Gridiron, Week 11

The college football season is really winding down, but the part I most enjoy still lies ahead, with the classic rivalry games (Alabama-Auburn, USC-UCLA, Michigan-Ohio State, etc) and the bowl game season (December to early January). With luck, I'll see a dozen good games over the next six or seven weeks.

Today is the big TAMU vs Baylor matchup. The game has no significance whatsoever other than establishing the Big 12 South cellar dweller. The preseason prognostication had the Aggies assigned to that slot, but Baylor may wind up there with a loss today. At any rate, the teams seem to be comparable in terms of ability, so I'm not expecting either to win a blowout. For the Aggies, the blowout will be later, when the longhorns come to town.

For several years, I've been thinking of TAMU as the place where coaches and blue chip quarterbacks go to die, a sort of football graveyard. I was looking at the BCS standings this week, and saw TCU ranked number 4 with a 10-0 record. That led me in turn to think about Dennis Franchione, who laid the foundation for the TCU program that now ranks as a national powerhouse but can't seem to latch onto another head coaching job after his dismal tenure in Aggieland.

In the post-WWII era, there have been two coaches who left TAMU for bigger and better things. The more prominent of the pair was Bear Bryant, of course, who took off for Alabama and finished his lengthy career playing for or winning national championships. Bryant's would-be protege, Gene Stallings, had one special season in College Station, then bounced around the NFL before ending up at Alabama himself. Stallings got a national championship of his own with the Crimson Tide.

Franchione went the opposite direction, leaving Alabama and heading west to TAMU. His chances of ever winning a national championship are the proverbial slim and none. One of the mysteries that won't be solved in my lifetime is how a coach who could resurrect a program as sorry and downtrodden as TCU ended up being run off at Texas A&M.

Let's set aside the so-so Aggie coaches like Hank Foldberg, Jim Myers and Tom Wilson, and consider only the ones who had a little success. Emory Bellard was the first post-Bryant coach to have anything resembling a string of winning seasons in Aggieland, but he couldn't seem to get over the hump and capture a SWC championship, much less the Cotton Bowl. Jackie Sherrill took over in the early 1980s and was able to do what Bellard couldn't, but he fudged a few rules and bent a few others along the way. Coincidentally, both Emory and Jackie finished their college coaching careers at Mississippi State, with teams wearing maroon and white uniforms. Both had a few modestly successful seasons at MSU before fading away.

R.C. Slocum took the program Jackie built and kept the dreams alive as long as the team played in the mediocre SWC. He had a few good seasons in the tougher Big 12, but was in charge when the current death spiral began. He's probably out of coaching for good. Mike Sherman had a decent reputation as an NFL coach at Green Bay, but he's quickly catching up with Franchione in terms of responsibility for humiliating blowout defeats. He looks like another guy who stumbled into the graveyard by mistake.

As for blue chip high school quarterbacks who signed with the Aggies, there haven't been too many, but those who did never realized their supposed potential. The one who came closest was Gary Kubiak, who didn't win many Aggie games and spent much of his professional career as John Elway's backup. The high school hotshots who were the biggest busts were Lance Pavlas and to a lesser degree, Reggie McNeal. Of those two, McNeal looked like the guy who might get the Aggies into championship contention, at least at the conference level.

Ironically, the most memorable game Reggie played for the Aggies was his first one, the monumental upset of Oklahoma in which Slocum burned Reggie's redshirt year to get a big win that ultimately couldn't save his job. McNeal was a great passing quarterback who could run, but Franchione's staff transformed him into a so-so option quarterback who could pass a little. A totally disgusting waste, but the kind of thing that happens in graveyards.

Added 10:20 pm, same day: Aggies 38, Baylor 3. The score was more lopsided than I expected, but if I knew shit about predicting football outcomes, I'd be a professional gambler rolling in dough. A&M goes no worse than 6-6 in the regular season, but qualifies for bowl participation so might finish with a losing record. I'm almost always pessimistic about A&M in TV games, which comes from seeing so many in which they embarrassed themselves (Arkansas and OU being recent examples).