Category Archives: Texas Sports

TCU and Baylor Flying High in AP Preseason Poll

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Texas and Texas A&M – not so much.  Ohio State pulls off a first ever sweep of the 61 first place votes up for grabs in the AP Preseason Top 25.  TCU ranks second and Baylor (despite current travails) is in fourth place in the meaningless annual preseason exercise.  Ohio State has been top-ranked 7 other times at the beginning of the season and has never won the national championship in any of those years.

Texas comes in unranked but in 38th place in the voting with a mighty 3 points.  A&M lands just outside the rankings with 61 points in 26th place.

The Longhorns at least have a chance to move up quickly when they face Notre Dame in South Bend on Labor Day weekend.  The Aggies also would get a huge boost from beating a highly regarded Arizona State team in the Texas Kickoff Classic at NRG Stadium in Houston on September 5  and probably would move into at least 15th place.   As usual, most of the top 25 play the typical first game assortment of lower division patsies, perennial doormats and conference weak sisters.  A handful of the top 25 may face actual tests in the first week.  Notable matchups other than Texas v. Notre Dame and A&M v. Arizona State include:

No. 1 Ohio State at Virginia Tech

NO. 2 TCU at Minnesota

And the likely game of the week in  No. 3 Alabama v. No. 20 Wisconsin

Is Art Briles a Liar?

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USA Today remains on the case of soon to be embattled Baylor Head Football Coach Art Briles.  In a press conference, Briles denied any knowledge of the trouble and violent past of Sam Ukwuachu who was dismissed from the Boise State program after attacking his girlfriend.  Washington Coach Chris Petersen calls Briles out on that one.  According to Petersen, he personally called Briles to inform him about the potential danger with Ukwuachu.

Washington head coach Chris Petersen issued a statement Friday saying that he informed Baylor’s Art Briles about why defensive end Sam Ukwuachu was dismissed at Boise State.

“After Sam Ukwuachu was dismissed from the Boise State football program and expressed an interest in transferring to Baylor, I initiated a call with coach Art Briles. In that conversation, I thoroughly apprised Coach Briles of the circumstances surrounding Sam’s disciplinary record and dismissal,” said Petersen, who was Boise State’s coach at the time.

Briles said in a news conference Friday morning that he had no knowledge of Ukwuachu’s violent past at Boise State.

Fire Art Briles Now!

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USA Today excoriates Baylor Head Football Coach Art Briles for taking in Sam Ukwuachu when there was strong evidence that he was a danger to the young women on campus.  Ukwuachu was dismissed from Boise State after viciously attacking his girlfriend.  The sad tale came to an end when Ukwuachu was convicted after raping a Baylor student.  If Briles knew all this and let young women at Baylor be exposed to Ukwuachu then he is indeed a scumbag who should be fired immediately.

When Art Briles recruited Sam Ukwuachu to Baylor University, he turned every female on campus into a potential victim. When Briles’ superiors signed off on bringing the talented defensive end to Waco, they tacitly approved of putting students in harm’s way.

It was all right there in the most basic of investigations into Ukwuachu’s exit from Boise State, when he was dismissed from the program in May 2013 because he attacked his girlfriend. Despite the clear warning signs of violent behavior, Baylor had brought Ukwuachu into their community because, by golly, he sure could help the pass rush. Five months later, all that had really changed about Ukwuachu’s tendencies was the venue.

On Thursday, in a district court in Waco, Ukwuachu was found guilty of sexually assaulting a former Baylor women’s soccer player, who was 18 and in her first semester of college in October 2013 when the big-shot football transfer twice her size attacked her.

Maybe if she had been warned that the Baylor football player in her tutoring sessions once became so crazed during a domestic dispute at Boise that he broke a window, she wouldn’t have even been in position to be in his apartment that night. Maybe if Briles, athletics director Ian McCaw and school president Ken Starr had looked at his background and realized Ukwuachu didn’t belong at Baylor, she wouldn’t have had to go get a rape kit the next morning.

Astros Baseball

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Red likes baseball but going to more than 5 or 6 games a season starts to seem like work.  Red was out at Minute Maid Park for the second time this season to see the suddenly stagnant Astros against the Detroit Tigers.  But even though they lost, Saturday night was fun because they welcomed back the 2005 NL Champions.  That will be the first and only National League Pennant the ‘Stros will ever win barring another realignment.  Red shares some random observations with the loyal readers:

  1. Luis Valbuena is pretty darn good defensive first baseman. Too bad defensive first basemen are a dime a dozen and there are too many nights when LV can’t hit his way out of a paper bag.
  2. Preston Tucker seemed to catch Ian Kinsler’s sinking line drive to end the 5th inning.  When the call was overturned on replay, the umpire determined that the baserunner would likely have scored from second and the Tigers took a 1-0 lead and the Astros defense was called back into the field.  How do you make a credible determination in real time that the runner would have scored?  If Tucker had come up throwing instead of trying to sell the catch, it could have been a close call at the plate.
  3. The Detroit Tigers’ bat boy is bigger than most of the players.
  4. Orbit looks like he needs a good dry cleaning. Red aint touching that fur.
  5. The Astros’ Dugout Girls (Red has looked for their official name and can’t find it) all have rag arms.  Only one of them can throw a free T-Shirt 12 rows.
  6. The waffle cone stuffed with mashed potatoes and fried chicken with honey mustard is pretty damn good.
  7. Saturday night games should not start at 6:10.
  8. From the 2005 team, Brad Lidge still looks damn good.  Jeff Bagwell – not so much.
  9. If you are picked to sing the National Anthem – don’t start off with God Bless America.  To her credit, the young lady admitted her goof and then belted out a very credible version of the Star Spangled Banner.
  10. It was cool that Brad Ausmus (now Tigers manager) could join his mates from the 2005 team in the pre-game festivities.  Then he had to go ruin the occasion by winning.

Just How Worthless is Your College’s Football Coach?

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In most cases, pretty darn worthless it turns out.  The Count of Wall Street Journal fame has run the numbers of the coaches at the major football schools.  Rather than looking at won-loss records or conference championships, the Count analyzes exactly how well each coach did against opposing teams that were ranked in the Top 25 at game time.  This eliminates stacking of the records against lower division opponents, perennial doormats and the intra-conference weak sisters.

Who is the best college football coach?  Not surprisingly, it is the coach of defending National Champions Ohio State – Urban Meyer with a .707 mark.  The highly regarded Nick Saban is a piker by comparison with a .597 career average against quality competition.  So who is number two?  Jimbo Fisher at Florida State has racked up a .666 winning percentage in his 18 games against ranked competition.  But really, the oft-maligned Bob Stoops is likely the better coach – coming in batting .649 when going against the big boys in 77 games.

In Texas Gary Patterson at TCU is at the top of the heap with .559 winning percentage in 34 such contests.  A&M’s Kevin Sumlin is a respectable second with a .500 mark in his 20 top tier tests.  UT’s Charlie Strong (3-6) and Tech’s Kliff Kingsbury (2-7) don’t have enough games (at least 15) to make Red’s list – but neither is trending in the right direction.  And you have to wonder at UT’s hiring of Strong when he had an all-time 2-1 record in games against real teams before joining the Longhorns.

Who looks really bad?  Wunderkind Mike Leach is a pathetic .236 in 55 games against ranked competition and is fading fast having gone 1-11 at Washington State.  Kansas State’s legendary Bill Snyder is more legend than reality with a .278 record in 79 games.  Flavor of the Month Art Briles is on similar ground at .286 with all 10 of his wins over Top 25 opponents coming at Baylor.  And at the bottom of the heap is Colorado’s Mike MacIntyre who has yet to get on base (.000 in 15 games).

Who is coming on strong?  Mark Richt at Georgia racks up considerable numbers by virtue of playing in the SEC and is looking respectable at .535 in 71 games against the Beasts of the Southeast and others.  David Shaw sports an impressive .625 mark in his 24 games – all at Stanford. The only other coaches above the .500 mark are Gus Malzahn (Auburn), Les Miles (LSU), Brian Kelly (Notre Mama). Jim Mora (UCLA)  and Steve Spurrier (S. Carolina).

How the Mighty Have Fallen

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The Amway Coaches Poll has neither UT nor Texas A&M in its top 25 preseason poll.  The only Texas teams to be ranked are TCU at No. 2 and Baylor at No. 4.  Both of the formerly down-trodden programs are clearly holding onto the recent success.  More recent in the case of Baylor.  TCU has been performing on a fairly high level in the last decade.

Longhorns a Long Way from Respectability

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USA Today reports that the University of Texas football team is not ranked in the pre-season polls for the first time in 17 years.

For the first time since 1998, Texas will begin the season without a number next to its name.

The Longhorns  are unranked in the Amway Coaches Poll, which was released Thursday. It’s not surprising given that the team finished 6-7 in 2014, capping Charlie Strong’s first year as head coach with a 31-7 loss to Arkansas in the Texas Bowl.

Texas had its worst season in recent history in 2010 when it followed a national championship loss to Alabama with a 5-7 record. The program hasn’t been the same since, going 36-28 the last four years without a single 10-win season. Still it always found a way into the preseason poll in that span, averaging a 19.5 ranking.

Not this year. Texas only received eight points, putting them at No. 38 outside the poll.

The End TImes are Near, Cont.

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The new baseball lawsuit (see entry immediately below) seeking to have the net extended from foul pole to foul pole in all MLB parks got Red to wondering about deaths from foul balls.  And of course with the miracle of the internets and some people having way too much time on their hands, the answer to Red’s question was only moments away.

Sports Nut (Joe Mooallem) at Slate offers a review of a 2008 book,  Death at the Ballpark: A Comprehensive Study of Game Related Fatalities of Players, Other Personnel and Spectators in Amateur and Professional Baseball, 1862-2007 by Robert Gorman and David Weeks.  One can only wonder at the motivation for creating this apparently exhaustive study which is certain to not make the NY Times Bestseller list. According to Slate, “The authors say their aim was to “raise awareness” about baseball’s many dangers, but there aren’t any recommendations for making the sport safer here, no real signs of impassioned outrage, and no warnings to suburban parents about aluminum bats.”   Red isn’t exactly running out to get a copy, but the review does offer this interesting fact.

Fatal fastballs to the head, meanwhile, aren’t nearly as common as you’d expect. In the past 150 years, only one fan at a major league baseball game has been killed by a foul ball—a 14-year-old in Los Angeles named Alan Fish. The liner that fractured Fish’s skull came off the bat of Dodger pinch-hitting specialist Manny Mota, whose own teenage nephew would be killed 14 years later while playing shortstop in New York—a coincidence Gorman and Weeks don’t stop to note. Mota’s nephew, a high-schooler, was struck by lightning as he stood in the field, five minutes after the umpire announced he was going to call the game at the end of the inning.

Of course, others have been injured and some seriously by flying bats and balls, but the risk of actual death from sitting along the baselines appears to be pretty small.   But if your number is up, just hope you are sitting next to this guy.