Posted by Dr Fro 10:35 PM
Last night I was supposed to drive 1 hour north to Oklahoma and play in a tournament. Unfortunately, on Sunday night, I was fixing the lock on our back door and the spring in the lock popped out and flew into my left eye. I ended up at the emergency clinic and spent the time that I should have spent at the casino sitting on my couch looking like a pirate (I had an eye patch). Mike Leach would have been proud.
I did spend some of my time on the bench catching up on the High Stakes Poker episodes I missed while I was in Rome. If you get GSN, you must watch this show. If you don't, you must watch it on YouTube. (somebody breaks up each 1-hour episode into 4 15-minute videos uploaded to YouTube).
Jamie Gold is the biggest jackass to play poker since, since, since....well, since I last played poker. He seems to play absolutely terribly, but he never gets beat that bad. Maybe he is onto something.
Well, there were two very big hands that involved the golden jackass this season...
The first was when he had a set of Kings on the turn against Patrick Antonius' made straight. There was $750,000 in the pot. PA decided to run it three times. Good decision for him. The first two times they ran it, Golden Fag boated up. Only on the third try did Patrick's hand hold up.
The next hand was the first hand of the most recent episode. No shit, this hand was so crazy that the second hand of the episode started TWENTY MINUTES into the show. I really can't put it in words. Just watch it.
How unbelievably stupid was Jamie in that hand (i.e., he was the only guy that did not know Sammy had AA) and how freaking annoying was his banter (e.g., "enough already, I call, I call, I call...)?
I don't want to hear how he save $180,000 with his banter. He is a complete idiot and asshole, and his luck will eventually run out.
Since we last spoke, 1/3 of the Big XII teams in the top five took a tumble. They did it ala Oregon (w/o their very good QB). The better analogy is UT 2006:
In 2006, UT beat OU and then won all of its games until two games were left. The only way they could not win the South was to lose both of its last two and have OU win both of its last two. On the road vs. KSU, UT's QB was hurt on the first series. Consequently, a big underdog, KSU, beat UT. UT then got its in-state rival at home, but they were unable to prevail due to, among other things, its QB being well less than 100%. OU won its final games and went to the Big XII Championship.
In 2007, OU beat UT and then won all of its games until two games were left. The only way they could not win the South was to lose both of its last two and have UT win both of its last two. On the road vs. Tech, OU's QB was hurt on the first series. Consequently, a big underdog, Tech, beat OU. OU then got its in-state rival at home....
Uncanny, isn't it?
If OSU beats OU and UT beats A&M, it will be entirely obvious that we will lose to Boise State in the Fiesta.
My college football pools came down to the Tech/OU game. I needed a Tech cover, which was in the bag early. However, I also needed 7 points to win the tiebreaker, and I just kept waiting. OU got that crazy 7 points at the end of the game that landed me my tiebreaker and yet another weekly win in the college football pool. I am in 1st or 2nd in all 4 pools (pool sizes of appr. 120, 140, 20 and 30). Damn I am nervous about the end of the season.
I am putting all my hopes and dreams and life savings into OSU over OU. I think they might beat OU, but I think that covering 14.5 is a cinch.
I owe a post on the A&M game that is currently 10 pages long and still long from being complete. Maybe I will write a book some day out of it. For now I will just offer some pithy bullet points:
UT fans view the A&M rivalry differently than the OU rivalry. They tend to view OU as peers (peers they freaking hate, but peers). UT views A&M (and A&M views UT) as a group of people from another planet
There is a tendency between groups that define themselves along the lines of urban versus rural to quickly go to the stereotypes of "you are a bunch of sheep-shagging backward-ass idiots" and "you are a bunch of arrogant pussies." Go travel the world. People have been lining up along these lines for a while. With UT and A&M, it doesn't matter what the truth is, the lines stereotypes have been drawn.
This gets me to my earlier post about Mack Brown and what Steve Spurrier thinks about him. There really is no quantitative measure you can use to say that some coach is better than Mack Brown (assuming you use his entire tenure and not some arbitrary fraction of it). Yet, there is a common criticism of him and his teams that they underachieve. Aggies spout this more than the average fans do. There is no factual basis for this, but there is something about Mack Brown that plays into Aggies' fantasies. He is polished, political, and smooth. He delegates the X's and O's to his coordinators. He coddles his players in public. In Aggie parlance, he is a pussy. Fact is that you can't give Aggies facts. They really don't care that he has been the most successful coach over the past decade. He typifies everything about those fags from UT that they already hate. So he is guilty as charged. Never mind that the pussy beat them 6 of the past 7 years. Clearly, he and his team need to toughen up. Suggestion: knock opposing players long after the whistle has been blown and after they have started taking off their helmet. That's manly. That's red-ass. Whoop!
So much for pithy.
Oh, then there is my favorite subject of college football playoffs. If you are one of the idiots that support this, stop reading now because you will never agree with me any way. They only reason that the crazy upsets this year were so newsworthy is because they kept teams out of the MNC picture. If there were a stupid 16-team playoff, then Rutgers beating South Florida would have felt like New England beating Dallas (i.e., "Wow, fun and exciting game, I guess both teams still will go to the playoffs. Pass the peanuts). I have said it before and I will say it again, the only people who want a college playoff are people whose brains are too damn small to appreciate a system that strays from the norm (in US sports, that is).
If you are going to College Station for the game, call my cell. I will be there.
If you will be in DFW for Xmas, let me know. We will get a cash game or small tournament together.