Thoughts from Rick on the first big game of the coming season (Florida State at Oklahoma)
July 22, 2010
On paper, this should be a cakewalk. I'm not buying the paper.
Their D ranked pretty badly in their pretty bad conference last year. Their offence was middle-of-the-pack. I cry trap.
Look, Bowden was done. He's not as cool as Paterno.
His highly-recruited kids have speed, he couldn't muster how to use it
within his legion of position coaches. The program has never lacked
talent, it needed organization, and Bobby realized he was a failed CEO.
Just being in Norman does not guarantee us any wins,
and this one is a doozy. We will say we want to beat these guys for
all kinds of reasons, including the Balogun flak. They will just wanna
beat us to prove they can. Kinda like we were in 1999. If these two
teams traded coaches, who would you root for?
OU should have their way offensively; if not, this
team doesn't deserve to wear the colors. FSU was flat-out awful in most
categories, and if Landry isn't working go to DeMarco. Or vice versa.
I had been going to write up a
defense-versus-offense paragraph here, but who the hell knows? They've
got a new coach, new system. Last year's stats don't mean diddly. I
just want Travis Lewis and Quinton Carter to flatten some SOB's. Jeremy
Beal smacking the quarterback into Tuesday would also not come amiss.
Look. We've gotten soft in terms of intensity.
Come to Oklahoma, yeah, you're going to win. We haven't been playing
hungry. And I lay that squarely at the feet of Bob. Bobby Knight once
said, in an oft-downloaded tirade, "I'm sick and fucking tired of losing
to Purdue!" That tirade did not inspire fear, it inspired anger. And
we need that. We need to be as hungry as they will be, and hungrier.
Don't try to tell me that, here in July, Jimbo Fisher isn't trying to
get his kids ready to play OU in Norman. He's got to make his kinds
think we've vulnerable here. We've got to not be.
Damn, my thought process on this rant would work
much better as a chat conversation than an email. Gimme a break, this is
my study break before I go back to the arcane Louisiana Napoleonic
Civil Code laws of death by intestacy.
Florida State will beat us in Norman if we play it
business as usual. We did it against Oklahoma State. We've done it
against Missouri and Texas Tech. We've done it (away from Owen)
against saxeT.
We need to do it against Florida State when they come to our place.
I leave it to you, as an Ohio domiciliary, to talk about our trip to Cincy.
Rick is one of the original crew since the inception of AJS and lives in New Orleans.
