Lache is Not Great

(Lache got homesick and scored a TD against UCLA)

Texas is renowned for its high school and college football programs.

In literature, film, and the everyday churn of journalistic bombast the record is clear on this.  Texas is a football factory, a landscape dominated by its varieties of sage brush, open space and football-generated mythology.

A cursory glance at the history of Texas football is replete with heroes and anti-heroes, and because this is America that mythology is transcendent.

You don't think G.W. Bush escaped to his "ranch" in Texas with regularity during his presidency to mull over the big questions of world leadership, do you?

Of course not.  He went home frequently to commune with the ghosts of football's past, to revel in the myth.

Decked out in his finest dude-ranching gear, playing for the camera like an arrogant pass-catching god who has just scored his team's winning touchdown in the big game, he even spiked his pitchfork like a football, thinking perhaps of one of his heroes scoring yet again.

Preening, speaking in the broken, Texas-invented idiom of grunts and monosyllabic poetry that defines the self-centered jock, Bush sought succor in the myth--we're good, we're damn good, and this is the championship season.

He is gone fortunately, having wrecked everything, but Texas football persists.

Which is why I badly want to see Oregon State crush Texas tomorrow in the Alamo Bowl, brought to you by some corporation or another whose name I've momentarily forgotten.

I can still recall a sweet moment 12 years removed, when Oregon beat Texas in the Holiday Bowl.  That little throwback play to a stumbling Joey Harrington was a thing of ugly beauty.

Joey could not run, but he is an Oregonian through and through. That counts.

Let me tell you something about Texas football players.  They are only great in my book when they leave Texas and come to Oregon to play their college ball, like Quizz and James Rodgers, one-time stars at OSU.

Or like LaMichael James, Darron Thomas, Josh Huff, Bralon Addison, Chance Allen and the Amoaka brothers.  Past, current, and future stars at the University of Oregon.

Lache Seastrunk, the toast of Temple, was great once, when he played at Oregon (or sat behind a bevy of better backs), but now that he plays for Baylor he reminds me of a lesser god.

The young feller helped Baylor crush UCLA last night, but that doesn't make him great, does it?  After all, he abandoned Oregon.

Lache could have been a star.

Now he is preening on the sidelines like old George used to do, pointing at the other God in the sky and calling this abomination destiny.

God had a plan all right, that you should take your arrogance home silly Lache.

Which brings me to OSU's Storm Woods.  I like him.  Seems like a solid kid because he's toughing it out here in rainy Oregon.

He's from Texas, ya'll know?  Like Lache and LaMike, he got homesick that first year.

Unlike Lache he didn't run home to Grandma when he wanted to cry.


TS