Usually, SEC fans cheer for the SEC. It’s an acquired habit, I think, one they developed back when the conference was a little off in the football department for a stretch last decade but Alabama’s national dominance kept that trend from becoming a narrative. Usually, SEC fans cheer for the SEC, rooting for things like, for example, an all-SEC College World Series, which was by one definition (the one that counts Texas and Oklahoma as SEC schools) 7/8ths on the table yesterday. Yesterday, though, SEC fans did not cheer for the SEC. Yesterday, SEC fans did not cheer for a 7/8ths-SEC College World Series. Yesterday, SEC fans cheered for…Notre Dame?
Such was the power of the 2022 Tennessee baseball team’s villainy. These guys were such “punks” (to use my high-school-baseball-coach cousin’s word) that they made their own tribe hate them. These guys were such punks that they made their own tribe cheer for the most hated college, all-time, in the country. These guys were such punks that they made bat flips uncool in 2022.
Tennessee was a great villain, and they deserve credit for this. Outrageously dominant by the standard of their sport, they were loud about it, ignoring the agreed-upon social-contract consequences for arguing balls and strikes, acting as though they were immune from the randomness of baseball and therefore legitimately invincible, and flipping the bird to what may have been the entire rest of the world after at least one long ball. Were they a team in the same societal place in, say, Indonesia, and Netflix made a documentary about their sport, a big chunk of American fans would love these guys. Objectively, they were entertaining.
The problem was, at least in part, that they played too many teams.
When you make every team you play hate you, you can’t play too many teams, and Tennessee made every team they played hate them. (To be fair, the SEC doesn’t actually hate Notre Dame. The SEC and Notre Dame understand each other; Greg Sankey and Jack Swarbrick are on the same page about the future of college sports; if the SEC ever broke off from the NCAA cold-turkey, they would invite Notre Dame to join. But most Notre Dame fans don’t know this, and you can bet your ass most SEC fans don’t know this either. It’s not the most unnatural friendship of convenience, but it’s a weird one. SEC fans cheering for Kansas State or Washington State to beat Tennessee would’ve made much more sense.) But the thing I’m coming back to on this is…this was *Tennessee.* This wasn’t Alabama. This wasn’t Georgia. This wasn’t LSU, or Auburn, or Florida, or even Kentucky, whose status capital comes from a different sport but still makes them notorious within their league. It wasn’t one of the programs who’ve made the SEC into *the SEC* in its current form, and it wasn’t one of the don’t-make-as-much-sense ones like Mizzou or Vanderbilt or Texas A&M. It was Tennessee, a school who hasn’t been a big factor in the SEC where it counts in roughly two decades. It’s not like a hypothetical where the whole SEC turned on South Carolina, but it’s close to that. Which provokes a few questions.
The first is how obnoxious Tennessee fans were during the Phillip Fulmer era. Has this latent hate been simmering within the hearts of Mississippians since 1998?
The second is whether Tennessee is the lowest on the SEC totem pole. After all, it has to be somebody, right?
There’s gratitude within SEC fans, acknowledged or unacknowledged, for the schools which carry the banner. The SEC is beholden to Nick Saban, and to Kentucky’s basketball culture, and to LSU boosters and to the charm of Athens and to the anti-societal tendencies of Urban Meyer and to whoever it was who (allegedly) got Cam Newton his money. There’s even cause for gratitude to Vanderbilt for giving the conference a premier academic school, and to Texas A&M for breaking the SEC into the largest college sports culture in the world, and you could argue to Mississippi for being the SEC school most emblematic in its Greek culture of what it means to be “SEC” on campus (the “Ole Miss girlfriend, Ole Miss boyfriend” meme). But Missouri, Mississippi State, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Tennessee do not pull their weight, and it seems Tennessee is currently the loudest of those five. Maybe this is why everyone gets so giddy when their football program self-destructs every time they get close to figuring it out again. Missouri isn’t hurting anybody. Arkansas’s getting better. Mississippi State and South Carolina aren’t particularly loathsome to anyone but their rivals, and honestly, I don’t know who considers South Carolina a rival right now. Tennessee threw condiments at Lane Kiffin and fostered a baseball team that is legitimately the most hated in college baseball history, given how widely and closely-followed the sport currently is compared to its historical context.
SEC fans might hate Tennessee. And I mean “hate,” not “lose to regularly and think they hate.”
Texas Is Also Going to Omaha
In a funny twist, because some Tennessee fans think they’re rivals with Texas due to both states starting with a ‘T’ (this is often news to Texas fans, who don’t know Tennessee exists), the Texas Longhorns, who were originally supposed to be the best baseball team in the country, are College World Series-bound. In the process of unpacking this for Bevo’s Fake Nuts earlier (Texas is almost definitely going to have to play at least one of its two biggest rivals in an elimination game at some point), I realized something:
What if Chris Beard isn’t who Shaka Smart should replace at Texas?
What if Shaka Smart should be hired to coach the football team?
Beard is, objectively, doing a lot better than Steve Sarkisian. Smart is, objectively, the last coach to win a national championship at Texas in a big-money sport.
It adds up.
Courtney Ramey: Arizona
In another this-blog-from-2019-through-2021 throwback, Courtney Ramey is transferring to Arizona. My impression of Ramey was that he was Texas’s best shooter, Texas’s most aggressive defender, and the Texas player both most likely to start a fight and most likely to win a fight. I hope those talents serve him well in Tucson. I liked this guy.
They’re Gonna Let Him Go to Rehab
Per my ESPN Fantasy app, per James Fegan of The Athletic Joe Kelly threw a simulated game yesterday “and could be activated next week.” The app continues, “He will on (sic) a rehab assignment with Triple-A Charlotte to begin the week.” Unfortunately, since this was published on a Sunday, it is unclear if that means Kelly could be activated this week or next week now that it is either the same week as yesterday or a brand new week. The “this week”/“next week” thing, much like the use of the prefix “bi” in front of words like “weekly” and “monthly,” is something the English language has yet to fully settle within itself.
Pitbull Is Crushing It in NASCAR
Pitbull is a part-owner of Trackhouse Racing, the outfit which won its third race of the season yesterday at Sonoma as Daniel Suárez became the first driver from Mexico to win a NASCAR Cup Series event. Trackhouse has now won twice on road courses and once on a superspeedway, and Ross Chastain and Suárez have both been consistently competitive on all sorts of tracks—especially Chastain, who’s currently second in points. This is good for NASCAR for two reasons, and good for us for one:
The NASCAR reasons are that 1) there’s finally a little legitimate new blood in the sport, with a team that does things differently from the established players both enjoying success and doing it with two of the most personable drivers on the circuit, neither really from the carbon-copy mold so many of the sport’s drivers fill; and 2) Latin America is a big, big market for sports.
Our reason is basically the same as that first reason for NASCAR: This is entertaining, and NASCAR has failed too often to be entertaining recently.
Dammit, IndyCar
IndyCar had another great race yesterday—not as mentally stimulating as Belle Isle, but a competitive race, by open-wheel standards, on a road course that’s as pretty as you could ask one to be, if you’re into scenic, natural road courses. Is IndyCar too competitive? I’d say yes. The races are so wide-open and the personas are so similar that it’s hard to casually follow. The bigger issue, though, is all the damn breaks. They’re off for the rest of the month now. I’m guessing this has more to do with TV coverage than their own preferred cadence, but it still stinks. Just as it was fitting into our groove, it takes two weekends off and then returns on a holiday weekend when we won’t be paying much attention to sports.
Dammit, Formula 1
I got up early to do some work during the Baku race and I was 1) too sleepy to do much work and 2) immensely bored. There were three exciting things that happened during the race—Sergio Pérez jumping Charles Leclerc off the start, both of Ferrari’s cars self-destructing, and Red Bull ordering Pérez to stand down and let Max Verstappen win after Jos Verstappen criticized Red Bull in the days preceding the race for not letting his son win more often. To be fair, Verstappen was going to win either way, making the Red Bull call make sense from a competitive standpoint in the constructor standings, but at the same time: F1 is a sport that cuts a lot of corners when it comes to being a legitimate competition in the name of entertainment, and Red Bull already has the constructor title wrapped up, with Mercedes pulverizing Lewis Hamilton’s tailbone and Ferrari incapable of keeping its cars on the racetrack. Let ‘em race, guys.
Going back to a point from last week: I still think F1 should’ve brought back last year’s exploding tires for this one. At least keep ‘em in reserve and them tell the teams they have to switch to those if the race is too boring. Again, you were willing to arbitrarily decide the most exciting championship in years. You can make some tires explode to spice things up a little bit.
I do wonder, with more drivers opting out of Drive to Survive and nothing competitive going on this season on the track unless Ferrari or Mercedes resurrects itself, whether the F1 fad in America might be peaking. I don’t think this would be bad for the Austin or Las Vegas or even Miami events (Miami’s race location is terrible, but we’ve tolerated that with the Orange Bowl for years now), and it would make F1 a lot less annoying, with the fans who’ve been fans for a long time regaining their footing in the discourse and probably pointing out stuff the rest of us don’t notice because we’re too busy yelling, “MAKE THE TIRES EXPLODE AGAIN,” while we try to blog before our puppy wakes up and/or it’s time to go to church.
Bye Bye, Burnleyers
It’s officially official. Ben Mee and James Tarkowski are leaving Burnley. Tarkowski is still expected to end up at Everton, with Mee’s destination more up in the air. Both are on expiring contracts, and I think both will be missed, though it was funny how Burnley made it a point in all their communications about it to mention that Tarkowski was leaving no matter what. I don’t think they would’ve done that if it didn’t make Mee look even more loyal. Mee really was the man at Burnley.
Also leaving are Aaron Lennon, Dale Stephens, Erik Pieters, Phil Bardsley, and Joel Mumbongo. Stephens’s departure feels like the end of an experiment that never worked—a move for making a move’s sake back during the Garlick era. Lennon’s makes sense—he turned out to be a great pickup, but he can play in the Premier League and therefore he should. Pieters was a real mensch for the Clarets on the field in more than one big moment—guy you could count on, if I remember correctly. I don’t have a ton of memories of Bardsley, but his name was vaguely similar to Burnley and more than once in the earlygoing I was wary of accidentally calling Burnley “Bardsley,” similarly to how I was afraid of calling Burnley “Barnsley.” Mumbongo was a U23 player who never worked out.
It does still sound like Matěj Vydra could be extended, though he doesn’t figure to factor into this coming season as he rehabs his knee. Jack Cork is evidently also still a possibility for next year. Jack Cork and Ashley Barnes, man. Just feel like Burnley.
Fargo’s On a Roll
Fargo got through another stay at the boarder without massive colonic distress. She’s sleeping next to me on the couch as I blog here. We’re leaving town again a few more times between now and August, so the poor gal’s going to have a bit of a lonely summer, but we’ve got friends keeping her this next week while we’re gone, and she’s always so sweet for a few days after we get back. Hopefully we successfully follow through on our attempt to get her well-trained enough and accustomed enough to traveling that we really can bring her to Arizona for Thanksgiving, as is the current plan. Regardless, God bless the veterinarians who got her to this point health-wise after that awful stretch this winter. She’s really in a good place.
Joe Maddon’s Ill-Timed Mohawk
Evidently, Joe Maddon went back to what got him here as he tried to break the Angels’ losing streak last week. He got a mohawk, the same hairstyle that led the Rays to the 2008 American League pennant.
He was fired before anyone saw it.
You Won’t Be Laughing When…
At the end of a disastrous weekend for the Cubs, Frank Schwindel was on the mound, and here’s the thing about the Cubs losing so badly that they’re having position players pitch not infrequently:
When they find out Jonathan Villar’s been able to throw 95 with movement this whole time, it’s not gonna be so funny for the haters.
***
Viewing schedule, today/tonight:
4:00 PM EDT: UConn @ Stanford, Game 3 (ESPN2)
7:30 PM EDT: Auburn @ Oregon State, Game 3 (ESPN2)
If Oregon State and Stanford both lose, The Alliance will have just one team in the College World Series, and that team will be Notre Dame? Or will The Alliance have no teams in the College World Series?
8:05 PM EDT: Padres @ Cubs (MLB TV)
I’m not cheering for Yu Darvish, but I’m close.
9:00 PM EDT: Celtics @ Warriors, Game 5 (ABC)
Will the Celtics get wise and replace Jayson Tatum with someone with great NIT experience? Perhaps Juwan Morgan? The assumption is yes.
