The Houston Cougars men’s basketball team had a nice win over LSU last night, as new coach Tom Penders continues to make my post on his hiring look bad.
Meanwhile, former Texas A&M, Pittsburgh, and Mississippi State head football coach Jackie Sherrill has teed off on the NCAA in a lawsuit over in Mississippi. The over/under bet on this lawsuit is $1 million.
On a more pleasant note, 55 year old Austin resident Tom Kite — fresh off an impressive performance in the 2004 U.S. Open — plans to rejoin the regular PGA Tour next month and become the oldest exempt player in Tour history.
Also on the golf scene, in concrete evidence that securities regulators do not have enough to do, this recent Wall Street Journal ($) article reports that regulators have embarked on sweeping inquiries into Wall Street gift-and-entertainment practices, particularly golf junkets that Wall Street firms provide to mutual-fund executives and other money managers they are trying to woo for trading business:
NASD regulators, for example, have started to examine golf outings that Bank of America Corp. provided to Fidelity Investments’ head of stock trading, people familiar with the matter said. As the bank worked in recent years to win trading business from Fidelity, it hosted the executive, Scott DeSano, at the annual AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament several times, allowing him to play alongside the pros competing in the event, which raises money for charity.
What next? Eliot Spitzer to sue?
Also in the combat department, as the University of Texas football team and its supporters prepare for their trip to L.A. for the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day, the Dallas Morning News’ Greg Fraley throws down the gauntlet and declares the run for the Roses a make or break game for Longhorn coach Mack Brown:
Texas and Brown must win a game on the main stage for once, or never again demand to play with the big boys.
It will be a real live put-up-or-shut-up game for a team notorious for underachieving in these moments. . .
It will be the Longhorns’ highest-profile bowl appearance since they went into the 1978 Cotton Bowl ranked No. 1 but lost to Notre Dame.
This is not the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl, a regular stop off the main bowl draft for the Longhorns. . .
The only way the Longhorns’ task could have been easier would have been if Pittsburgh had landed in Pasadena.
Michigan is 13th in the BCS standings. Only Pitt, the Big East co-champion, is worse among the eight schools in BCS bowls at No. 21.
Michigan, which shared the championship of the stodgy Big Ten with Iowa, has the name but not the chops this season.
The Wolverines lost to Notre Dame, which has fired its coach, and to Ohio State (7-4). San Diego State came within three points of the Wolverines, at Michigan.
This is not an opponent of the USC-Oklahoma-Auburn level. Michigan is not even Utah, which may be out of coaches before its bowl game.
The Longhorns must cleanly handle Michigan and prove they belong at this level, . . .
Brown asked for this chance. Now, he must do something with it.
And that would be a first, too.
Brown has been a convenient target of barbs because his teams promise so much and deliver so little under the spotlight.
In 17 seasons at North Carolina and Texas, Brown has never won a conference title. That is somewhat understandable at North Carolina, where basketball is king and Florida State was in the conference for part of his tenure.
An 0-for at Texas, flush with resources and talent, is unfathomable.
The bigger the moment, the worse Brown’s Texas teams have played. Look at his big-game resume:? Five consecutive losses to Oklahoma and uber-coach Bob Stoops.
This is as big a mismatch as there is in the college game. The thought of Stoops throws Brown into a panic. The gap is growing. Texas’ dull offense does not even challenge Stoops and his staff.
? An 0-2 record in Big 12 championship games. Texas lost to Nebraska in 1999 and, with a BCS berth at hand, was upset by Colorado in 2001.
? A 3-3 bowl record. Last year’s 28-20 loss to Washington State represented a dreadful showing by Brown and his staff. Texas acted as if it had no idea Washington State, which led Division I-A in sacks, would blitz. With the offense collapsing in the face of the heavy blitz pressure, Brown removed the mobile quarterback (Vince Young) for the stationary quarterback (Chance Mock).Reputations are formed by a body of work. There are lots of wins but no landmark triumphs during Brown’s seven seasons with Texas.
A win against Michigan would have substance because of the setting.
A loss to Michigan would make it easy not to take Brown seriously for a long time. . .
Moving to thoughts of Christmas, if you are looking for a gift for a sports-interested family member or friend, this Boston Globe article reviews the new book by Gene Conley, one of the last athletes to play two professional sports (Major League Baseball and the NBA) at the same time for much of his professional career. Conley’s is a remarkable story, as reflected by this snippet from the article:
There was the time he struck out Ted Williams in the All-Star Game. Then there was the time he had to separate Tom Heinsohn from Wilt Chamberlain during a heated exchange in an NBA game. . . No one else ever won a championship ring in two major sports. No one else played against Jackie Robinson, Frank Robinson, and Oscar Robertson. No one else played with Carl Yastrzemski during the summer, then joined Bob Cousy for the winter. No one else lockered next to Hank Aaron and Bill Russell in the same calendar year.
Conley also confirms the truth about the legendary story in which he and a teammate got off the Red Sox team bus and Conley was not seen again for 68 hours. Ah, those were the days.
Finally, this Houston Press article provides an interesting analysis of the evolution of the high-powered suburban high school football programs in the Houston metropolitan area. Call it the natural evolution of Friday Night Lights.
A nice update on all things in the Texas sports world. Almost makes me want to give the counter post on Arkansas. The unusual thing about Arkansas, though, is that thereís really only one team to talk about. Unlike Texas, where there are professional teams aplenty, and a number of top-notch college programs, Arkansas has only the Razorbacks. In some ways, I suppose that seems like a barren landscape, and certainly enough people lobbied to finally get a pro basketball franchise in Memphis, a city that is at least on our border. But in truth, itís most a good thing to have only one team. I canít think of another state in a similar situation. The consequence is that everyone in the state is absolutely rabid about the Razorbacks, which not only heightens the experience of following the teams, but also has the opposite result of uniting the entire state, almost as though we were all alumni.
Of course, the downside to that kind of intense state passion is that it can sometimes go very awry as recent events seem to demonstrate. Not sure that youíve followed this story, but last year Arkansas had the most highly recruited high school prospect, a quarterback named Mitch Mustain. Mustain didnít receive the amount of playing time he had hoped for, and the offense never became the wide-open passing game he had been promised. He was vocal about the possibility that he might transfer. In the meantime, a booster apparently sent him a nasty email which apparently expedited his decision (heís now at USC). There was some question about the fact that the booster had ties to the coach, and the suggestion that the coach had perhaps put her up to it. A bad enough scandal in its own way. But some fan decided that he should sue the university over the fact that Mustain had transferred. Essentially, he feels he has been wronged by the coachís actions (assuming the coach is truly to blame), and that he deserves compensation. The fact that the case is going forward essentially means that some judge is taking the idea that fans should have some control over player decisions on a university football team seriously.