MarkInAustin

How many tix were allocated to Texas?

Thanks.

Barry Bonds is the only human I know of whose head size grew as an adult. Ted Williams was the best hitter I have ever seen. Mays was the best baseball player I saw. My parents saw Ruth play in Yankee Stadium. He never had trouble with a fast ball, swinging a ridiculously heavy 42 oz bat. Today he would have been swinging 34 oz at most. Williams spanned eras and lost about 5 seasons to military service. He ate up 96-98 mph fast balls. His worst hitting, which was still better than any of his peers, came against junk.

It is fashionable to want 10+ wins but I want 2+. Beat OU. Beat Aggie. The rest is gravy. Ok, I want all the gravy, too!

Rooster Andrews, 2025 version?

It is a great sport to watch. The Greg is a great venue. But we cannot all fit into Gregory Gym. With the roll-up of LHN into the SEC where will the matches be televised?

Two thoughts - Agree with the Juan Davis talk - thought he made more sense than Gullette, actually. He was an All District QB in HS and has reportedly been a willing blocker. "Too tall", but plenty sturdy and fast enough, with decent hands. TE is deep, and he has proved willing to play on special teams for four years now. H-Back to RB should not be as intensive a learning curve as LB to RB. Colin Page was a terrific HS RB here in Austin - 1700 yards his senior season at Anderson. *** I hope Clark will be OK, fully recovered, no matter how long that takes.

Despite the score in 2013, the NMxSt DL stifled the Texas OL in that game. Texas' greatly superior skill speed still overwhelmed the Las Cruces Aggies. Thus, one could have watched that blowout and yet become very anxious about the remainder of the season. The NMxSt DL will not stifle the Texas OL in 2027.

I counted the same five plus NMxSt as legit opponents, and decided as you did that it is the home schedule that is deficient. I think "John Galt" simply dislikes RT and won't let go of it. Like Bierce, I think playing teams like Rice and UTA would beat the heck out of playing HCU at home, and would provide consistent fun for me at Moody and better team building opportunities as well. IDK why the home schedule sucks except for UConn and NMxSt [not a true feature, but a team with a heartbeat]. I don't think it had to do with fear of losing to mid-level teams; the road and pre-season tourney games put the lie to that. Beard started the downgrading of the home schedule from mid level fillers to bottom feeders, btw, and I had not understood that either..

In the portal era it does not make as much sense to load the pre-conference with tough games as it did in the past. Rick usually had continuity going for him back in the days when UT regularly scheduled half or more of its games against teams that had a heartbeat. Now there is the issue of molding a team from strays. Good, experienced strays, but not ones that have played under fire as a team ever before. That being said, I miss those games against Michigan State and North Carolina.

Wasn't Taaffe the MVP of two HS State Championship games? I marveled watching him against Southlake, wondering how he had not been offered by Texas.

Take away the incentive of graduating college in four years, if ever, and replace it with the incentive to turn pro in one or two and the Duke/Cougar High difference evaporates. A degree from Duke is worth far more than a degree from Houston but a single year at either college is almost meaningless except for prep to play pro ball.

81 next month. Still younger than Biden...

When I watched him win the State Champ game in HS I wrote then that he reminded me of Frank Gifford - RB, QB, WR, DB - and starring all over the field. Most of you never saw Gifford. He was not the very best at anything but he was really good at everything, and made the Pro Bowl at each position he played except backup QB, IIRC. I have watched J-Whitt ever since that game and when healthy he has never disappointed.

If they both want it then it doesn't have to be thought of as a tragedy. We wish them the best.

He will not be handicapped for weighing less than 300# in the MWC.

Did they change the FCS rosters as well? Also, the Sevice Academies are technically all walkons, correct? What was the reason for doing this? Was it a push from the SEC and B1G? This should mean more Title XX scholarships for women, as well - right?

I get the Rose Bowl, but I don't really get Memorial Coliseum. It must have been super improved when it was renovated. Of course, unlike every other football stadium in America, the ones in California seem to be never full. My daughter went to hoops games on campus at UCLA but she never once went to the Rose Bowl and she did not know anyone outside the band members who did. People will brave ungodly heat and humidity in the south and blizzards in the midwest and northeast, but given usually excellent weather UCLA averages a half empty stadium.

There were no NBA level talents on either of our last two teams and the implication that the previous coach "developed" anyone at Texas is unwarranted. NBA level talent is a luxury that is not as important as developing team cohesion over time. Veteran teams, like 2022-3 Texas, will become the norm for the post season as NBA level talent ever more turns pro out of high school.

By all accounts, Gundy is a smart coach with no filter on his mouth and not much sense of society beyond the gridiron. His first instinct was to rally around his ball player. But he could have done so without defending the act of drunk driving. Like Jordan, above, it has been many decades since I have driven impaired, and I and those around me were fortunate that there were no negative consequences. My son has been in recovery and sober for 37 years now, but he caused two collisions before that. In one, he wrecked his mother's daily driver, in another he wrecked both her next daily driver and the Cadillac he hit head on on South Congress. A former son-in-law has never attempted sobriety and has had close scrapes with death and destruction, including a long hospital stretch after he turned over his boss's truck. Frankly, I have been too close to these situations to write off drunk driving as a normalized or even marginally acceptable behavior. Accepting, as I do, human frailty, I can only ask this: If you have ever driven impaired, I implore you to never do so again.

John Harvey story reminds me of the last [old] Anderson HS athlete, Billy Brooks. By 1968 I was Travis County's Juvenile Court Prosecutor. I and the male probation officers would go to Doris Miller Auditorium on Thursday nights to play pick up basketball with Julius Gordon's probationers. Gordon had played ball at Prairie View and back in the day he supervised the black probationers. He would have a group of them come to Doris Miller on Thursday nights and mainly sit in the bleachers where we would take turns helping them with their homework or listening to their problems. Like everyone else, we and Gordon's kids would rotate into games. I never played against Billy Brooks, but I played on the same five with him in a game to eleven [does that count?]. He was not a probationer, but he was the best young three sport athlete in Austin, and the local star at Doris Miller. He moved from [old] Anderson to the now defunct Johnston HS, where he finished up. Brooks, at 15, was then about 6-1 and a chiseled 185# or so. As an OU All American and NFL All Pro wide receiver he was fully grown and bigger, and while a couple of us wanted him to go to Texas and told him so, he was pretty sure he wouldn't. Six years later he beat Texas for OU on a long end around run. He won a Natty for OU [maybe two?]. I wished we could have convinced him to come to Texas. DKR was about to take his first black player in 1968, but Brooks knew that he could go anywhere if he left home, and not have to be a pioneer. Still, by the time Brooks beat us with that end around Texas had some damned good black ball players on the roster [Campbell, Leaks, Clayborn...]. He was a likable and smart kid at 15 and I watched his career blossom with interest.

In the Summer of 1960 I was an almost 17 YO recent HS grad in NJ, destined to go off to Rice on academic scholarship in the fall. I was then 6-2, 172#, and the best guys I ever played against were not in baseball in HS but at night in pick up basketball at the gym in Demarest School. You may never have heard of these guys but they were all pro athletes at some point, a couple were stars. Gary Cuozzo, later Fran Tarkenton's backup QB at Minnesota; Willie Naulls then of the Knicks who would only do shoot arounds; Wally Lamb, later a Giants LB [practice squad, not starter, Jersey guy who went to Purdue]; Dick Lynch, starting CB for the Giants [scored the TD for ND that broke OU's 47 game win streak], and Sherman White, former All American wing barred from the NBA by a college gambling scandal. I never had to directly guard any of them except Lamb. Once, I had White blow by me in the air [on a switch] for a dunk. I was up as high as I could get, figure my hand just a bit above the rim; White tucked his legs as he flew by and I swear his red shoelaces went by my nose. But my worst experience repeated. Lynch would slide over and just take the ball away from me. Every time. I had to get rid of the ball before he got to me. Dick told me that his reaction time had been tested as twice as fast as that of a normal human, and that it allowed him to play corner against guys who were a half-step faster. He could break on a pass as fast as the WR and his hands were faster than anyone's. On the basketball court you just could not see his hands coming. I think he led the league in interceptions while I was in college.

Wow

I was fortunate enough to see him play in college when I was in HS. My dad was a friend of Joe Lapchick, then the St. John's coach. He got us tix for the WVa game in Madison Square Garden. St. John's had a prospective All American wing named Tony Jackson, who was eaten alive by West. After the game, Lapchick told us that two college seniors, West and Oscar Robertson, were going to change the game at guard the way Russ, Wilt, and Pettit had changed it up front. Great athletes were indeed taking over hoops. W.Va had a 6-10 Center named Lloyd Sharrar, but West jumped center. West averaged 13 rebounds a game. West was an octopus on D. In fact, he was 6-3 barefoot; 6-4.5 by modern NBA measurement in shoes. He had 40" sleeves and could jump over the moon. There is a clip on YouTube of him more than a foot over the rim in an NBA game at the age of 35. Aside from pure athleticism what West and Oscar brought to guard play was distance shooting. They averaged around 50% from the floor in the NBA when no guards had ever shot 44% previously. Had there been a three point shot then West would have been the first Steph Curry. Again, you can find a clip of him shooting a 40' shot over Walt Frazier as a buzzer beater, in perfect form. Magic Johnson tells a story about West hitting 25 straight shots from the top of the circle while giving a talk to the assembled Lakers - when West was the Laker GM. I would have played him next to Michael on my imaginary all time team because he was an insane defender as well as a fine lead passer and a very high percentage shooter. The only knock on him? As a first year NBA player he only drove right. But then, after that, he easily went either way. Apparently worked his whole off season on it. He had a rep as the best executive and talent evaluator and as a great guy, as well. I will be 81 in August, and losing West, for me, is like one more reminder of my own mortality. So, again, RIP, Logo.

Mickey Herskowitz on the "Colt 45s" name change to the "Astros": So what we will call them, for short? That was an era when Texas sports writers were simply the best, In Houston, DFW, and SA. And before Craig? There was Kern Tips.