The Kinks Corollary

You make some incredibly valid arguments. I’d say I agree with about 95-99% of what you just said. The only thing I take I can nitpick at is this: “But it’s not that we are losing games, it’s why we’re losing games”.

No YOU, Chrisapplewhite are upset at how we lose games. Most if not all of the bloggers (excuse the term) are undoubtly upset at HOW we lose football games. But that’s because you’re rational (at least in terms of football expectations) human beings who understand the ways and means of pigskin. And also football. You understand how frustrating close Texas is to being a truly dominate program and you can see obvious *cough Greg Davis cough* obstacles to our righteous success. But unlike 80% of the 80% of the haters, or 2886.4 of the readers here don’t HONESTLY understand that we cannot win every game. After every loss they invariably say things like “I don’t mind losing if we could just execute our plays.” Or “I don’t mind losing if our coaches would bring out a good game plan.” Or, my favorite, “I don’t mind losing if our coaches would have shown some adjustments at halftime.”

You don’t mind losing if all of those things happened? I sure as shit-fire would mind. We’re the by-God University of by-God Texas. IF we execute, or correctly game-plan, or make the correct halftime adjustments I expect us to have the athletes and playmakers to beat whoever we line up against. Every Saturday. Unlike the people who “wouldn’t mind” however, I understand that no matter how great your players and coaches, that every once in a they will fail in one, if not multiple categories. What grates me is that a great (note: not good but great) coaching staff learns from those failures. They learn from those failures and work to correct them regardless of the outcome of their poor performance. I believe that a great coaching staff focuses more on the performance of themselves and their players and less on the outcome of the contest because a great coaching staff should understand that at the University of Texas we have the players to absolutely suck in all phases and still beat 75% of the teams we play. Moreso, a great coaching staff should have the BELIEF that with the players we’re able to attract to The University, if we perform near our capabilities and the coaches do their jobs correctly, we shouldn’t lose. Not that we won’t; just that we shouldn’t.

Uunfortunately for us, many of our coaches don’t grasp this concept. They look at a win in any fashion to be a total victory. Now don’t get wrong, I’m all for finding ways to win ugly when the times call for it; but winning ugly shouldn’t be a gameplan. Winning ugly shouldn’t be your prime objective.

Okay, I’ll get off my damn soapbox now.

The Kinks Corollary is a catchy title, but the article is inherently flawed in the fact that we are NOT the kinks. They never had the talent to be considered in a “best ever” conversation.

Recently I would consider us closer to The Doors, Queen, or Nirvana. Their impact on the landscape of music was undeniable during their heyday. They were all groups of talented musicians, undeniably lead by a charismatic lead singer, who died and the bands simply couldn’t recover.

Hell, even give us Van Halen.

The Kinks? Really?

Led Zeppelin was the greatest band of all time, btw.

“You don’t mind losing if all of those things happened?”

Honestly? No. I wasn’t upset when Ohio State beat us in ‘06. They were just better.

It rarely happens though, so it’s not like I’m Buddha calm after every loss.

I remember watching the 2004 Arkansas game with HJ, Scipio, and a bunch of other guys I don’t remember or know.

Trying to remember who else was there. I think SizzleChest, LHScott and srr50.

I remember changing my opinion about that team during the game. When DJ screwed up the coin toss, I was thinking nothing had changed. Then I saw Vince, saw players like Dibbles and Cedric Griffin make clutch plays and I knew this was a different team.

The 2005 Rose Bowl most certainly wouldn’t have happened. We probably would have played Tennessee in the Cotton Bowl.

The Black Crowes are better than The Beatles, The Stones and The Kinks combined.

Outside of USC, did we ever even need Vince to be Vince? We pretty much rolled everybody, and OSU bottled him up pretty well.

I see your point, though.

I, for one, would be happy with a team that comes to the game prepared, knows how to win, performs to the best of its ability, and plays intelligent football. What drives me crazy is that the Longhorns are so often self-defeating. I’d rather win, but I can stand losing if we have played well against team that has played better.

The problem with the Kinks is that they were too British-centric. No one outside the UK understood what Ray Davies was talking about 90% of the time.

How this fits in with Texas is that in 2004, we were the early Beatles. Bubblegum pop, flavor of the month.

In 2005, we were Exile on Main Street era Stones. We could fuck anyone up and knock their socks off.

In 2006, we were late 60’s Kinks. We played the run when all the opponents passed. We were brilliant but no one GOT US, MAN.

In 2007, we were Ringo Starr’s Allstar band. Led by the least talented member of a once popular group, we relied on the 4th replacement bassist from the Byrds when we could have had Clarence White if anyone managing the group had a fucking clue.

Dave Davies had some great songs (”Love Me Till the Sun Shines”) but his fights with Ray were so bad, his songs were often overlooked.

Also, Doperbo, HJ enjoys Dead Yeti more than Poi Dog.

mws: Yeah, but in the Mackovic era, we were Wings. So we’re getting better.

And we were the mild type of wings, not the habanero-quality wings.

(’Habanero’ means ‘Vince Young’ in Paraguayan by the way. You can look it up.)

It’s only music, only jukebox music-only jukebox music ….

Back where we started, here we go round again, …

man - I’m a huge Kinks fan. And I gotta tell all of you I got a new technique for our QB’s to improve our passing statistics: I’m going to train them to throw w/ the wrong arm!! Heeheee, they’ll be preparing for our guys to throw w/ one arm - and by golly, we’ll be throwing with the other!! They’ll never expect it!!!

I am a total genius!! Total!!

In the Mackovic era we were Yanni.

You know guys, The Kinks weren’t supposed to be an exact, literal match to our program in terms of our respective landscapes. The post was about perspective.

Of course we’re not the freaking Kinks. We’re N’Sync.

I know what you look like and could never figure out why. Glad that mystery is put to bed.

You know, I think there is a happy medium between Chris and Eyes. VY was a game changer, but you need only look at the Titans to see how not having good WRs will keep him from doing as much damage as he is capable of doing. You could make the argument that had other teams not had to respect our receivers and RBs, then they could have concentrated more on VY and possibly made life tougher for him.

The 2006 tOSU game also found us with a redshirt freshman QB in, what was it, his second or third start in college? That must be taken into account when looking at the offensive plan we used for that game. 2007 aside, Colt improved vastly in ‘06, and had that game been played later in the year, it probably would have looked different. I’m not saying we would have won, but there is a good chance we would not have lost by as much as we did.

We also lost some great defensive players from ‘05 to ‘06. And that 05 defense was just great - the safety play at tOSU, the stop of USC on 4th and short… I get chills thinking about it.

So yes, VY elevated our program to the point where we could beat teams like tOSU and USC - even when down by a significant amount - but we still had the talent to roll pretty much everyone else we played even without VY. (Yes, I know I’m skipping over scares like Ok. St., but that happens almost every year anyway.)

On a completely different note, I also agree with previous posters that this team needs to play harder and with MUCH more fire. Team chemistry should also be a priority for the returning players this year.

“It’s absurd to try to account for 2005 as anything but the year Vince Young elevated this program above the abilities of its coaches.”

First off, that is an absolute slap in the face to the other 9 NFL players that played on that offense, and the several other valuable role players. Everybody wants to heap all the credit on Vince, but the fact is, he didn’t score 50/game on his own. From OU to Colorado it was as much the team as it was him. tOSU was the same. Everybody played well because everybody was good.

Second, you could be a professional at missing the point. I’m not saying Vince was irrelevant. srr50 used a very specific phrase “let Vince be Vince.” Well, we didn’t for most of that year. A&M was his least Vince-y game in his career. Other players won that game, not him.

I was saying that in 2005, we didn’t need Vince to run wild. It was a team effort, and we were so good that we could have run pretty much anything and still dominated the regular season.

We stopped organizing game watching parties because you moved back to town.

Ray Davies was on ACL Saturday. Still full of himself.

I afraid we are the Sir Douglas Quintet. Monster hit in the 60’s. Interesting recent revival. Then graveyard.

Its not supposed to be that way.

Even though Vince has ridden off into the Waterloo Sunset, I still expect MB/GD and the boys to deliver more Victorias. For the haters and doubters, all I can say is that paranoia will destroy you.
I admit that what I just typed is some of the weakest shit ever, but the first two songs mentioned still sound good 40 years later (and needed to be mentioned in the thread for completeness).