice within 24 hours.
The Texas Tech/Texas rivalry is great, as someone hot and cold on Texas and hot on Texas Tech but only if I notice they’re playing, because Texas Tech has nothing to lose. Texas Tech could get swept in every series in every sport for the next two years and it wouldn’t really affect things. If Texas fans got high and mighty about it, well, yeah—Texas is supposed to do that to Texas Tech. If the reverse happened, though, it would not get old. Every win would provoke the same giddiness. The flipside of Texas Tech having nothing to lose is that Texas has nothing to win.
There’s a lot going on that contributes to this, but an important aspect is that Texas is fighting on a lot more fronts than Tech. Texas has Oklahoma to worry about. Texas has Texas A&M to worry about. Texas has TCU and Baylor and in certain sports Oklahoma State and Kansas to worry about. Texas, at some level, has the whole country to worry about, because Texas is a national brand in a way even Oklahoma is not, and people love to hate on the Horns. Texas has some of the highest expectations of any collegiate athletic department in the country, across the board, and of all the teams who get glee from beating them, none is as fun for an outsider as Texas Tech.
Why is it so fun when Texas Tech, in particular, beats Texas? Part of this is that there isn’t anything actually objectionable about Texas Tech. Lubbock’s not fun? It looked pretty fun in those videos. Tech’s not as good a school as Texas? Congratulations, nerds. Rice has you beat in a landslide on that scoreboard. Baylor and TCU and Texas A&M each have one fundamental, annoying quality. Oklahoma is in a weird spot of being Texas’s big brother in football and little brother (vibe-wise, I don’t know my way around every sport here) everywhere else, which nets out to rough equality. But Texas Tech is just a state school in the panhandle, fired up and ready to celebrate whenever they kick Longhorn ass. And there’s no better way to do that than the way they did it this weekend: first with guile, then with style. Good work, Kurt.
