Mongol General: Conan! What is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.
Mongol General: That is good! That is good.
— “Conan the Barbarian”
Terry: All right. Now I have complied with your every request, would you agree?
Rusty: I would.
Terry: Good, ’cause now I have one of my own. Run and hide, asshole. Run and hide. If you should be picked up next week buying a hundred-thousand dollar sports car in Newport Beach, I am going to be supremely disappointed. Because I want my people to find you, and when they do, rest assured we are not going to hand you over to the police. So my advice to you again is this: run and hide. That is all that I ask.
— “Ocean’s Eleven”
These two movie quotes succinctly express my feelings about Thursday’s game between Texas and Texas A&M. I don’t just want to beat them. I want to destroy them. Annihilate them. Pummel them.
If the game is within fifty points, I am going to be supremely disappointed.
Add to this the beauty pageant that is the Bowl Championship Series. With Oklahoma nipping at Texas’ heels, we need a huge win to hopefully hold them off when the struggle against OSU.
Unfortunately, Mack Brown is the consummate gentlemen, and will call the dogs off before it gets that out of hand. All we can hope for is repeat of the 2005 Kansas game, where Texas was up 52-0 at the half. One can hope.
“But wait”, you say, “aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? The Aggies have won the last two years. Clearly, Mack Brown doesn’t get the importance of the Texas A&M game.”
Mule muffins!
Let’s look at the games against A&M under Mack Brown:
1998: Won 26-24
1999: Lost 16-20
2000: Won 43-17
2001: Won 21-7
2002: Won 50-20
2003: Won 46-15
2004: Won 26-13
2005: Won 40-29
2006: Lost 12-7
2007: Lost 38-30
So, Mack Brown had a bit of a rough start against the Aggies, but then they still had RC and didn’t completely suck at that point. Then, Mack had a six year stretch of domination, where A&M never even kept it to single digits.
Then we have the last two years…
I was at both those games, and they weren’t much fun. The highlight of the second game was watching a former President of the United States walk by so close I could have reached out and touched him. (I expect I would still be breathing out of a tube if I had, however…)
In any case, those two teams were missing something important. And, I don’t just mean Vince Young. I mean the leadership that Vince brought. The 2006 and 2007 Longhorns did not have that, and when adversity came calling, they weren’t up to the challenge.
The 2007 Longhorns are different. Colt McCoy will not allow them to fall Thursday night.
It’s only a question of how high we soar.