Yesterday I caught an early rivalry game: the Texas-Oklahoma showdown at the Cotton Bowl. Texas beat the Sooners 16-13 in a close but not great game.
The Sooners were very competitive though they were clearly a little overmatched this year. Sam Bradford went down on another routine tackle and left the game with a reinjured shoulder. I had to wonder yesterday whether the Heisman winner’s best days are already behind him. Landry Jones is doing well considering the circumstances, which should not be confused with doing well, at least compared to OU’s preseason expectations.
As for Texas, I was a little impressed with Colt McCoy’s mobility, and their run game looked very good in spurts, but the defense is clearly their bread and butter. Their D reminds me of other great teams, as Oklahoma has been in the past, with monstrous, athletic defenders who appear somehow bigger than their NFL counterparts.
I don’t count it against the Longhorns that this game was so close; that’s just how rivalries are sometimes. In fact, in this season of upsets, they're one of the few teams with a true shot at the national championship.
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A couple weeks ago I discussed with a friend a topic I’d like to open to everyone: what college teams can a person root for? Do you need a tie to a school and, if so, what suffices?
We were talking about the 2006 Rose Bowl, and I mentioned that among the reasons I was rooting for Texas was that my brother had attended law school there. My friend, a fellow CU alum, cut me off and said that was not a sufficient reason. He further said that he was rooting for Texas because they’re a Big XII school, which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.
Perhaps because I followed the NFL first, I’ve never much cared for the conference ties that dominate so many college football conversations. Is the Pac-10 better than the Big XII this year? Who cares? I happen to make sweeping generalizations about conferences all the time (the Pac-10 is soft; the Big Eleven is boring), but I see no reason to root for teams I spent all year rooting against. I would never pull for the Chiefs in the playoffs just to bring honor to the AFC West. (Perhaps my friend is just doing the best he can considering Division I football’s absurd “championship” “system”, where it really does matter what people think of your conferencemates.)
College basketball’s a stretch for me, a fan of the North Carolina Tar Heels. I started pulling for the Tar Heels in 1998, mostly because MJ went there and they had an absolutely stacked team. (They didn’t win the title that year. In fact, they choked rather dramatically, so I don’t feel guilty about this at all.) I’ve visited the campus and even requested an application there, which I was too lazy to fill out. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but I honestly considered attending school in Chapel Hill. Growing up in Colorado, who else was I going to root for? I did support the Chauncey Billups Buffs, of course, but the whole point of college hoops is March Madness, so you need a good team.
On the other hand, I grew up rooting for BYU football because my parents went there. I was pretty sure I’d go there, too, though as a little kid I had no real idea. But I was a lifelong fan, so it’s not like my fandom was any less pure than anyone else’s. If I’d been a lifelong fan of UNC, would that have been any less legit just because my parents didn't go there? Come to think of it, BYU was only a few years removed from its championship season when I became a fan; I just realized I might have been a front-runner there, too.
CU football I remember liking in a general sense, though not nearly the way I liked BYU. They might’ve been my second-favorite team, but it was kind of a distant second. Our ties to the school were living in Colorado and the fact that my mom occasionally took us up to Boulder to play on Folsom Field, which is even more awesome in retrospect. I definitely watched some Orange Bowls as a kid. I can remember our family staying up together to watch the win (over Notre Dame; how cool is that?) that gave the Buffs the national championship. At the time it was cool, but not Super Bowl XXXII cool. Eventually my brother and I attended CU together, and if they ever win another championship I’m going to lose my freaking mind. Amidst the scandals of the Barnett era the team became a bit of a punchline, but I find myself liking the Buffs more and more as life goes on, for obvious reasons. They’re my one team now, if I can only have one, but it’s amazing to me how long it took me to get there. For some reason, though, the rivalry with Nebraska meant a lot to me for years before the team in general did. That game was appointment viewing long before I ever attended class in Boulder.
I also rooted for Miami football in the early part of this decade for reasons far too embarrassing to discuss publicly. But with Miami, UNC, and perhaps young CU, I think I’ve had the right idea: if you’re going to root for a college team you have no natural reason to like, you might as well sell out and pull for a powerhouse. Contrast this with a friend of mine who moved to North Carolina a few years ago and started promoting what he saw as a rising N.C. State program. He talked quite a bit of trash to me as a UNC fan, which I found patently hilarious, because big-money college sports have all the upward mobility of Major League Baseball. Last season, after the Tar Heels won it all, he claimed to have lost all interest in the sport. N.C. State has a proud history with two national titles, and they gave the Nuggets the fantastic Skywalker Thompson, whose awesome lightsaber-holding likeness adorned the walls of the old Denver ESPN Zone, but come on. College sports are all about the haves.
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The Red River Rivalry was just an appetizer for CU’s win over No. 15 Kansas last night. What can I say, I love watching Tyler Hansen. He’s got a good arm, but those feet! Unlike some young quarterbacks with quickness, his first instinct isn't to run, but to buy time and keep plays alive long after the plug has been pulled. Twice after he purchased some clock his receivers dropped good passes, and I’m convinced they’d just become mesmerized watching him dance behind the scrimmage line. Tight end Riar Geer was able to keep his focus long enough to catch a pass after another great scramble on Colorado’s fourth-quarter go-ahead drive. Hopefully that's a sign of the future. Adjustments will need to be made, but I think receivers will love playing with Hansen.
Kansas, other than their end-of-half sequences, didn’t look that great, and I’m a little surprised they were No. 15 to begin with, though they were undefeated.
CU’s next game is Saturday morning at Kansas State.
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