Surviving the Surge

Reading that made my bowels surge.

Though not everything is perfect with the season so far, every team can point to multiple deficiencies. The season is too short to gripe constantly about our team’s problems. We played much worse on defense last year and still managed to beat the majority of our conference opponents and come within a touchdown of OU, so they don’t strike fear in me at this point.

Ah Bill Little…

EL PASO, Texas — It had been a typical beginning, and every Mack Brown team since he came to Texas has learned to prepare for it. Regardless of how a team has looked on video, regardless of the pundits impressions, they will play Texas with a different fervor — a different scheme and attitude — than they have played others.

It is called “the surge.”

I love the unjustified use of the authoritarian claim “it is called…” to describe Mack’s new buzzword, as if Bill Little was recounting an ancient Navajo legend instead of merely parroting the coaching staff’s blame-deflecting propaganda.

No one calls the highly-specific phenomenon (excuse?) of a perceived increase in effort or improvement in strategy by Texas’s opponents during Mack Brown’s tenure as the head football coach “the Surge.” Well, maybe not no one. But only three people use this term with a straight face. And only one of those three people is not provably retarded.

And so it was that the Texas Longhorns came to El Paso to play the University of Texas at El Paso Miners.

And so it was that William Sunshine Pappadapolis Little came to the precipice bordering the Interwebs intent on penning an awkwardly-written, laborious sentence that would seemingly provide a useful transition between the first paragraph and the second paragraph of his latest tome but, upon closer inspection, does not truly fit in the context of the surrounding text.

Not since 1933, when Clyde Littlefield was still coaching football at Texas — before Jack Chevigny’s 1934 team beat Notre Dame and Dana Bible became a legend and Darrell Royal a treasure…well, you get the point. It had been 75 years since the Longhorns had played what was then called “Texas College of Mines.”

Wait. What happened there? Did Grampa Bill just type out and publish an episode of senility? He went to the trouble of beginning a meandering thought, only to get lost, openly declare defeat, and finish with a dismissive “you get the point.” Someone missed his afternoon nap.

Since the game was announced a couple of years ago, the city that hugs the border between New Mexico and Texas, as well as the international juxtaposition of the United States and the Republic of Mexico, had looked forward to this night.

I can think of at least two crappy Mexican restaurant chains that managed to conjur up a more elegant, concise way to describe the geography of El Paso than “hugs the international juxtaposition of the United States and the Republic of Mexico.”

And at the end of two spectacular sun-splashed days, the Sun Bowl Stadium was packed with the bright orange of UTEP and the burnt orange of the flagship university of the System from Austin.

Wait, we played two nights in a row? That’s flat-out confusing. Why the end of two days? Why not the end of the week since the last game? Or the end of the 75 year-span since these two teams last played? Or the end of the ancient pre-surge era, when sun splashed wildly across the international juxtaposition and … oh you get the point…

And I’m sure that crack team of writers for Taco Bell could come up with a description of the University of Texas that is slightly zippier and less confusing than “the flagship university of the System from Austin.”

Conference television packages are tremendously important, and ratings dictate their success. So when a non-BCS league like Conference USA gets a chance to enhance a television partner like ESPN2, they’ll play the thing at midnight if they have to, and they darned near did. That is why the start time — 10:30 p.m. on the east coast — kept fans who watched the game to conclusion up almost as late as some of the Olympic events from Bejiing.

Topical! Nice. But most of the Olympic events were telecast during primetime. Not that Bill Little would have seen them, as the NBC Olympics coverage conflicted with reruns of Matlock on the Hallmark Channel.

To frustrate the TV viewers who wanted to see the game even more, ESPN2 got caught with an overtime game with South Florida and Central Florida which prevented joining the party in El Paso until 26 minutes had expired.

I wanted to see that game even more than some unspecified baseline comparison. No doubt about it.

That was a shame, because the set-the-scene pre-game had to be ditched, along with most of the first quarter. And if you missed that, you missed the surge.

The Surge is like the Chupacabra. It’s there. You didn’t see it? I did. It happened. It was amazing. I don’t know how we survived, but it must have been sheer will. One day, we’ll capture the surge on video and you’ll see. It’s not poor preparation. It’s not lack of effort or intelligent scheming on the Horns’ fault. It is a supernatural force of Fate driving the opponents of the University of Texas under Mack Brown to overcome all natural limitations and inexplicably outplay the Longhorns. Only the sheer will of our heroes can overcome the awesome power of the surge!

You didn’t see it? Too bad. Trust me, it’s real.

The Miners, who had been embarrassed in their season opener at Buffalo, started the game with two crisp drives and a defensive three-and-out stop. But to the Longhorns’ credit, both drives were limited to field goals, giving UTEP a 6-0 lead.

But before the quarter had ended, cooler heads had prevailed.

Huh? Did the two coaches sit down and negotiate the outcome, settling on a Texas blowout only after calming down and realizing that this was the level-headed thing to do?

The turning part of the game came, however, on successive drives in the second quarter with the Longhorns leading, 14-6.

The turning part of a car is the wheels!

In many ways, this was what is commonly referred to as a “trap” game — an easily overlooked opponent with better than advertised talent, on the road in a really late game, and coming after they’ve looked bad and you’ve played well.

This is what is commonly called a pile of cliche and largely immaterial excuses for a poor performance by the Longhorns. How could they expect to dominate UTEP, when Texas had to play at 9:15? That’s an unfair advantage for the Miners.

Game two was far from perfect. The statistics even favored the Miners. What was effective, however, was the efficiency.

That’s an interesting point. However, what I took away from the box score was that the effectiveness to be efficient. In any case, it is clear that the Longhorns of the System in Austin were able to leverage efficiencies in core competencies resulting in a win-win scenario.

Brilliantly done, Ken Tremendous.

Poor Bill sure is getting picked on around here this week.

Wonderful stuff, Ken Tremendous.

“A must listen”

Damn you.

My aunt once saw the surge when she was a little girl. The memory haunts her to this very day.

You fear it, yet it’s power only grows!!

Shoot, where I grew up there were surges all over the place…..some of ‘em big as horse turds!

Beergut, has it come to this for the Aggie nation- “Our idiot is smarter than your idiot?”