Let's talk football

Since Rita's not coming anywhere near me anymore (although those high cloud bands are still flying across the sky above) and other folks are blogging in horror at the Houston non-evacuation gridlock more effectively than I could, I figure I'll look at something less earth-shaking: Last night's Texas A&M-Texas State football game, moved from Saturday to Thursday because of the hurricane threat.

Boy, did those Bobcats come to play. I work for Texas State, so obviously I wanted the Bobcats to have a good showing. But it's impossible for me to root against the Aggies. The outcome was about as good as I could hope. The fact that the Bobcats (an NCAA DI-AA team) only lost 44-31, and were threatening late in the 4th quarter to pull within a field goal caught a lot of people by surprise. QB Barrick Nealy even out-performed A&M's Reggie McNeil, completing 26 of 34 passes for 378 yards compared to McNeil's 13 of 24 for 317 yards. Every time the Aggies looked to break the game open, Texas State fought back, gaining confidence as the game wore on.

The circumstances of the game added up to an almost "Perfect Storm" scenario for Texas State, pardon the pun. The Bobcats were coming off a bye week, and had 11 days to prepare, whereas the Aggies were facing a quick turnaround after last week's SMU contest and worked out only four days--which were clouded with uncertainty about whether or not the game would even be played because of Hurricane Rita. Moving the game definitely hurt A&M in terms of execution and preparation. And because Highway 6 is one of the gridlocked evacuation routes from Houston, A&M officials asked that fans stay away from the game and instead watch on the hastily-arranged Fox Sports Network broadcast. The end result of that was a crowd of only 50,000 or so turning out for the game. One of the biggest the Bobcats have ever played before, sure, but nowhere near the intimidating thunder of the 75,000 previously expected. Another factor in the game was the fact that A&M took the I-AA Bobcats lightly. A&M always takes lower-division foes lightly, getting upset by the Ragin' Cajuns a decade ago and almost falling to McNeese five or so years back. Finally, Texas State coach David Bailiff--a former assistant of A&M coach Dennis Franchione--has stressed conditioning from the first day he set foot on campus. He works his team hard so they'll be ready for the 4th quarter. Because of that, his team held up well in the second half even though A&M had a huge depth advantage--a far cry from the fatigue and exhaustion that wiped out SMU a week earlier against the Aggies.

I expect there will be quite a few coaches in the Southland Conference losing sleep over the Bobcats' performance. And I'll bet there will be quite a few A&M coaches losing sleep over the Aggies' performance.

If these two teams played 10 times, A&M wins nine of those games. But last night's game was the ninth of those games, and Texas State was just a few miscues away from making it that elusive 10th.

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