Wrapping up the 2004 college football season

The 2004 college football season ended in a rout Tuesday night, as the USC Trojans flattened the previously unbeaten Oklahoma Sooners 55-19 to win the FedEx Orange Bowl and claim the Mythical National Championship for the 2004 college football season. I don’t think anybody was expecting the game to be as lopsided as it was; the Sooners just didn’t seem to be prepared for USC’s relentless offense (this year’s Heisman Trophy winner, Matt Leinart, threw five touchdown passes) and made too many mistakes (last year’s Heisman Trophy winner, Jason White, threw three interceptions) on their way to their second consecutive BCS title game meltdown. I really didn’t care who won; I just wanted to see a good game. Needless to say, I, like millions of other college football fans, was disappointed. 

Auburn fans are probably especially cranky today; given last night’s performance, they no doubt believe that their undefeated Tigers, who beat Virginia Tech in Monday night’s Sugar Bowl but were left out of a shot at the national title, would have given the Trojans a better game. The Rose Bowl, on the other hand, was a classic. Putting aside for a moment the fact that the 5th-ranked Longhorns probably should have beaten the 12th-ranked Wolverines by more than a point, and ignoring for a second the pathetic whining to the media Mack Brown did in order to get his team there instead of California, the game itself, replete with spectacular performances from players like UT’s Vincent Young or Michigan’s Braylon Edwards, was one of the most thrilling and complete college football games in recent memory.

Like it or not, whiny Mack Brown was vindicated. Not only did the ‘Horns win the Rose Bowl, but the 4th-ranked Cal Golden Bears were embarrassed by 23rd-ranked Texas Tech in the Holiday Bowl. I know Cal was not happy to be playing in this game, but a big win here would have made a statement; a loss makes them look like pretenders. Too bad Mack can’t beat Oklahoma or win a conference championship…

Other notable bowl games included the Capital One Bowl on New Year’s Day; 11th-ranked Iowa defeated 12th-ranked LSU 30-25 on a 56-yard touchdown pass as time expired. A pretty amazing finish, considering that LSU overcame a 12-point deficit in the fourth quarter to take a 25-24 lead with 46 seconds left to play. The New Year’s Eve Liberty Bowl between 8th-ranked Louisville and 10th-ranked Boise State was also a thriller. The matchup between the two highest-ranked non-BCS schools was expected to be an offensive showdown, and it did not disappoint. Louisville won the see-saw battle, 44-40, to give Boise State its first loss of the year.

Steve Casburn and I went to see the EV1.net Houston Bowl on Wednesday afternoon. Colorado and UTEP were evenly matched for a while but as the game progressed the Buffs’ strength and depth began to take over. Colorado won 33 to 28 in an entertaining, back-and-forth game.

The announced attendance for this game was 27,235. There just wasn’t a lot of local interest in this matchup, and the game’s start time of 3:30 pm didn’t make it easy for people to attend either. UTEP did their part, however, bringing several thousand fans and their entire band with them; their fans filled the entire west side of the field boxes. The Colorado contingent was perhaps only a fourth or a fifth as large. Colorado didn’t bring their entire band, either, although they did bring Ralphie the Bison with them.

Steve and I originally had tickets on the upper endzone, but we were asked by Reliant staff if we wanted to move down to the lower endzone seats; they clearly wanted to make the crowd look bigger for the ESPN cameras. We took up their offer and moved; the view wasn’t quite as good, however, and there was simply no way to make the stadium look “full” no matter how many fans were moved around. 

So ends the 2004 college football season. Hopefully 2005 will be a better one for my Houston Cougars. 

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015.)

On becoming homeowners

Although it probably won't completely sink in until I write that first mortgage payment, Lori and I are now officially homeowners. We closed on our house, in the same University Oaks neighborhood where I grew up (my parents still live two blocks away), last Wednesday.

Since our lease here in Midtown runs through the end of February, we have a couple of months to do some remodeling before we move in. Which is good, because the heater needs to be replaced, the kitchen (which lacks a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, and a stove that actually works) needs a complete facelift, the yard could use some landscaping, Kirby's room needs to be painted, the leaky sunroom roof needs to be replaced, the downstairs bathroom needs immediate attention, etc. The joys of homeownership!

Lori and I are looking forward to it, however; we're glad to finally have a place we can call our own.

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015. That old house has become a veritable money pit in the years since, but it became Lori's after the divorce, so it's not my problem anymore!)

White Christmas

That's something I never thought I'd see here in Houston, so I never even bothered to dream about it!

It was very cool; Lori, Kirby and I were eating tapas with my parents at Mi Luna restaurant in Rice Village when the flakes started falling Christmas Eve, and the flurries continued throughout the evening. Here in Midtown, the snow didn't completely melt from lawns, rooftops and parking garages until well into Christmas morning.

It made for a truly memorable holiday; I doubt I'll ever see a Christmas snowfall in Houston again in my lifetime.

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015. Houston has only seen a couple of snowfalls since, and certainly no more White Christmases.)

Bowl season begins with Mean Green defeat

Bowl season began yesterday evening, with North Texas and Southern Miss squaring off in the Wyndham New Orleans Bowl. Lori and I watched part of the game with other Houston-area UNT alumni at Noche restaurant on Montrose, but the game didn’t turn out to be very watchable. The Golden Eagles dominated the Mean Green 31-10; the score would have looked worse had North Texas not scored a touchdown on the last play of the game. This is UNT’s third loss in four consecutive New Orleans Bowl appearances; Darrell Dickey’s squad continues to be unable to win games out of conference.

To be fair to the Mean Green, they’ve had a rough season. Quarterback Andrew Smith was killed in a car crash shortly before the season started; Chronicle columnist John Lopez wrote a good article about the tragedy and local furniture mogul (and UNT alum) Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale’s response to it. The Mean Green then began the season with four straight losses. To their credit, however, they overcame these setbacks to dominate the Sun Belt conference for the fourth year in a row; they haven’t lost a conference game since 2001.

However, the Mean Green must find a way to begin winning out of conference; last night’s performance against a decent but not invincible Southern Miss team was simply unimpressive.

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015.)

The VCR meets the dustbin of history

The show’s over for the VCR, at least at one British electronics chain. Dixon says that demand for videocassette recorders has fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s, while sales of DVD players have increased exponentially. Thus, after this Christmas, VCRs will no longer grace the store’s shelves. The format is becoming obsolete, and more retailers, including those here in the United States, will follow Dixon’s lead in the coming years. By this time ten years from now the video cassette will be just as much of an obscure anachronism as the vinyl LP or Super 8 movie film. 

If you’re somebody who likes to ponder the effect of technology on culture, then the videocassette is certainly a good place to start. When this technology became available to the consumer beginning in the late ‘70s, it revolutionized the way people watched TV. People were now able to record their favorite shows and watch them whenever they wanted; they were no longer at the mercy of network broadcasting schedules and, much to the chagrin of advertisers, all those annoying commercials could be bypassed with the push of the fast-forward button. A person with cable could even record movies from HBO or Showtime and watch them at his or her leisure. Although Hollywood initially worried that the rise of the VCR would lead to rampant movie piracy or impact the take at the box office as people decided to wait until movies came out on video, in the end the movie industry had no choice but to embrace the format. This led to the rise of the video store; people could now go out and rent whatever movie they wanted to see and watch it whenever they wished. Rentals weren’t limited to movies, either; there were documentaries, self-help tapes, educational tapes, do-it-yourself home improvement tapes – the VCR made a vast new realm of information readily available to the public. 

With the videocassette also came the widespread availability of video cameras. Families could now videotape the Christmas get-together or the kid’s basketball game and then immediately watch themselves on TV. There was no more waiting for Super 8 cartridges to be developed and no more fighting with the movie projector. Home movies became home videos. Furthermore, a person with a video camera could record anything and everything as it happened and immediately have the footage available for the world to see. Amateur footage became news; if the most famous amateur 8 mm film in history is the Zapruder footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, then the most famous amateur videotape in history is the 1991 footage of Rodney King being savagely beaten by several Los Angeles police officers - images that would eventually spark one of the biggest and ugliest riots in modern American history. 

However, technology always marches forward, and by the end of the 1990s new digital media, which offered superior quality to the analog videotape, was beginning to make its way into the consumer market. The DVD player and the digital video camera have now overtaken the VCR, and the videocassette, as revolutionary as it might have once been, is seeing its final days as a technological staple of our culture.

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015. Ten years later, and I still haven't transferred by old VHS home videos to digital media. I guess I should hurry and get that done.)

A lousy end to a lousy season

The University of Houston Cougars ended their disappointing 2004 campaign with a 27-65 loss to Louisville last Saturday at Robertson Stadium. The Coogs were actually able to keep the score close for much of the game and only trailed the 11-ranked Cardinals 27-35 early into the fourth quarter. But the Cardinals scored 30 points in the fourth quarter, including two points on a safety resulting from a bad Cougar snap, and the Cougars ended a sour season on a sour note. 

The 2004 season was, needless to stay, a huge step backward from the success of 2003. A grossly unfavorable schedule, combined with the loss of several key players to graduation, academic ineligibility or injury, resulted in a 3-8 record – the Coogs’ 14th losing season out of the last 20. A Cougar offense which scored an average of 34.5 points per game last year sustained key losses to the offensive line and receiving corps and only managed to score 20.9 points per game this season. There was only minor improvement in the porous defense over last season, and special teams saw a wholesale regression from the previous year. 

Bright spots? If you’re somebody who believes in so-called “moral victories,” then you’re pleased that the Cougars covered the spread against the powerhouse Miami Hurricanes or that they were able to force Southern Mississippi into a thrilling overtime game. But, quite frankly, I find it hard to find many positives about the 2004 Cougar football season. It started badly (with a loss to Rice) and went downhill from there. Thankfully, it is over. 

Some Cougar fans are already looking forward to 2005; there’s hope that, with a good recruiting class, some offseason adjustments, and a more favorable schedule, the 2005 season could be a good one for Houston. But I’m not going to get excited yet; the start of the 2005 season is over 9 months away, and, as this past season clearly showed, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done between now and then. 

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015.)

Tweedle-dum defeats Tweedle-dee

Right before the election I said that Bush would get re-elected because he would hang on to Florida and Ohio and pick up one or more of New Mexico, Iowa and Wisconsin (he won two out of the three). I also predicted that Bush would lose New Hampshire to Kerry, but that it wouldn’t matter. Acknowledge my political prowess!

I’m not particularly enthused about the results of this election, as I’m not looking forward to another four years of the arrogant unilateralism, crony capitalism and pandering to the fundamentalist right that the Bush administration represents, but the voters of this nation have spoken. And I’m glad it’s over. This election was ugly and hateful and neither side should be particularly pleased with the way they conducted themselves.

As for the result, the Democrats really only have themselves to blame. Bush was very vulnerable and probably could have been defeated by a better candidate. But the Democrats chose an uninspiring northeastern liberal (didn’t the Democrats learn anything from Michael Dukakis?) with a murky, contradictory voting record. Kerry couldn’t articulate his plans or visions in a manner that the voter could understand; he couldn’t shake his reputation as a “flip-flopper,” and he did a poor job of defending himself against character attacks from opponents such as the so-called Swift Vote Vets for Truth. He chose to attack Bush where he was strongest by focusing on the war in Iraq and didn’t spend enough time attacking Bush where he was weakest, such as on health care costs or prescription drug benefits. Simply put, Kerry was a lousy candidate who ran a lousy campaign.

Being the “we’re not Bush” party just wasn’t enough for the Democrats. They needed to give the electorate somebody to vote *for* as well, and they didn’t do it with John Kerry.

The Republicans saw the election as a huge victory, because in addition to Bush's successful re-election they were able to increase their margins in the House and the Senate (even adding insult to injury to the Democrats by ousting Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle). However, boasts of a Republican "mandate" are merely rhetoric. 

The nation is still bitterly divided and extremely polarized. 51% of the voting public supports Bush; 49% voted for somebody else. Deep divisions remain along urban /rural and secular/evangelical lines. Although this nasty election is over, the political climate in this nation will unfortunately remain ugly for a long time to come.

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015. Eight years later, the Republicans would make a similar mistake, choosing an uninspiring northeastern elite with a murky and contradictory record, Mitt Romney, to run against the otherwise-vulnerable Barack Obama.)

Houston 27, TCU 34

The Coogs lose again, this time to TCU in Fort Worth, in a game that apparently wasn’t even as close as the score indicated. I didn’t get to see the game because I was in Las Vegas over the weekend, but according to reports from people who were there the Coogs played uninspired football until the fourth quarter, and by then it was too late.

This loss, the sixth of the season, cements a losing record for the Coogs. They’ll return to Robertson Stadium to play Tulane this weekend, a game which won’t be easy. Considering how poorly the Cougars are playing right now, even the following week’s game against woeful East Carolina is going to be tough. A 1-10 season looks like a real possibility at this point.

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015.)

It was fun while it lasted...

Even though they were only one game away from the World Series, the Astros just couldn’t pull it off and lost to the Cardinals in an exciting seven-game National League Championship Series. 
 
I was trying not to get my hopes up, even after Houston’s amazing victory in the fifth game of the series, because I knew that the Astros had been in this same situation once before but couldn’t pull it off – in 1980, against the Philles, the ‘Stros were one win away from the World Series with two games to play – and also because I knew that the Cardinals were the ultimate comeback kids – they have never lost a best-of-seven series after trailing three games to two. Nevertheless, I’d be lying if I said I’m not disappointed right now. Just once, in my lifetime, I’d like to see the Astros go to the World Series, and this season they were so close. But I guess the Astros just aren't meant to reach the World Series.

But I’m not really angry. If you had told me in mid-August, when the Astros were four games below .500, that the team would make an improbable late-season rally, get into the playoffs, beat the hated Atlanta Braves, win their first postseason series in franchise history, and take the team with the best record in baseball to a full seven games in the NLCS, I would have called you a liar. Instead of underachieving, as Houston sports franchises are wont to do, this season’s Astros overachieved. Like I said after they beat the Braves: they could have been swept by the Cardinals and I’d still have considered this postseason a success.

So now the Cardinals go on to face the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. The Red Sox, who made baseball history by being the first time to rally from a three-game deficit to win a playoff series, are hoping that this is the year that the “Curse” comes to an end. It won’t be easy to do against the Cardinals’ amazing batting order, but it will be fun to watch. And even if Boston doesn’t win, I still enjoyed watching them beat the Yankees. I like it anytime anybody beats the Yankees.

I don’t necessarily hate the Yankees themselves, although their fan base certainly makes it easy to do so. I simply dislike what the Yankees represent. To me, they are the epitome of everything that is wrong in baseball. George Steinbrenner can pull out his checkbook and buy himself a World Series appearance virtually every year; only a handful of franchises can compete with the Yankees’ financial resources and many of the “small-market” teams have no hope of being in the World Series chase before the season even begins. The disparity between the rich franchises and the poor franchises makes Major League Baseball a rather uncompetitive sport (much like, say, Division I-A football), and it’s really a shame.

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015. I'd have to wait one more year to see the Astros finally make it to the World Series.)

Cursed no more!

I really didn’t expect the Houston Astros to be able to beat the Braves, in Atlanta, with Roy Oswalt pitching on only three days’ rest. After all, the Astros had never won a postseason series in seven previous tries, and three of those frustrating playoff losses had come against the Braves. When the Astros blew a three-run lead and lost to the Braves in Houston the day before, I thought for sure that history would repeat itself.

So you can imagine how elatedly surprised I was last night, when the Astros won their first postseason series in the 43-year history of the franchise by pounding Atlanta, 12-3, in game five of the National League Divisional Series. The curse was lifted, the jinx was broken, the demons were cast aside with an exclamation point, as the Astros scored five runs in the seventh inning and three runs in the eighth to turn what had been a close contest into a blowout. Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio, oft-criticized for their poor offensive production during previous postseason appearances, finally broke out and combined for four hits and three RBIs, which was especially remarkable considering that they were playing with the news that their friend and former teammate, Ken Caminiti, had died of a heart attack the previous day. Carlos Beltran, who dominated during this series, added two home runs.

I guess Astros owner Drayton McLane took my advice and hired that exorcist.

Now, the Astros face the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series, with the winner advancing to the World Series. St. Louis, with the best record and the best line-up in the majors, is going to be a tough test. But even if the Astros don’t get past the Cardinals, this season will still be a success. Their late-season really from four games below .500 to earn a trip to the playoffs was quite remarkable, and the fact that they’ve gotten the can’t-win-in-the-playoffs monkey off their backs is even better. The Astros, for once, are exceeding expectations, instead of falling short.

It’s a good thing I don’t bet on sports. I would be dirt poor right now, otherwise…

(Retroblogged August 23, 2015. I'm only slightly less pessimistic about Houston sports today than I was a decade ago...)