Written by Adam Jones
Thursday, 05 January 2006

They did it.

You know, I do my absolute best to write an objective and unbiased look at college football from a national perspective each week. But tonight I simply don't give a damn. The Texas Longhorns are national champs.

I thought this would happen in 1977. I was ten years old and I would stake out the afternoon paper delivery boy every Tuesday. In Amarillo there was still a morning and afternoon edition of the paper long after it was fashionable in other cities. The cynical believed that it was simply so the Amarillo Daily News could sell the same content twice. During college football season, however, it was vitally important that the afternoon paper could pick up the Associated Press college football poll, which did not appear in the a.m. And in 1977 I would intercept the delivery boy and turn to the sports, where the Longhorns were number one on the strength of a victory over whatever poor bastards got in the way of Earl Campbell. The story didn't have a happy ending however. Notre Dame 35, Texas 10 in the Cotton Bowl.

Written by Adam Jones
Thursday, 15 December 2005

I drive across the Enfield bridge over Lamar street every day on the way to work. As you approach the bridge, the pink dome of the State Capitol appears, seemingly out of nowhere, with postcard-perfect morning light behind it. I'm not so jaded; it still gives me a warm feeling in my heart. On the other hand, it's only my second-favorite landmark. That's because, to the right of the bridge, sits House Park Field. House Park has hosted high school football games since 1939. The old gal looks every bit of her 66 years and, allegedly, seats 6000 - they had better be skinny. My two youngest took in their very first football game at House Park this season. That night was filled with wonder. McCallum beat Lanier and B's babysitter turned in a helluva performance as the McCallum drum major - they went to state this year, you know. The stadium buzzed with the energy of hundreds of teenagers on a Friday night. Nothing else in life really approximates that feeling. But those feelings fade. On this morning, a man in khaki coveralls and a black watch cap slowly moves through the bleachers at House Park with a leaf blower. He removes, re-circulates and re-organizes all manner of debris from all manner of events. McCallum v. Lanier is just another box score, another piece of historical debris. There won't be another football game played at House Park this year, nor in most of the rest of the House Park Fields around the country.

Written by Adam Jones
Tuesday, 06 December 2005

Bored at work? Or are you just depressed that in college football, as opposed to any other sport, we all are forced to sit around and wait a month between the end of the season and the next meaningful game anyone plays? To combat that depression, I give you the first annual JonesTop Ten Best of the Season column. Here's my year in college football for 2005.

FAVORITE LINES
Great literature? No way, but I do hope you find something you like every week. Here are my favorites.

"...the BCS settled on Harris Interactive to create for them a new poll of 114 former players, administrators, coaches, trainers, cheerleaders and at least one sousaphone player who once dotted the "i" for the Ohio State band." - season preview

Written by Adam Jones
Sunday, 04 December 2005

Uhm, OK. Really, I don't have much to write. I guess I could get in a couple of paragraphs about perhaps the least competitive day of the college football season - on championship day, no less. Other than that, we might as well wait around a month for the big finish. It's not like we have playoffs to watch or anything. Sigh.

Texas blasted Colorado 70-3 to start the day and then, almost as if they had been watching the game in the locker room - and they may have been - USC throttled UCLA 66-19 just to keep Reggie Bush in the Heisman lead. UCLA was allegedly ranked 11th going into the game.

Written by Adam Jones
Sunday, 27 November 2005

Santa now appears in commercials. Not as window dressing -- you know the shot at the end of a spot where he winks at the camera or you see him fly off into the night on his sled -- but as a real character. This I can't take. Santa apparently stops taking present orders at the mall to walk across to one of those slick, corporate, "how much can we get away with marking this up?" guilt-inducing jewelry stores to pick up a sapphire anniversary ring for Mrs. Claus for $499 plus tax. Now, why, I ask you, does a man who employs thousands of skilled craftsmen for basically room and board require Kay Jewelers to ensure the wife has something under the tree? It may be that things aren't so hot at the Arctic Circle for ol' Santa. He plays second banana to a goose in the last Aflac commercial. Kringle is also picking up some extra change shilling for big auto. Apparently he's got an ongoing argument with the guy in the Chevy red tag suit. Both big guys in red, both offering up all kinds of discounts, making people happy, obvious rivals. But come on, this is Santa Claus here. He's the man. And he's arguing with a guy dressed as a price tag. What's next? Jesus comparing car insurance rates?

Written by Adam Jones
Sunday, 20 November 2005

We could go home. Or we could go to Lala's over on Justin. At home we will get two very small children, one of whom should be asleep and the other of whom has no regard for his parent's need for eight hours of uninterrupted quiet. At Lala's we get year-round Christmas decorations, beer in a can and a jukebox that doesn't have a single song dating past 1970. Lala's won partially because it's been a long time since I played "Hey Porter" by Johnny Cash or "Twistin' the Night Away" by Sam Cooke on a jukebox. The latter confused me as a child. I knew the song because I had older siblings (it didn't hurt that it was on the Animal House soundtrack). Sam Cooke's protagonist spends a fair amount of time "dancin' with the chick in slacks." I always assumed that he was dancin' with the "chicken slacks."  I was white bread and middle class; obviously "chicken slacks" were some mysterious clothing item from the soul underground that helped one approximate the moves of a chicken, or perhaps do the funky chicken. Or maybe they had a small chicken pattern printed on them. I did not know. Given that Lala's had a fair number of young twentysomethings on this Friday night, I wondered if some of them might be hearing Sam Cooke for the first time and perhaps they discussed the same thing.

"What the hell are chicken slacks?"

Written by Adam Jones
Sunday, 13 November 2005

It requires some serious investigation to figure out that George Killian's Irish Red is actually a product of the Adolph Coors Company of Golden Colorado. The people of Coors type their imprimatur in a tiny font on the bottom of the back label. The rest of the bottle reminds one of the old country (Ireland, not Colorado) - or at least of what some bright marketing grads from Wharton want you to believe about the old country as you sit in front of your television set on college football Saturday. Coors peddles authenticity with Killian's. If you squint hard enough, you might actually believe that what you are drinking was made by an old Irishman named George Killian in a tiny family-run emerald isle brewery.  The people of www.ratebeer.com are not fooled of course. They don't say anything bad about Killian's - exactly - they write things like: "not bad for a Coors product," or "...obviously designed for mass consumption, but it's not offensive." May I pause here and note what a great country we live in? What other nation would have invented ratebeer.com? Granted the Australians might have, but you get my point. What was my point again? Oh yes, peddling authenticity. You can't peddle authenticity to college football fans. Ours is both the worst-marketed sport and the sport in least need of marketing. Beyond the idiocy of not having a playoff (cha-ching) ask yourself why college football is the only sport where the networks can't guarantee a national television audience for a "must-see" football game. Television made the NFL and it rescued the NBA, but college football was made long before Roone Arledge was born. We are going to go to the games regardless of the marketing campaign. Because we always have. Especially in Tuscaloosa.

LSU 16, Alabama 13

Written by Adam Jones
Monday, 07 November 2005

Yes, I know it's Tuesday. I've broken the covenant. Instead of penning a column Sunday afternoon I played the "Worst Case Survival Handbook" board game with my brother, my nephew and Z. It's like a really sick version of Trivial Pursuit and even more addictive.
 
"How do you know if someone is in hypo-glycemic shock?"
 
"What do you do to preserve a severed limb?"
 
"If attacked on a public bus by spider monkeys, should you seek the help of a transit cop?"
 
My team lost because our opponents knew that eating snails with brightly colored shells would lead to certain death.

Then C and I went for a walk. I figured he needed to see the neighborhood and it gave me time to undermine his mom by offering up some subliminal messages on the need for a sport court in the backyard. A playscape gets you nowhere in life, man. What you need is a reliable jumper from 15-18 feet, which, by the way, I don't have anymore. I know this because the next thing I did to avoid writer's block was play pick-up basketball. Pick-up basketball cures all ills: boredom, burnout, heartaches, hangovers, you name it. Of course, it is also a great avoidance strategy. Worked just fine.
 
It's not that I didn't want to write on Sunday about how impressive Miami was at the point of attack in overwhelming Virginia Tech. Or how astonished - and that's the right word - I was by a 52-14 win by 2-6 Arizona over 8-0 UCLA; this after writing last week that UCLA's defense is better than you think. Uh, no.
 
I just need a second wind. It's that time of the season.
 
A second wind will allow me to ponder things like: Can Alabama really go undefeated without scoring any offensive touchdowns? It worked in a 17-0 win over Mississippi State.
 
Or that USC and Texas are acting like two fourteen year-old boys who can't quit showing off because they like the same girl. Is 62-0 over Baylor really necessary? 37 points in the first twenty minutes against Stanford? ("It was easy for us," Matt Leinart said. "We pretty much did anything we wanted to do.") By the way, if you haven't been paying attention, neither Baylor nor Stanford are "bad" football teams (not Duke or Temple bad, for example).
Save it, guys, Virginia Tech lost.
 
I need a second wind after staying up Saturday to watch Vanderbilt fall...just...this...short of upsetting Florida in the Swamp. Should Vandy's Jay Cutler be the All-SEC quarterback? Maybe, he was nails right up to the point when his worst throw of the day ended in a game-preserving pick in the second overtime period. The kid can't do everything. Florida 49, Vandy 42.
 
I need a second wind to contemplate just how Steve Spurrier coaxed six wins out of a really bad (on paper) South Carolina team. Maybe he's not overrated. The Gamecocks punched their ticket to Bowlfest 2005 with a 14-10 decision over Arkansas.
 
Boston College needs a second wind after losing to Nawth Klina 16-14 as Tar Heel return man Wallace Wright did the old "drop the ball on the ground to sucker the defense and then pick it up and take it 90 yards for the TD" trick to open the scoring.
 
BC's loss paved the way for Florida State to sneak in the back door of the ACC title game. NC State blocked the front door with a 20-15 upset victory (again) over an FSU team that the Wolfpack had no business beating (again). Actually, it starts not being an upset anymore, doesn't it?
 
Michigan State's used up their second wind. Did the Spartans really lose to Purdue? Did they really beat Notre Dame?
 
Speaking of Notre Dame, the Irish abused Tennessee's defense early and took a 21-3 lead. Then Tennessee abused Notre Dame to come back and tie it at 21. Then Notre Dame abused Tennessee's defense late to win 41-21. I've never seen so much abuse. How many of you believe Charlie Weis makes better in-game adjustments than Phil Fulmer? Show of hands, please.
 
Penn State whipped Wisconsin up one side and down the other in a 35-14 punisher. It might have made impressive showing of the week had Miami's defense not decided to play tetherball with Marcus Vick.

Written by Adam Jones
Sunday, 30 October 2005

We all make choices in life. Today I made the choice to pick up cheeseburgers on the way home and wile away the afternoon throwing the ball around the yard with Z. That means you, my fair readers, are left without any semblance of the cyber-literary masterpieces to which you are accustomed. Well, actually it means you are largely spared my ruminations about cold fronts, the leaves falling outside, school carnivals, Marta's pumpkin flan, the amber glow of Bourbon on a cool evening and making chili. These seasonal memories come complete with a faithful dog asleep in the corner at no extra charge.

"Honey, did you read JonesTop Ten today?"

Written by Adam Jones
Sunday, 23 October 2005

The tour around the stadium started with 12:10 to go in the game. From our four end zone seats my partners in crime first headed to the bottom of the section to watch the action up close. Then we moved right one section for a better view. That was followed by a sprint down the stairs and underneath the west side where we had to catch a few plays on the television next to the souvenir stand. Back up the stairs we reached the west side lower level, home of the ancient and revered, not to mention deep-pocketed, Longhorn alums who can be counted upon to vacate enough seats to accommodate three ten-year olds and one adult acting like one for the balance of a fourth-quarter blowout. From the tunnel in section six we enjoyed a picture perfect view straight down the line of scrimmage as Vince Young set up under center.

"This is where we would sit if we were rich," I explained to Z.