I love the NFL, but I generally truly dislike college football. It’s sloppy. The tackling is atrocious, the playcalling worse. It’s typically unfair. The disparity between matchups on the field is tremendous, and far too many games end up being 60-3 blowouts.
All that being said, last night’s game was like watching television for 4 hours with not enough oxygen in the room.
My brother, who is a huge UT fan, points out that perhaps the problem was that I went to the University of Texas during the John Mackovic years (motto: Every Team Needs a Prima Donna, Why Not The Coach?) Those were painful years of football, as UT struggled to gain a modicum of respectability. Even worse, Texas A&M was good at the time, making every Thanksgiving with my uncle an insufferable episode of school bashing*. My brother, on the other hand, went during the Mack Brown and Ricky Williams (motto: Don’t Ask Me About My Munchees, and We’ll Get Along Fine) years, so he’s gotten to watch UT from a different perspective – a good team that can’t get over the hump.
I watched last night’s game over at my bro’s place. It was, on one hand, everything I hate about college ball – sloppy, inconsistent, glaring mismatches. Put shortly, any football game with 80 points and 1000+ yards is not particularly fine football. But it was mesmerizing.The game had everything. A defensive struggle the first half. An offensive shootout the second. Three 4th and 1s where the defense held. 6 lead changes. Three or four controversial calls, split roughly evenly. Two ill-advised laterals, one that worked (due to a blown call by the ref), and one that killed the momentum. A spectacular interception.
The low point involved Texas going down by two scores on a play where one of Texas’ defenders leaves the game with a friggin’ broken arm. At that point, you could have stuck a fork in ‘em. I would have sword that UT would give up, and end up losing by 28. Instead, UT manages to march down the field for a score, make a critical defensive stand (more impressive in that they hadn’t stopped USC the entire second half to that point), and then complete the comeback on a 4th and 5 Touchdown with 22 seconds left. Incredible.
On the way back to my place last night, I detoured downtown to get a look at the tower, which is lit up orange every time we win the championship. The streets were parking lots of honking and cheering, like a riot in slow motion. I wandered the backroads of campus and found a parking lot with a clear view of the tower and just looked at it for a couple of minutes.
I still hate college football, mind you. But it’s funny how pride in your alma mater can kick in when they do something right.
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* My uncle has had other plans and hasn’t been able to join our family for the last 4-5 Thanksgivings. Odd, that.
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