Does Mike Leach Have a Point?

I've always kind of liked Mike Leach. Although he's sometimes derided as Coach PlayStation for his crazy fourth-down gambles and sometimes questionable playcalling, I think the guy is a football genius. I also like the fact that in a job where every aspect of media exposure is tightly managed, Mike refuses to stick to the script. He tells it with the bark off, like this outburst earlier this season:



However, I went to Austin on Saturday to watch the Longhorns beat Mike's Pirate School. Texas won, 59-43, in a game that was entertaining to watch, that is assuming you prefer non-stop scoring over gritty defense.

That's why I was a little surprised at Leach's comments about the poor officiating after the game.

Let's look at the calls that set off Leach. These calls came in the third quarter:

A pass to Tech receiver Michael Crabtree deep in Texas territory was ruled incomplete. Leach challenged the ruling, but it was upheld after a review.

Later in the same drive, quarterback Graham Harrell completed what would have been an 18-yard touchdown pass to Edward Britton, but it was overturned after an official review. Replays appeared to show the ball had hit the ground.

Moments later, an apparent touchdown was wiped out by a holding penalty, and Leach thought a late hit should have been called on Texas defensive end Henry Melton on the same play.

Did Leach have a point?

The Crabtree catch: If the video evidence was inconclusive, the ruling on the field stands. I couldn't tell from my seat in the stadium, and I haven't consulted TIVO yet. My thought at the time was that he caught the ball.

The Britton TD: The replay showed in the stadium clearly showed the ball hitting the ground.

The Holding Penalty: The holding call on Louis Vasquez was pretty obvious.

The Late Hit: Texas defensive end Henry Melton probably should have gotten flagged for lighting up Harrell.

Of course, Leach didn't mention Harrell's jackassery after one of Tech's TDs that could have easily gotten a flag. Leach laid in to Harrell on the sideline after that one. And that's the way it goes. Some things get flagged, some things don't. Is it a conspiracy? Is it incompetence? Is it bias? No. It's just the the way the game goes.

So does Mike have a point? Does Texas get favorable calls from the refs?

You know, Mark Mangino thought so back in 2005:



These days, Mangino doesn't spend as much time complaining about Big 12 refs because his team is 10-0. And that's what it comes down to -- if you are making the plays and winning games, you don't have to worry about the refs.

If anyone has grounds to talk about late hits not being called, talk to Texas QB Colt McCoy. There were about three hits on Colt in the KState game that could have been flagged. Then there was the time he got blown up by Auston English after a play was stopped in the OU game. Texas lost both of those games, but was it because of no-calls? Nope. It was about not making plays.

Look, Leach is a smart guy. He's got a talented team and he's frustrated that things haven't gone better for them this year. I understand that. But his team has to make the plays, and right now, his defense isn't doing that. I don't think any of the calls in question would have turned the game for Tech. Texas moved the ball at will on the Red Raiders and chewed up lots of clock. That killed Leach's team more than the refs.

Leach has lots of talent on his pirate crew. He's got a powerful offense, but his team needs to play better defense. If that happens, I think a lot of his officiating problems will disappear.

The Johnson Treatment

The Startlegram had an interesting story on the new-found interest in Lyndon B. Johnson. Writes John Moritz: "The death of Lady Bird Johnson last month and the outpouring of tributes to the former first lady's quiet influence during her husband's tumultuous presidency have rekindled a resurgence of interest in the Texas couple's years in Washington. Attendance at the LBJ Library and Museum at the University of Texas at Austin reached about 36,000 from July 15 to Aug. 1. That's twice what would typically be expected from such a stretch during the summer."

I've always been an LBJ fan, which surprises some people. Most folks -- mainly boomers -- still think about Vietnam and "Hey, hey, LBJ, who many kids did you kill today?" And certainly Vietnam, or "that dirty old bitch of a war" as he would call it, will always color many people's opinions about the man. The great American writer Ralph Ellison told him as much. But Ellison, who was grateful to Johnson for the great strides he achieved in civil rights, said: "When all the returns are in, perhaps President Johnson will have to settle for being recognized as the greatest American president for the poor and for the Negroes, but that, as I see it, is a very great honor indeed." Agreed.

I still think that what made the man great was he believed in a vision of American greatness. Look at his record: aid to education, attack on disease, Medicare, urban renewal, beautification, conservation, development of depressed regions, a wide-scale fight against poverty, control and prevention of crime and delinquency, removal of obstacles to the right to vote. Maybe the Great Society was an overreach, but the fact is that the lives of millions were improved under his leadership. In my opinion, he's still the greatest president from Texas. He truly believed that no person should be left behind.

Close, But Not Quite

Well, I thought this was the Fort Worth Sanger Brothers building, circa 1920s, but I can see upon closer inspection that it ain't. Still, it's kind of cool photo from an advertisement in the back of 1923 University of Texas Cactus yearbook. This one's for Kevin. Good luck with the move!

I Love This Time of Year

And it ain't because I like fryin' eggs on the sidewalk. It's because I have a fever, and the only prescription is college football. I was going to put together this whole long ode to my love of the sport, but words fail me. It's something you just kind of have to feel ... like winning ... in The Shoe ... at Night. Remember that one Mike?

Mack Brown in Fort Worth

Yeah, I'm a big college football nerd. Here I am with my daughter and our good friend, Mack Brown, at Joe T. Garcia's on Monday night at the Longhorn Foundation shindig. He signed my Mack Brown Wheaties box. And my Rose Bowl ticket. And my Big 12 Championship game ticket. And my daughter's hat. He's just a good sport that way.

We had the big Mexican feed and sat at a table with Jack Rattikin, who was a really cool guy. He's pals with Dan Jenkins, he was in Dan's first wedding and told us a story about being in the book Baja Oklahoma. I also saw my old Startlegram boss, Gary Hardee, one of the nicest guys I know.

The speaking portion of the evening wasn't much I hadn't heard before. However, there were a few highlights:

"There aren't any particular games y'all are interested in?" Mack joked. He knew damn well there was one game we in Fort Worth were very interested in: TCU on Sept. 8. He told us about what a good team TCU is, fast, well-coached. He's a big Gary Patterson fan. He said that it was important for the team not to take the Horned Frogs lightly.

Some asked about Henry Melton, but the answer could have applied to the recently DWI'ed Sergio Kindle. "We don't want to embarass the kids by talking about there private business any more than we have to. But trust us -- the team punishment is serious and severe."

Regarding future schedules, he said that a lot of teams say they want to play UT publicly, but in private, they have no interest in playing at all. He didn't say it, but he means you Michigan and Notre Dame. He said the Irish didn't even return the phone call.

Mack says he favors a playoff but doesn't think it'll happen anytime soon.

Former Longhorn Michal Ungar, the special teams tackling artist from Fort Worth Trinity Valley, was there. Evidently, he had a recent bout with cancer, but is doing fine now.

That's it. Hook'em!

Oh, The Humanities!

The Smithsonsian may be America's Attic, but the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas is America's crazy uncle with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a fat wallet. It's got a Gutenberg Bible (ca. 1455), the First Photograph (ca. 1826), film archives of David O. Selznick and Robert De Niro, paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and major manuscript collections of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tennessee Williams, and Norman Mailer. It's even got Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. The overview of the place in the most recent The New Yorker had me waxing nostalgic a little.

I've got a soft spot for the place because I used to hang there back in my UT days when I was suffering under delusion that a life in academia would be beneficial. Under the influence of Bill Stott's class on Documentary Expression, I spent many hours going through the James Agee Collection researching Agee and Walker Evans and their book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Kurth Sprague also gave me a private tour of the Tom Lea Collection. Although the U gets some knocks for being an overwhelming environment that doesn't care about undergrads, I always found lots of great academic opportunities and people willing to nurture your intellectual curiousity if you made the effort.

That said, the HRC gets some knocks because gathering this trove of stuff means throwing down some serious coin. That has some regarding the HRC as a bunch of rich Texans with fat wallets and no appreciation for the significance of the work they are buying. That's selling the HRC a little short. My understanding is they do a great job archiving this material for future generations and making it available to the academics of today. Besides -- to paraphrase Ross Perot -- if God didn't want all that stuff here, he wouldn't have given Texans so damn much money!

Still others wonder "What are Arthur Conan Doyle's Undershirts Doing in Texas?" Or put another way: why would anyone pay good money for some of that shit? Yeah, maybe they don't need the old sandwich found in one of Isaac Singer's boxes, but you never know what is going to provide the "Rosebud Moment," the seemingly unimportant object that is actually the Rosetta Stone for the secrets and meaning of person's life.

Thanks to Emphemera for reminding me to get off my duff and write this.

Memorial Day 2007

UPDATE, 6.5.07: I found John Moore's blog item about this photo. Please take a moment to read it. It puts the photo into context and makes it even more raw and powerful (if that's possible). Also, Unfair Park's Robert Wilonsky weighs in on John: "He's a hell of a guy."

6.4.07: I missed this last week -- a photo from my old UT classmate John Moore that appeared in the New York Times. "Mary McHugh visited the grave of her fiancé, Sgt. James J. Regan, who was killed in Iraq in February. He is buried in the new Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery for those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Kurth Sprague, 1934-2007

I was with immense sadness that I learned today of the passing of one of the great teachers in my life, Kurth Sprague. If I ever learned anything of writing in my life -- and those who read this blog may find that claim to be debatable -- then Kurth and Bill Stott and F.J. Schaack were certainly, in part, responsible.

Kurth Sprague taught me to write simply and clearly and with a confident voice. He taught me that writing was real work, and like real work, an important part is showing up every day and doing it. He taught me that whatever it took to make it happen -- having exactly eight sharp pencils or a well-oiled typewriter or a bottle of bourbon or a pot of coffee or a pack of Luckies or a Chopin record -- whatever got you in the zone to write, do it and get about the business of writing.

He was the first person who led me to believe that I could actually make a living being a writer. He encouraged me to listen to myself, take some chances and -- sometimes -- ignore what other people said because what did they know anyway. He helped me greatly on the journey to becoming myself.

He was a true gentleman, a product of the the Eastern establishment who would have been right at home in the Oak Room with the Algonquin Roundtable. I remember the first day he strode into class, a tall imposing figure in a seersucker suit with a straw boater. He looked like a mix of John Wayne and Tom Wolfe, which he, in fact, was. He could recite Swinburne and Shakespeare by heart, but was also proud to say that he was a member of the last horse cavalry unit in the U.S. Army. I will always treasure the memories of sitting in his basement office, smoking cigarettes and absorbing his wisdom. He would start sentences using phrases like, "Ah, yes, I remember back in the bourbon days ...."

Since I found out about Kurth's passing, I've been pouring over over my old notes and writings from his class. One thing I had forgetten -- I used to write everything in longhand. I've found tons of old yellow legal pads. Boy, those days are way over. I've also been trying to find my old journals to use the words I wrote down back then. But those words are buried somewhere in my office here, and I suppose it doesn't really matter, because, like another old prof, Bill Goetzmann taught me, it's not about what happened, it's about what I think happened. And so here it is.

After all these years, I still can't believe how sad this makes me. The worst part for me is that Kurth was living right here in Fort Worth when he died. I wish I could have talked to him one last time to say thanks. But this will have to do.

Kurth, thanks for everything. You will be missed. To read his colleagues' rememberances, check out Bill Stott's blog.