
statsman
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Good news! The Ohio Stadium says they have upgraded their concessions. They have bbq and Mexican food now! 😂 (I have learned not to eat bbq, Mexican food or Chicken fried Steak north of the Red River)
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I was so sick of mediocrity, I was fine with going after Meyer. (Background: I heard that, in the 2013/2014 search, Jim Harbaugh was approached. His agent said that any suitor needed to know that it would take $10M annually- highest in the nation- to sign him, and Patterson bowed out. I was pissed, because it meant that Texas was still full of hubris, thinking there were a lot of coaches that could succeed here. In my opinion, the proper response to the demand should have been, “That’s do-able. Let’s talk”.) I knew Meyer had a similar high demand. I was so encouraged when I heard that Meyer’s high demand was not a stopper for Texas. Finally, we were serious about this! That didn’t work out. I wasn’t so enthused about Sark. The way I saw it-Saban was the gold standard, and Kirby Smart was his only assistant to recreate the magic elsewhere. I didn’t like Sark’s chances of being the second (I don’t count Fisher, who I see as more off Bowden’s tree than Saban’s). I am very happy to be wrong on this.
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OU Football 2025 - League Average & Loving It
statsman replied to closetojumping's topic in Football
I see where Venables is using Ott as a KR, to get more explosiveness. Awesome! Stoops did that with AD Peterson in the 2006 RRS. He returned the first kick 59 yards. The next three went for a combined 35 yards. If you want to let our special teams gunners tee off on your all American RB, we’re fine with that. (edited: Wow! Joe Jon Finley had two catches for three yards in that game!) -
Meyer is a brilliant strategist, and a great player talent scout (although a lousy judge of character), perhaps because he looks at players as “objects” to do what he tells them to do, and is primarily concerned with their ability to execute his strategies. Briles is even more so on each of those points- strategy, scouting and disdain for character.
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I had forgotten- in 2013, Texas flirted with Briles briefly, before hiring Strong. Supposedly he was contacted for an interview, and he replied that he gave his interview on the field that fall, drumming Mack’s “B12 contender”. Smart. Interview with the big school down the highway, and don’t get the job? And have to recruit against them, while pissing off the guys that pay your salary? Hard pass. That was a screwed up process anyway, from the fucked up timing (thanks, Mack!) to the program sense of entitlement to the idiot running the show.
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Tell me more, if there is more to it than just defending Briles. I think she’s a high strung weirdo, but are there other stories?
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I see a spectrum of behavior between a coach saying, “What you did was wrong, and I fully support law enforcement in bringing you to justice” and “Give me that bloody knife. If I hide it, I can be sure it won’t be found”. In the middle of that spectrum is, “You got yourself into trouble, and if you can get yourself out of trouble, you can still play for me”. That middle spot is where most coaches are. They justify it to themselves in various ways, but it’s really situational ethics.
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Do you think he was a sociopath? I don’t. When asked why he was lenient on misbehaving players, he said he didn’t want to punish the whole team for what one guy did. (Note- the army discovered a long time ago that one way to reform misbehavior is to punish everyone in a unit, except the miscreant.) I see him as having situational ethics (like almost anyone) more than sociopathy.
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I don’t know- I think they were just guys that had more extreme calibrations on the amount of trouble they would tolerate for a given talent level. They knew their star players’ crimes had to be addressed; they just sought the least impact. Plus, Osborne and Stoops would absolutely eject a less talented player that got into trouble. Briles and Meyer didn’t seem to understand what the problem was with what their criminal players did.
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Sure. But I see it this way (and this is not an argument I’m going to continue with; I think you have a very strong point)- Paterno spent decades building an image as college football’s paragon of virtue. That image was the most important thing to him. He probably convinced himself that protecting that image was also protecting PSU. Tragic, really, and the most tragic part is the damage inflicted on the children, and not to Joe Paterno’s image. (I think the historic analog to Sandusky is Lavrenty Beria. He was Stalin’s right hand man, the Russian equivalent to both Dean Acheson and Leslie Groves, and a serial killer/rapist).
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I was listening to Joel Klatt’s podcast, where he was discussing the game with Urban Meyer. Klatt is great- a sharp guy, open about his recovery, enthusiastic about the college game. Meyer came across as weird, like he wasn’t relating to Klatt as a human. Klatt would offer up leading questions, giving Meyer opportunities to wax about past teams and players, and Meyer never bit. Every anecdote was about something Meyer did or said, and the only players’ names were said by Klatt. We know Meyer’s history- he assembled a talented and powerful Florida squad, and was dismayed to see that he had a bunch of bad guys. He dealt with the problem he created by leaving. Arguably, the Florida program never recovered. (I understand that Texas made a serious run at Meyer in 2020). Is Meyer a sociopath? Or does he just have a few sociopathic tendencies? Football coaches, like Army Drill Instructors, see the drilling of young men to and past physical pain as part of the job. I decided to see how many coaches I could place in a list of sociopaths. Art Briles came up next, of course. He built a great team that had a culture building rite of passage where they would roofie a coed and then gang rape her. When he learned of this, his main concern was not getting caught and keeping guys eligible. To this day, he asserts he did nothing wrong. (Baylor still won’t reveal all they know). Switzer had a team blow up under criminal scandal, but I see him as more of a narcissist (which, I understand psychiatrists don’t define as a clinical disorder like they used to?) than a sociopath. Switzer spends too much time in image maintenance, and efforts to convince others that he’s not a bad guy. Meyer and Briles don’t really seem to give a shit what any of us think. Switzer does care. Jackie Sherrill is a really weird dude, but he never had the (human) scandal the others did. He was unconstrained by ethics, was happy to create a fantasy image for himself out of made up stories, but the only human wreckage seems to be the horrorscape of his own tortured psyche. Paterno will come up, because of the awful shit that Sandusky did, and Joe covered up for, but I don’t see him as the same type of weirdo. As I read his story, around 1999, the evidence that his right hand assistant was a monster had piled up so high that it couldn’t be ignored and he retired him. His main sins were supporting a coverup (thereby allowing Sandusky to continue to prey). I see Paterno as more of a cautionary tale- the guy who really wants to be a good guy, but who allows personal weakness and vanity to turn himself into the bad guy. Am I missing any?
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Texas Tech has played in a lot of interesting bowl games, including the Raisin Bowl, the All-American Bowl, the Copper Bowl, the ticket City Bowl, the Meineke Car Care Bowl and the Birmingham Bowl. Nobody knows where any of these bowl games were located, except the Birmingham Bowl (just kidding, I was just too lazy to look it up). They have gone 16-23 in bowl games. They have played in nine Sun Bowls. They have gone 1-8 in Sun Bowl games.
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Quinn "La Joya" Ewers - The Man The Myth The Mullet
statsman replied to Coach pop a bitch's topic in Football
Thank God none of you watched the ‘99 KSU game. We had an OC trying run an offense that he understood as well as Jimbo Fisher understood what he was trying to do, and you’re blaming the QBs. -
Quinn "La Joya" Ewers - The Man The Myth The Mullet
statsman replied to Coach pop a bitch's topic in Football
Simms was a terrific QB. What kind of idiot says otherwise?
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