Thursdays With Raider: Episode Seven A Love Story

Raider Begins This Week

Recently I’ve wondered to myself if I’m getting too old for a lot of things, and in particular I ponder the fact that my season ticket is still in the North Endzone.  I swore to myself that I would never become “that guy” and by “that guy” I mean “that guy at RES who seems adamantly against things that are perfectly acceptable at pretty much every other college stadium”.  Things like…say, vociferous cheering.  Or getting to your seat(s) anytime before kickoff.  This always draws the ire of Ute fans who have kids that one chooses to bring to the game.  Apparently, most normal families take their sweet time getting their whole menagerie into a large vehicle, trying to find a place to park, making sure no one gets lost on Guardsman Way and into the stadium.  I will also admit here that I’ve been about 30-45 minutes early to any and every single appointment and event I have attended since you bought your first Go-Go’s album, so it might be a good idea to take my insistence on being early for everything in life with a little salt and lime.

(This also explains why I am still single, as my last girlfriend thought I was strange because I was ready to leave and go out a good hour before she was.  Look, all she had to do was say “I’m not interested” the first time I asked her out and then she wouldn’t have that problem.)

Over the course of the past half a dozen years or so, I’ve seen some really great and some really horrific moments as a denizen of the NEZ:

–2005 Wyoming game, where I drove into SLC on about 2 1/2 hours sleep.  I vowed never to do that again.

–2006 Boise debacle.  The less said about this, the better.

–06 Holy War.  This in my opinion is Exhibit A of the deep, dark corpulent underbelly of the BYU fan base, as it was on full display among the Y fans that showed up to RES that day.  They truly bring out the best in us and the worst in us.

–07 Wyoming game, where a mutual acquaintance of ours ran to my section and said “Joe Glenn just flipped off the Ute sideline on TV”.  In an odd sort of way, I liked Joe Glenn.  I kind of thought that Glenn would have been an incredible and entertaining athletic director, or failing that, the head of the Cowboy Joe Club raising funds and shaking the hands of the Cowboy faithful.  But from our perspective, this was trolling at its finest.

–08 TCU game, which to this day is the best game regardless of the sport that I have attended in person.

–2010 TCU game, where if you will remember a girl about 3 rows down from me took her top off.  If security had waited even 5 minutes more, I probably would have gone down there to get her phone number.

–2010 Holy War.  Brandon Burton won a game for us that by all accounts we had no business winning.

–Last season’s games, including the CU game where I said sort of out loud as Coleman Peterson’s game tying FG attempt “that’s not going in”.  So sorry Ute fans, it’s all my fault.

I think I will stay in my assigned seat for another season, but you have to understand how disconcerting it is for me to not be an obnoxious lush anymore.  It’s quite an existential crisis.

Say, have you seen the new Marlins stadium?  Particularly what lives beyond the fence in right center field.  Here, take a look at it:

I’m proud of this joke (maybe a little too proud), but I’ll go ahead and re-type it here.  It looks like something you’d find on a teenage girl’s Lisa Frank trapper keeper.  It could be worse though, at least it doesn’t feature Pitbull partying under a freeway overpass with a whole bunch of Dr Pepper.  Should I remember nothing else from the 2011 college football season, I will remember that.  Unfortunately.

Hey, speaking of TCU, take a look see at this article  and ponder to yourself about their AD’s comments concerning schools like FSU “trying to get in” to the Big XII.  Maybe I’m putting too much thought into this, but I think that Del Conte is almost taunting FSU and Clemson and “Da U”.  Sort of a “yeah that’s right bitches, we’re in and you ain’t” kind of thing.

Well, I have to work on Memorial Day, so try not to cook anything too mouth watering.  It could make me angry.  You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

MAC Proudly Responds

Well as the kids say, lets get this party started up in this piece.

The old guy thing has been a real topic of mine of late.  As you know my wife is significantly younger than I and her medical school classmates are even younger.  When I socialize with these people I find myself becoming Red Foreman and describing their behavior as, “dumbass-ish.”  I’m pretty sure I’m no longer capable of interacting in this world in many facets.  Like you often speak of your dating life.  Should my wife chuck me to the curb, I don’t think I could date anymore.  It just seems like too much work.  Honestly I think it would be better just to treat myself to a really high end prostitute every so often.  Like the great philosopher Chef in South Park said, “A prostitute is like any other woman, you’ve got to pay something for sex, you pay a prostitute to leave.”

As for the being late thing, well I have a bit more understanding for people on that.  Since it’s not the 50’s or Wyoming and you can’t just smack you kids to get them to behave as you want, unexpected debates with 2 year olds over what kind of shoes they’ll be wearing can throw a wench in even the best laid plans.  And you can’t arrive too early because that can seriously take time off the backside of the game.  Still I arrive earlier than most and my little guy has made it through two basketball games including once sitting courtside, so I feel I’m doing my job.  Do you think Okie State v Arizona has the proper level of pomp and circumstance to be his first college football game?

I have a thought about NEZ seats.  Honestly I was thinking we should try to get ours closer together.  So that when I can make an appearance, I’d have someone to sit with and most of the time you could use the extra room to entertain.  You could create like a micro-lounge there.  Or at least as a woman to a sporting event.  For some reason women enjoy being asked to sporting events even if they don’t get the sport.  I may consider moving my seats when my wife is a rich doctor and I feel comfortable giving the Crimson Club money again.

The funny thing is the Big XII would be dead now if Oklahoma and Texas could ever leave behind Texas Tech and Okie Light.  Now people are scrambling to find life rafts off the S.S. ACC and Big East, except Boise and SDSU.  I think our friends in Boise should have real concerns, as should our friends in Provo after all this shakes out.  You’re either in a life raft or you’re trying to climb onto a headboard with Ms. Kate Winslet, and we know how well that turned out.  BTW, I really think the BYU fan base is on the edge of turning on itself, there are one group of very reasonable people who are concerned and another who think all is well and I think Civil War is looming.

Finally speaking of Miami, I leave you with this fine nugget

Yes the Zombie Wars have started my friend and shouldn’t we all have expected that it would come from Florida.  Doesn’t everything awful come from Florida?  Can we start calling Utah County the Florida of Utah?

Raiders Excited Retort

For the sake of either humanity or to just get it out of the way, I would like to point out that the interviewee in your Miami cannibal video is from New York.  To think that a guy like that, who strikes me as the type of individual who knows a few people that have fitted people for cement boots, is unnerved by that is telling.  Think about that for a minute.  Not even certain “businessmen” would stoop to cannibalism.  And what would a theoretical Godfather IV have written in that script based on that horror?  “Leave the gun, take the mandible”?  Doesn’t have quite the same panache to it if you ask me.

You know, Red Foreman is a scholar and a gentleman (albeit a fictional character), and it has taken me a very long time to realize this fact.  But here’s my current complaint with dating.  For a sociological exercise, check out a few online dating sites since they’re so damn many of them nowadays.  Peruse the profiles and see how long it takes you to find a female with a description that is written along the lines of “Must be taller than 6′, make at least $50,000, have their own home, have no kids, have brown hair, olive skin, 16″ biceps, etc.”.  I’m not necessarily against being selective when it comes to the type of person one wants to date.  But here’s the rub though: if a woman writes a list similar to the one I just described, she “knows what she wants”.  If I write something similar to that, I’m a male chauvinist pig.  So for your sake alone, I would do whatever you can to avoid dating lest ye want to invest in a model train set when you hit 50, because that is staring me right in the face.

While I’m on this particular train of thought, if I ever do find another girlfriend, I think a “Thursday’s with Raider’s Girlfriend” where my theoretical girlfriend and your wife could write back and forth could be a potential gold mine of entertainment.  Though it could also involve potential embarrassment, it would be a rather enlightening look into the women who willfully and proudly put up with both of our neuroses.  And, since I have the fear in the back of my mind that any woman that would call themselves my girlfriend might watch a lot of CW programming, there will probably be a lengthy debate of the most recent episode of Gossip Girl.  So best be prepared.

Here’s my thing with BSU and to a certain extent with the Zoobs: there probably is some concern among both of those fan bases, but I also think that both are just proud and full of themselves enough that they think things will work out for them.  Yes, it still might, but if you’re BYU and you have all of the advantages and upside that they claim, wouldn’t they be in the Big XII by now?  Further, what would possibly be in it for the current Big XII schools, especially UT and OU?  Speaking of Oklahoma, are you sort of surprised that they didn’t go to the SEC with Texas A&M and/or Mizzou or do you think they, like Texas, prefer to be one of the whales in the bathtub?  I mean, why wouldn’t they at least beg and plead for it, given the way that our old fellow traveler @ColoUte once described the SEC (and to a tee, I might add):

"SEC Formula – Let media just assume you’re best conference before season starts + play no one OOC to prove otherwise. -ColoUte"

As for Boise State, my brother seems to be of the belief that they should have stayed in the Mountain West and continued to make a name for themselves that way, but my brother is nothing if not the atypical Boise State fan.  He also remains nostalgic for the days of the Big Sky, which would be like some old Ute fan pining to bring back the Skyline Conference.

If I may throw in another variable concerning getting NEZ seats closer together, I try to live tweet games in which I’m attending, which was always a challenge when I was still stuck in the previous decade technologically with my old BlackBerry.  Now that I have a non-BlackBerry it’s a little better, but I’ve seen a few people at both football and hoops games lug around their iPad’s.  That bothers me to a certain extent, but I’m also not above tweeting stupid crap on Twitter while I’m at a game, since it’s kind of what I do on Twitter anyway.

Arizona/OK St isn’t a bad game to whet the college football appetite of a small child, but I do wonder this: how do you plan on approaching Utedom with your son?  Would it go along the lines of “listen, kid, this whole Ute thing is frustrating and annoying at times, but it occasionally pays off”?  I suppose he could force your hand in a few years when he asks you “Daddy, why do you want to strangle Golden Whetman?”  But it doesn’t hurt to have a plan in place I guess.

For as much as I don’t care much for Miami in general–I genuinely hate the Marlins, the Dolphins probably cost the Raiders two shots at the postseason, the Heat are…well, the Heat, and the Panthers sullied the good ol’ hockey game by introducing plastic rats to their home ice.  And then there’s making fun of Pitbull selling out, which even I decided to participate in.  However, if the video to his song “Hotel Room Service” is any indication, I can’t really blame the man for doing so, crazy girlfriend stopping the video shoot notwithstanding.

If your wife asks you any questions about that link, just tell her I sent you the link and then she can just be mad at me for a while.

MAC Talks Excitedly

Well everyone from Florida is from New York.  In fact I was just listening to Colin Cowherd and he was talking about a study that pretty much proves that Florida baseball is an abject failure.  The Marlins are already under 30,000 at their new park and no one cares about the Rays despite maybe being the best organization in baseball.  A quiz found the most popular baseball team in Florida is the Yankees and its because Florida is populated by people like that guy.  I think that Florida is such a miserable place, full of old people and angry Yankee fans that yes, I’m guessing it is where the Zombie Apocalypse will start, either there or in Tooele.

Online dating is a troubling troubling place.  And I agree, women can ask for what you request, but your simple request for a slut who can cook but no fatties allowed is viewed as disrespectful.  Women have a short window of non-crazy I fear.  They must be older than 25.  Any female under 25 is crazy.  But much beyond 30 and the crazy comes back.  If they have kids, its not a total red flag but you must investigate the relationship with the ex.  If it’s bad run.  Also if they’ve ever had an eating disorder, no matter how much they claim to be sane, they are not.  Run.  Mostly I say, I’m, shockingly lucky to have my wife, I have some ex’s out there I wouldn’t wish Austin Collie and if my wife dumps me I’m never doing this again.

As for BYU, I don’t get what they want.  I mean at least Boise and SDSU took the leap.  BYU blew the Big XII negotiations with their bizarre BYUtv negotiations.  Why it’s so important to them is beyond me?  So my question is, is their leadership the most delusional or self-aware people in the world.  Do they think the Big XII will come crawling back on BYU’s terms?  Or do they think as I think, the Big XII is the way for BYU to find mediocrity.  I mean BYU won’t get much of a recruiting boost and they can’t honestly compete.  If they stay Indy, the illusion remains for many of their fanbase.  If they chose to compete, well all question would be removed.  Maybe they are smarter than I think, then again, maybe they aren’t.

I’m giving genuine thought to letting my son find his on way on college athletics, as long as it’s not BYU or God forbid USC.  He was witness to Larry Krystkowiak’s use of timeouts near media timeout so he may be making his own choice anyway.  But the fact is I won’t be living in Utah again, I doubt he’ll go to college there and to not deal with the BYU thing in any way, well I think it sounds nice for him.  If he chose Utedom great, but I’m going to let it be his choice, mostly.  Besides how do you explain Ryan Kansisherio or Golden Whetman to a child.  That seems cruel.

My fear of allowing the women who love you and I talk about why they do it, is that someone will ask them why the hell would they choose to deal with that and at that point they’ll ask themselves that question and then you and I are two sad old guys who convince themselves that the strippers really do like us.

Any idea where I might be able to find a copy of the BYU-Wyoming 1984 game?  I saw it once on BYU TV oddly enough.  I like to watch it every five years to see if I can go back in time and make Al Kinkade go for it.  That game is approaching 30 years old and damnit it still haunts me.  I wonder how much less douchey BYU fans are if Kinkade goes for it and wins that game.  Imagine a world where BYU fans couldn’t talk about a fake national title.  Seems like a dream.

BTW the day before this publishes I’m writing an article about why the rivalry should die.  Our friend Jazzy wants it to live.  Your thoughts sir?

Raider Reliably Replies

Sometime in the early 1930s I believe, America seemed to acquire this rash of English teachers who were complete and utter totalitarians, and as such I simply must acknowledge the fact that I wrote the phrase “any woman that would call themselves my girlfriend”.  Truly awful, almost in a Dizzy Dean “slut in to home” kind of way, so for those of you who will snap back with a grammar correction, yeah, I know about it.  My bad.

This could get a lot of people mad at me, but I’m in favor of not playing BYU for a significant amount of time.

1. Look at last year’s game.  Understandably, BYU had a whole bunch of turnovers and I am fully aware that we have encountered this annoying subset of fans who always seem to think that teams beat them when they aren’t playing at their best.  But how many 54-10 kind of games will have to take place in order for Ute fans to seriously reexamine this rivalry?

2. How about a hypothetical scenario: Let’s say in ten years from now Kentucky is a national title contender in football* and they want to play us in a home and home**.  Or Alabama still can’t quite get over the 2009 Sugar Bowl and they want revenge.  Are we really going to turn that down because we have to hand BYU another 40 point drubbing?  And as a corollary, I still will think that strength of schedule will be an important aspect of college football even when your son ends up applying to grad school.  How often will this conversation take place:

Person A: “Hey, look at the teams we beat this year, we beat BYU!”  Person B: “Yeah, but they won 11 games by beating nobody”.

3. Since I live here and I have to deal with their fan base more frequently than you do, I would like to find any way possible to get said fan base to quit their yappin’.  There is this school of thought that the Holy War in this state is every bit as much of a Utah tradition as the Days of ’47 and the inversion layer that lingers around town during the month of January.  When you figure that this rivalry has only been truly heated and worth watching for barely 20 years, I’m not quite so sure that such a thing constitutes a “tradition”.  Feud, definitely.  But not a tradition in the sense that, say, Kansas and Missouri is a tradition.  Or that OU/Texas is a tradition.

I also don’t think that either fan base truly respects one another.  You grew up a Wyoming fan.  Playing Colorado State and beating them is a big deal to Poke fans.  But at least you got the sense that after it was all said and done, one person would say to the person on the other side of the rivalry “hey, I’ve got an extra ticket to the Avs game tomorrow”.  Unless they’re related to each other somehow, I don’t think that happens as often among Ute fans and Coug fans.  Thus, put me down on the side of the argument that is all for seeing this rivalry cool off, lest I come up with a sign to display at this year’s Holy War “This Is What A Group Of People Who Couldn’t Figure Out Puberty Looks Like”.

Speaking of Wyoming, someone needs to not only air that ’84 Wyoming/BYU game again (as I’m sure BYUalwayswinsTV will at some point), but put it on DVD, complete with “director’s commentary” from Al Kincaid, LaVell Edwards, Paul James and Dave Walsh–as Larry Birleffi kind of can’t, because he’s no longer with us.  Failing that, though, one of us could always DVR it and invite the other to their house for some running jocular commentary.  That would probably kill a few hours and a few 12 ounce cans of brewed beverages.

Far be it of me to change course concerning my own dating life and not be quite so fatalistic about it, but I do recall the things that I would often do to really annoy my ex-girlfriend.  At the time I went out with her, she worked in the registrar’s office of a somewhat reputable and accredited two year institution.  As we’re watching a movie and doing what couples are want to do, I said “you know what I want to do sometime?  I want to get a GED.”  “But you have a high school diploma, honey.”  she said.  “Yeah, so?”  I asked.  “But what would be the point of that?”  “You know, for fun.”  She simply shook her head and said “you’re weird.”  It’s this type of psychological conflict that I always presumed was the cornerstone of a loving and healthy relationship.  I guess it isn’t.

(The last I heard, she was in a long-distance marriage–yes you read that correctly–with a guy from England who was every bit as obsessed with Harry Potter as she was.  Again, the whole women get to be as nutty as they want to be thing.)

Getting back to BYU for a minute, I think they want what they had in the 70s and early 80s and there’s just no way they can get back to that in this radical realignment era of college football.  What do you think their “Quest for Perfection” four years ago was really all about?  It was their not so subtle attempt to return to what they had when they were the mid-major in college football and no matter what they try and do, it is going to ring more and more hollow as the years go by.

This is probably a bygone memory, but to me there is no more “Miami” type of story than that of Andrew Cunanan, who was the serial killer that killed fashion designer Gianni Versace.  I still can’t quite believe that manhunt happened 15 years ago.  Clearly, you can’t be that surprised that such a story happened there.

I will look forward to your reply and to our eventual snarkiness on Twitter as is the tradition.

And In Conclusion… Here’s MAC

To start with the BYU story, I don’t know if you noticed but today on the ESPN Pac-12 Blog, they pointed out that our biggest game is USC and essentially anyone who thinks otherwise is not a smart man.  And I agree.  Also as you’ll see in a column on Friday, I think it’s time that our fanbase put on it’s big boy panties and as Mr. Gemmell in the ESPN blog says, see that there are bigger fish, MUCH BIGGER FISH, to catch.

As for the second part about the rivalry itself, I think you’re onto something.  The Border War between Wyoming and CSU has had periods where each has dominated but you could always see the that the other side wasn’t far away.  BYU was never our rivals for more than half of the 20th Century.  It was Utah St. and the Battle of the Brothers was a MUCH BIGGER DEAL.  Then for reasons I don’t understand Utah quit trying at football around the late 60’s.  At the same time the LDS Church saw that athletics on TV would be a way to get them into the mainstream like nothing else and they dropped a fortune at BYU.  From the mid-70’s to the late 80’s BYU’s athletic budget was quite likely larger than all of the rest of the conference.

And during that time, we weren’t much of a rival to them.  So you’re right we have 20 years of competitive football and 80 years of nothing.  We willing cast aside Utah St.,  BYU would have cast us aside if Ann Richards hadn’t blocked BYU from joining the Big XII, which didn’t actually happen, but you get what I mean.  So what are we holding on too?  The thought that if we beat them enough they’ll admit we’re better.  Ain’t happening.  These people explained away a 54-10 asskicking by saying Riley Nelson would have made all the difference.  They’re better at pointing out that if a frog had wings it wouldn’t bump its ass when it hops better than any people I know.  So what’s left, I say tipping the cap and heading on down the road.

I’ll do your idea about Wyoming directors commentary one better, it was what I mentioned on twitter.  You, myself, Jazzy and ColoUte watch Ute games from the past and make snarky comments.  And not just the good ones, games like how Ron McBride figured out how to lose to New Mexico in 1994. It would be glorious, glorious I tell you.

And too conclude, I’ll give you an example of how the woman brain works.  Had a buddy who was married to a girl.  Before they were married she co-signed a loan to buy him a car.  They break up.  He makes the payments for six months until he loses his job.  She tries to claim that he only married her to get her to co-sign that loan, a loan mind you that she co-signed before they were ever engaged.  This is a true story.  She told people this story to try and win all their mutual friends.  I am not making this up.

As our friend Kelso once said, if it wasn’t for the pretty hair, soft skin and boobs, they’re be no point at all.

God Bless Us Everyone.