Living in Austin with little affiliation to the Texas Longhorns is weird. It’s easy to find friends without befriending Longhorn fans. It’s possible to not notice at times that games are going on. It’s also a situation with an accessible bandwagon, on both the love and the hate side of the tracks. The city’s big enough that you don’t have to buy in or reject it, but if you want to do those things, it’s also easy to go that route.
Where we’ve landed, those of us who are Austinites here at The Barking Crow, is a weird situation where we respect UT deeply, admire two thirds of its students, and have a lot of cultural support for the school. But we aren’t wild about Longhorn sports. We’ve written about this elsewhere, but unlike many people who put their best face forward before others and then behave more poorly behind the scenes, the University of Texas at Austin is a much better institution, culturally, than it lets on. With football the tip of the collegiate cultural spear, some of the worst Texas tendencies come out when football is involved. Behind that? Pretty great!
With all of this said, we don’t want Texas to stink. Even when we don’t want them to win, stinking is never the hope. Stinking is no fun. Stinking is something you wish on enemies, and we would never consider Texas our enemy. We’d consider them a sometimes-annoying friend. And what do you want for sometimes-annoying friends? The funniest possibility. Always, the funniest possibility.
In this season’s case, the funniest possibility involves beating Alabama tomorrow. The funniest possibility involves beating Oklahoma in four weeks in Dallas. The funniest possibility—excluding a loss to Wyoming next week, which would rock—involves starting the season 8–0 and then losing enough games over the month of November (the schedule goes vs. K-State, at TCU, at Iowa State, vs. Texas Tech) to miss the Big 12 Championship. That’s what we really want. We want this team to get a number 1 ranking and then crash so hard to earth that Elon Musk claims his tunnel company dug the crater. We don’t dislike the players—I love Quinn Ewers, I have nothing against these kids—but man. It would be so funny.
So, tomorrow? Hook ‘em, baby. Hook ‘em good.
Maybe the NCAA Should Have Rules
The Tez Walker situation sucks. It sucks for Tez Walker. It doesn’t suck for UNC, or if it does, they had it coming, but the Tez Walker situation sucks. Tez Walker was led to believe he’d be able to play. He’s not going to play. Tez Walker seems to have been taken advantage of by North Carolina, with the NCAA’s previous waffling on these exceptions also at fault.
We’ve asked before whether NASCAR and F1 should have rules, given they don’t *really* have rules right now so much as they just make a lot of arbitrary decisions and brace for the blowback. For a long time, the NCAA has tried this policy with all sorts of things. UNC has been one of its biggest beneficiaries on the academic scandal side, getting off scot free for more or less creating a fake major for certain athletes, an act in which they basically called some of their own students too stupid to pass four college classes a semester. Lately, though, the NCAA has been trying to tighten up, trying to get to a place of consistency that also matches what college coaches have been requesting: that the transfer portal can leave some semblance of stability, that fewer cases receive treatment as exceptions, etc. The NCAA has been trying to have rules, and the NCAA has been trying to make those rules be rules college coaches like. Now, they take another step in that direction, enforcing that you can’t transfer twice and play right away, and the reaction is deafening from Mack Brown and a legion of click-hungry college sports content producers, each of whom calls themselves a journalist but eagerly splashes into the waters of opinion, with the exception of Jay Bilas, who simply uses every flashpoint as an excuse to rain bullets down upon the NCAA but at least doesn’t call himself a journalist while doing it. (I believe he even did this with conference realignment, which was very much not an NCAA-driven issue.)
Among the many disingenuous parts of the response to Tez Walker being deemed ineligible is this, and credit to the NCAA spokesperson or lawyer or whoever it was who pointed it out:
If the point of Tez Walker transferring back to the state of North Carolina was to be closer to his family and receive necessary mental healthcare, why does he have to play football this year? If the point is that Walker needs to be close to his family and focusing on his mental health, why is it also so essential that he spends upwards of forty hours a week this semester on team-mandated activities while also traveling six or seven times, slamming his helmeted head into other hard objects repeatedly throughout the four months?
UNC loves double standards and obvious bullshit. They’re the people who’ll call Duke stuck-up and NC State fans hicks. That’s fine, it’s part of the game, plenty of fans do these things. But the prevalence of media members being unwilling to put an ounce of thought into any opinion if the issue at hand has “NCAA” in the title is disappointing. Just because people are used to being upset with the NCAA doesn’t mean the NCAA is always wrong or at fault. And this is coming from a guy who blogs about a tournament the NCAA tried to destroy so harshly that it led to an antitrust lawsuit with a massive settlement.
Is the United States a Bad Sports Town?
In the last 24 hours, American fans have watched Team USA lose in the FIBA World Cup semifinals, somehow applauded Putin’s favorite women’s tennis player beating Madison Keys, failed to produce a hostile enough environment for Ben Shelton to upset Novak Djokovic, and—at least in my case—learned that we didn’t qualify for the Rugby World Cup.
This sucks.
Obviously, the FIBA loss is Adam Silver’s fault. If anything bad is happening with regard to basketball, it probably traces back to Adam Silver or the NCA* *********t (Adam Silver did go to Duke, you know). If Adam Silver had fostered an environment as commissioner where basketball players most liked playing basketball, we would not have to send our C-squad to Manila. Instead, our men will be playing Canada for the bronze medal. I thought playing Canada *was* the bronze medal.
On the rugby side, I have less to say. I understand why we’re trying to push for Rugby Sevens. In light of this, I’m also starting to realize why we’re amping pickleball so hard. We suck at tennis. Why not try to replace it with something where we might have an advantage because nobody plays?
With the tennis crowd, though, it’s on all of us. The US Open needs to be a pro-American environment. This is New York City, dammit! You guys shouldn’t have to watch Al Qaeda fly planes into your buildings to start a USA chant.
I don’t need the crowd to be hostile tomorrow during the women’s singles championship match. I don’t need multiple fans to be ejected for yelling during Aryna Sabalenka’s serve about the atrocities her country is helping commit in Ukraine. I don’t need the crowd to cheer so loudly for Coco Gauff that it disrupts teatime over in the Hamptons. But you know who does need that? George Washington, and every other American who risked or gave their life so that we could talk shit towards other countries, especially the ones so in favor of raping and pillaging.
Jake Sanderson: Sen Forever
The Senators signed Jake Sanderson to an 8×8 deal, meaning he’s with the Sens for eight more years and they’ll pay him eight million dollars each of those seasons. It’s a big contract by NHL standards.
Sanderson grew up in Whitefish, Montana, which is one of the coolest places in the world. He played in college at North Dakota, in Grand Forks, which is one of the coolest places in the world to play college hockey. He now plays for the Ottawa Senators, which is the coolest organization in the world for whom to play professional hockey. And he’ll get to do it for a long, long time.
My understanding of the deal is that it’s big and exciting but that it also might make it harder to get Shane Pinto signed while staying under the salary cap, and that the Sens might have to trade Pinto? I caught a whiff of that. I might have it wrong. Either way, it sounds like the message there is that the Sens are in business! No salary floor concerns. It’s salary cap season in Ottawa. The foot is on the gas, or the petrol or whatever they say up there.
Joe Kelly: Earthquake Time
Joe Kelly begins his rehab assignment tonight, pitching for the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes. He’s rehabbed with these guys before, and it was a lot of fun. I think his house might be in Rancho Cucamonga (I found his address one time by accident I swear it was by accident I was looking for information on his rehab outing and his home address popped up).
It’s a good time for Joe Kelly to be getting healthy, because Walker Buehler isn’t going to make it back in time for October and Mookie Betts was on crutches yesterday, and if there are two things Joe Kelly can do, it’s pitch and play center field. The second base part of Betts’s responsibilities would be harder, but Joe Kelly was a center fielder at UC Riverside. He can definitely do it for the Dodgers if asked. Don’t be surprised to see him bat leadoff tonight in addition to starting the game. Don’t be surprised to see Joe Kelly hit an inside-the-park home run against the Visalia Rawhide.
(Question: Can Joe Kelly pitch for Rancho Cucamonga in the playoffs next week, if the rehab assignment’s still going on? Can major leaguers do rehab assignments during the minor league playoffs?)
Anthony Rizzo’s Still Got It
God bless this guy. One or two days removed from getting shut down for the year in the worst season of his life since he had cancer, and he’s got his rookie’s back:
Love that man.
