We went to our first Texas-OU football game as sophomores in 2003. We don't need to remind you how much of a slaughter that game was, but we took two positives away as we left the game.
- A freshman named Vince Young had the craziest run we'd ever seen.
- We got to leave in the 3rd quarter.
This weekend in Missouri, the Texas baseball team put up the two worst performances we can recall a Texas team putting up. The Friday and Saturday performances were so bad that we're too humiliated to post anything but the 9-2 victory on Sunday. Being the eternal optimists that we are, we found three positives coming from this weekend:
- A freshman named Chance Ruffin could be a very good Sunday starter this season.
- Kyle Russell is back (4 HR this weekend, 7 on the season).
- We didn't have to watch. One of us had a work retreat and the other had a bike ride event.
The win on Sunday meant all is not lost, but we're hanging on by a thread here. At 8-7 Texas must now fight for 3rd in the conference. At 23-12 and 17 games left, we're guessing the Horns need to go on a serious tear to even have a chance of hosting a regional series. The schedule doesn't get any easier from here on out, with a huge weekend series against Okie State next weekend in Austin. A series win would be great, a sweep could be huge.
The only Texas team to win fewer than 19 conference games since 2002 won a national title (2005 went 16-10). We've been saying all year that this team is capable of great things, but we won't really know until June if that's true. As with the rest of you that follow Texas baseball, this weekend has us questioning the wisdom of that belief.
Austin Wood continues to alternate between brilliance and badness (for lack of a better word), Kenn Kasparek has been bypassed in the rotation, Kyle Walker hasn't gotten a meaningful inning since Stanford, Stayton Thomas has struggled of late, Michael Torres continues to swing a hot bat but looks like Chuck Knoblauch trying to field 2B, and the team now has one pitcher (1) out of the nine (9) that have thrown 10+ innings with an ERA below 3.
We love baseball because statistics usually tell a large part of a team's story, so does that sound like the story of an elite team?
We still remain confident that this team has the talent to make an Omaha run, but we'll be the first to admit that talent alone does not a champion make.