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Stoops under pressure for OU-Texas 2008
by David Whitney - Monday Oct 06, 2008 College football produces some of the great rivalries in sports. Army-Navy, Ohio State-Michigan, Florida-Georgia. Many times, the intensity of the rivalries eclipses the quality and consequence of the games themselves. But this year, its almost impossible to overstate the importance of the midseason heavyweight match that will unfold this Saturday in Dallas, as Oklahoma and Texas renew the Red River Riot.
And "Riot" may never be more apt than in this edition of this corndog-laden rivalry, returning once again to the traditional confines of the Texas State Fair and a grandly remodeled Cotton Bowl, now ready to serve host to some 16,000 additional Sooners and Longhorns.
Never mind that both are unbeaten and ranked in the top five. Never mind that each team sports a Heisman-caliber quarterback. Never mind that the winner has the inside track to Big 12 South division, or that winning removes a huge obstacle in a path toward a possible national championship.
This game is a square-jawed battle of wills between Bob Stoops and Mack Brown. And despite the fact that Stoops' Sooners enter the fight as a 6-point favorite, it may be that Brown finds himself holding the intangibles necessary to pull off the upset.
Since Stoops arrived in Norman, he's seemed to hold the magic eight-ball of answers to whatever Brown has been able to throw his way. Entering his tenth OU-Texas game, Stoops has found himself on the wrong end of the scoreboard only three times, leaving Mack Brown gasping for answers. Yet despite Oklahoma's win over Texas in 2007, four straight BCS bowl losses have more recently colored Stoops' career, including an epic loss to Boise State only two years removed from an epic beatdown at the hands of USC. Now, with Brown's title only three years removed, the questions have shifted to Stoops, wondering how and why he seems to have lost the edge that brought a national title to Norman in his second year.
Stoops takes an unbeaten and #1-ranked team into the Cotton Bowl for the first time in five years. While everyone seems to ask whether this Oklahoma team has regained the swagger of teams past, no one seems to give Texas much more than a fleeting chance at an upset. And darned if that might not be exactly just how Mack Brown wants it.
Brown reinvented his approach to players in order to allow Vince Young to guide the Horns to a 2005 national championship. Now it seems Brown has reinvented his approach to the game itself as he enters October. Working stridently to put numerous off-field problems behind him, Brown has adopted his own folksy version of an unstated "no excuses" mantra to put together a decidedly blue-collar edition of the Longhorns that seem to enter Dallas with nothing to lose, but everything to gain. Injuries have sacked Texas of their top two tight ends, but still McCoy is running a show that has Texas fans hopeful and Brown optimistic.
Texas entered the 2008 campaign virtually unnoticed by national media, with quarterback Colt McCoy coming off an injury-laden and marginally productive sophomore season. Combine that with the loss of running back Jamaal Charles to the NFL and the subsequent loss of their top two tight ends to injury, and you had a stage custom-cut for a "what if" season in Austin. But Brown is having none of it. He has reinvigorated a defensive unit with the leadership of Will Muschamp, allowing a young secondary to mature while the guys in the trenches have notched 17 sacks in the last three games. That Muschamp architected the LSU defense that shut down Oklahoma's Jason White in the 2003 BCS title could hardly be deemed a coincidence. Even with a #5 ranking, Texas seems to enter the Cotton Bowl with the freewheeling attitude of a team without great public expectations, and absent the pressures that go with them. This year, the pressure is on Stoops to prove he has a true title contender on his hands.
Stoops enters OU-Texas 2008 with a #1-ranked team for the first time in five years, but one that has not yet had to play four full quarters. It has relied on quarterback Sam Bradford's seemingly uncanny ability to rabbit-punch overmatched opposition into submission by getting the ball to any one of a half-dozen potential targets in an offense that no one has completely shut down - at least not until offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson simply calls off the dogs. Before TCU could settle itself in for a blitzkrieg attack on Bradford, it found itself in a 21-0 hole; before quarterback Robert Griffin could even get in a Baylor bluff on Oklahoma's defense, the Bears were in a 28-0 first-quarter hole. That alone could suggest that if Texas survives the first quarter, or even applies a counterpunch, their chances of pulling off the upset improve dramatically.
Could Oklahoma enter Dallas as a top-ranked team with a glass jaw? Will Texas force Oklahoma to play a coherent game past the first fifteen minutes? Will Colt McCoy as the Longhorns' leading rusher prove to make Texas' offense a one-dimensional sitting duck for Oklahoma's defense? Will Oklahoma's sometimes wretched special teams play put Bradford and the juggernaut Sooner offense in a hole? Can Texas pull off an upset and put themselves in the national title picture, or will Oklahoma claim its seventh win in the last nine games of this storied series, and affirm its #1 national ranking?
Fortunately, none of the answers are obvious, but all the answers will come this Saturday, after what could be one of the very best games this century-plus old series has put together.
And isn't that just what rivalry games are supposed to be about?
Better go get my corny dogs now.
The Alchemy of Hype
by David Whitney - Sunday Sep 28, 2008 Alchemists used to promise riches for the promise of converting coal into diamonds.
These days, alchemists aren't scientists trying to create riches out of rocks; they're media types trying to create week-at-a-time football dynasties out of their own week-at-a-time hype. Heaven knows that if we could convert hype into money, the college football media world could quite possibly have saved the world's financial market crisis in just the first four weeks of the season.
In that time, we've created a preseason darling (Georgia), who was dethroned before they lost, then lost just to prove the machine wrong. We've anointed one team the "best ever" (USC) with its "clear" Heisman favorite quarterback (Mark Sanchez) before they lost to an unranked Oregon State team. We've manufactured distance between the Big 12 and the SEC by virtue of the SEC's "gritty defense" just before Florida and Ole Miss combined to score 61 points, Alabama and Georgia rolled up 71, and LSU and Mississippi State rolled up 58 points of their own.
Now, by virtue of USC's fall from grace, and Georgia's abject refusal to accept it, yet another high-profile school takes the dubious distinction of #1 in the land. Oklahoma, for the first time in five years, now ascends to the lofty top spot, if for no other reason than to energize the media in a dizzying frenzy to build them up just watch them fall, like a stack of meticulously laid out dominoes to be tripped gleefully by a malevolent kid.
Isn't it about time someone called a halt to the nonsense?
The grand point in all this self-perpetuating hype is that we know essentially nothing about the best teams in the land, except that they're all pretty good, they all have some kind of weakness, and there's a decent chance some or all of them will have at least one loss before the season unwinds.
So, someone tell me what, exactly, is the point of declaring someone #1 before the first Saturday in October has even hit the calendar?
If you said, "There is none," congratulations. You win the title of "Master of the Obvious."
The BCS, for all its loathsome championship-by-anointment hypocrisy, has one thing right. They don't release their first poll until the fifth week of the season.
Its high time the rest of the media machine that watches college football followed suit.
Lets face it; pre-season polls are 2/3 conjecture and 1/3 entrenched bias. We rate Ohio State higher than Boise State because we "know" Ohio State is better. We rate Georgia a pre-season #1 ahead of USC because we just "know" Georgia is better, and who cares if we can't put our finger on anything tangible to justify it. We've listened to our own gospel for so long, we accept it as fact, and perpetuate the (lack of) logic in to the regular season, where we prove we don't really believe what we're preaching to ourselves.
Just as arbitraily as Georgia was voted #1, they were dropped and USC put in its place because it hopped a plane, traveled across country, and stomped a hapless Virginia team by seven touchdowns. We just didn't want to acknowledge that Virignia might lose to most California high school teams by a similar margin. That Georgia went out and collapsed in their silly black shirts to ratify their loss in stature ran afoul of the promise that the Dawgs would reclaim the top spot after their presumed thumping of the Tide was completed. Too bad Alabama and Nick Saban didn't get that memo. In the end, polls this early in the season amount to something worse than a shot in the dark, an economy as false as the bad mortgage debt about to get stuck in the taxpayers' back pockets; yet we seem ever more willing to buy the packages of bad September hype built around schools slating strings of double-directionals for their pre-conference stat packages.
Now comes Oklahoma, unbeaten and unchallenged in four games, its offense looking like a threshing machine. But what do we really know about the Sooners? Until conference play rolls around, and the likes of Texas, Kansas, and possibly Missouri show up across the sidelines, Oklahoma is a really good team, but largely an unknown quantity. Is this to discount the Sooners' 50-point-per-game offense? No. But do we know Oklahoma is better than Missouri? Or Alabama? We know at least Alabama has played a conference game, while the Sooners first such test arguably won't come for two weeks (no, Baylor doesn't count) against the Longhorns.
The point is we don't know. Not yet. And until we come up with a body of work that at least allows us to convince ourselves we know something about these teams we rack and stack from 1 to 25 beyond what ESPN tells us to believe, we've got no business pretending that we do.
How does it work? Its astonishingly simple. Establish, as policy, that neither the AP, the Coaches poll, nor the Harris poll will be released until at least the 5th week in the season. Some would say that the intensely competitive media business around college football makes that impossible; yet some wondered how the AP poll would remain relevant after they pulled themselves out of the BCS.
This would force the college hype machine to focus less on who is rising or falling, less on the anointment of pre-season dynasties and Heismans, and more on the games being played, and perhaps even moreso on the increasing number of early-season patsies on which these gaudy out-of-conference resumes are being padded. And when those teams are racked-and-stacked, it can be based more on reality, and less on hype.
Alchemists made their living on part science, part philosophy, part religion, and part on the aura of their own hype. Taking away the false economy of early season polls won't stop the hype, but it might serve to produce a better quality hype - one based more in fact, not reality, one wherein legends aren't built one week merely for the sake of covering their their demise the next; one wherein we gain for ourselves an ever clearer picture of who really is the best in the land.
And the alchemists can go back to turning coal into diamonds.
Good luck with that.
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