As we get ready to pay attention to baseball’s winter meetings, I spent most of this weekend paying attention to another sport – football. Specifically, my beloved Texas Longhorns.
How about them Horns? They’re going to the BCS National Championship Game, baby!
I was fixin’ to have a coronary Saturday night when watching the Texas Longhorns/Nebraska Cornhuskers game. My brother (a fellow Texas alum – he graduated from UT’s Law School) and I were on the phone watching the game when Colt McCoy seemed to forget that there was a time clock headed toward zero. I didn’t exactly handle it well – I was screaming “Stop, stop, stop!” on the phone – and at my TV screen!
If the Longhorns had lost their national championship hopes then and there, thanks to literally running out of time, it wouldn’t have been pretty for Texas – or for McCoy.Or for me, for that matter. I figured all the haters would come out of the woodwork and give me a hard time. And Squawker Jon would talk about Nebraska in the same awe-struck tones with which he describes the 2004 Red Sox. Good grief.
Fortunately, the Horns were able to win, thanks to getting that one second back after the referees conferred. And Hunter Lawrence kicked a very tough field goal to win the game – and a chance at the national title.
But some in the media think the Longhorns don’t belong there. ESPN’s Gene Wojciechowski is not happy over the BCS voters picking Texas, writing two columns whining about the subject. He thinks that TCU was more deserving.
Wojciechowski also predicts that Alabama will win the national championship, although he does it in a weaselly way, writing: “My pick? Not positive, but I’m leaning hard toward the Land of Houndstooth.”
Dude, you just spent a gazillion words saying that “the Longhorns are leaving oil marks on the driveway late in the season,” and you’re “not positive” whether Alabama can beat them? Good grief.
And when the Longhorns do win, don’t expect a mea culpa column from Wojciechowski. Remember, this is the guy who repeatedly slammed Joe Girardi for going with a three-man rotation in the World Series, and suggested that Chad Gaudin, not Andy Pettitte, would be a better choice to start Game 6:
If the [three-man rotation] decision works, Girardi will get a borough named after him. If it doesn’t, he’ll get ripped. I’ll beat the rush and say that if he goes through with it, Girardi will be pushing one managerial button too many.
After Game 5, when A.J.Burnett spit the bit, the writer continued berating Girardi for picking Pettitte for Game 6, writing “Just so you know, Pettitte is 5-7 with a 4.18 ERA in 18 career short-rest starts.If we have these stats, so does Girardi. Yet he’s willing to risk the World Series on it.”
Yet after the Yankees won the World Series, with Andy Pettitte as the winning pitcher, he didn’t have a word to say about Girardi’s accomplishment, or about him being right about the three-man rotation. Typical.
I agree with what Houston Astros writer Richard Justice wrote in the Houston Chronicle about Texas:
Winning ugly is still winning. Texas is 13-0. If you’re thinking Texas had no business winning, you’re dead wrong. Texas found a way to win, and in the end, that’s all that matters.
What do you think? Leave us a comment!
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