the tindog coffeehouse

Good news, people of Waco. Baylor’s not screwed after all!

In what can only be explained as a miracle (by football-loving Baptists, at least), the Big 12 has been saved from destruction, with the ten remaining members swearing allegiance to Dan Beebe and the unnamed sports network (*cough*FoxSports*cough*) that bribed them to stay.

Who would’ve guessed that at the end of the day all of this realignment mess was really just about money? Huh.

So for now, there are no 16-team superconferences. No realignmentpocalypse. No ripping of the very fabric of the time-space continuum. Heck, not even a single punch thrown (unless you count Vince Young’s pummeling of an irate OU fan outside a Dallas strip club). In fact, Big 12 ADs would be singing “Kum Ba Yah” right now if it weren’t for the fact that they were too busy counting their enormous stacks of cash.

Where, then, does that leave us?

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I’ve largely stayed away from all the various NCAA conference expansion and/or realignment rumors floating around the interwebs the last few months because, well, they’re just rumors. One day you hear the Big Ten is going to steal the University of Texas away from the Big 12, the next you hear Texas is going to the SEC. One day the Big 12 is imploding, the next it’s expanding. Publicly, athletic directors declare their undying love for their conferences, but then they’re supposedly working vigorously in the shadows to broker a million other deals. And all the while, state legislators are trying to influence the process for their own particular benefit.

Is this college sports or As The World Turns?

The latest rumors have the Pac-10 asking Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, OU, Oklahoma State, and Colorado to be their new BFFs, thus elevating the Pac-10 to a 16-team superconference and completely decimating the Big 12. That would leave Baylor out in the cold, a result that doesn’t sit well with Waco’s state senator, David Sibley, who is apparently now fighting to have the Bears superglued to the other Texas teams. Meanwhile, the Big Ten, which has been rumored to be courting everyone from Texas to Nebraska to the North Dakota School for the Deaf, is supposedly focusing its efforts on Notre Dame. And Boise State, which was a lock for the Mountain West, is putting its plans on hold to see how everything else shakes out.

And of course, everything in the previous paragraph will be null and void by the time you finish reading this post.

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At the beginning of this year’s college football season, I looked ahead at the impending Texas Longhorns schedule and wrote that “it comes down to this: The Horns have to win. Period.”

Forget the National Championship. If the Horns want to win the Big 12 South, they have to win all three of those games [Tech, OU, and OSU]. Any misstep there, and the Big 12 tie-breaker rule that bit ‘em in the butt last year could do the same again.

Also, the schedule allows no room for error since the last four games will essentially be givens against weaker non-ranked (or lower-ranked) teams. In other words, if they fall early to OU or get tripped up in Stillwater, a blowout victory against Central Florida isn’t going to help them; there’s nowhere to go but down. …

The only way Texas can ensure they will end the regular season with a higher BCS ranking than OU is to go undefeated. And even if they do win the Big 12 with one loss, that single loss will probably be enough to keep them out of the National Championship. So it really comes down to winning every game, not just the biggest three. As Yoda says, “Do or do not… there is no try.”

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Fort Myers, Florida, columnist and self-identified Lutheran Sam Cook has taken Gators quarterback Tim Tebow to task for openly displaying his Christian faith on and off the field:

Religion – except for the “Hail Mary” pass – has no place in sports.

In Tebow’s case, he should play football and forget about us sinners for 31/2 hours every Saturday.

Somehow, we’ll survive without him displaying a “John 3:16″ Bible verse under his eyes. We separate church and state. Why not church and sports?

Actually, I think we need more athletes like Tebow and Texas quarterback Colt McCoy and OU quarterback Sam Bradford: men and women who not only live out their faith off the field and out of the spotlight but who display it in the public eye as well.

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First, a quick rant. Thanks to the Louisiana-Monroe game being on pay-per-view and the Wyoming game being on the Versus network (which was just dropped by DirecTV over a financial dispute), it looks like I’m going to miss the first two Texas football games of the season, which really blows. I mean, I’ve been jonesing since January for some college football, and now that it’s finally here, I’ve gotta wait two more weeks? Argh! It’s killing me!

OK, rant over. Deep breath. Serenity now! Ah, much better.

So last year I tried a season-long experiment in which I played NCAA College Football on the Wii every week, pitting the Longhorns against that week’s opponent to see if the video game score was any indication of the real score. The answer was that, well, no, it wasn’t too accurate. So while I had fun playing video games every week, I won’t be repeating the experiment this year. Sorry to disappoint you.

However, I did want to weigh in with my thoughts about the upcoming season. Basically, it comes down to this: The Horns have to win. Period.

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The cover of the September issue of Texas Monthly proclaims of Texas Tech coach Mike Leach: “This crazy pirate may be the best college football coach in the country.” They got the “crazy” part right, but I definitely wouldn’t say he’s the best coach in the country.

Granted, he’s very good at what he does, and he deserves a certain amount of recognition for that. If nothing else, his ability to recruit virtually unknown players and turn them into one of the most dominant passing offenses in the nation is worthy of admiration.

But NCAA records are one thing; results are quite another. At some point, those billions of passing yards have to translate to meaningful wins, and that’s where Leach has so far come up short. Sure, they beat Texas last year in what was arguably one of the biggest games in the country, but at the end of the season, all they had to show for it was a shared Big 12 South title and a loss to Ole Miss in the Cotton Bowl. In fact, in the nine seasons Leach has coached at Tech, they’ve never outright won the Big 12 South division or played in a BCS bowl game.

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