Monkeypox

With the exception of Jamario's freshman year, the DD ground game was rarely "explosive." I like a powerful run game, myself, but that was the definition of "3 yards and a cloud of dust" and without an absolutely DOMINANT defense, it was pretty sad football for the most part. And while I believe that the 2002 team would be competitive in today's Belt, I don't see what the point is when you consider, sadly, that that was the "pinnacle" year.

Yep.

And the percentage on those completions.

I like how it's become an "either/or" argument somehow. We have NEITHER the talent depth NOR the quality coaching on special teams. Yes, our team has more speed than it's had in the past, and it's deeper, but it still doesn't extend into the vast majority of our players, ESPECIALLY when compared to the likes of LSU. COACHING'S responsibility is to make up for the lack of depth with strategy and personnel decisions. As Jesse pointed out, Cobbs and Quinn both played ST for us, and were very good at it. By saying that we don't need to have our starters out there playing ST in case they get hurt, you recognize the large talent gap between them and backups/ST players. Our Special Teams suck, and it's both a coaching and personnel issue.

Lott, Dunbar, Riley, etc. all have more speed than we're used to seeing.

Now, I won't say I didn't see some crappy throws from Vizza, but I agree with you on all points. He had constant pressure. We didn't call a very good game, and we had some critical penalties and drops.

DD had 9 years. I personally felt he should've been fired 4 years in. If TD's results are not better when his guys are seniors, then I think you can make the case for getting rid of him. I think the talent lvl is much better now than it ever was in the DD years, but that talent is young, as is the system they're in.

I think it has some, but I also think the offense wasn't nearly as good last year as some made it out to be, especially late in the season.

I agree with this assessment. So far, I think over the last two years, our overall talent lvl has significantly increased, but we can't really expect to go up against a 10-win Tulsa team from last year with a young team that won 2 games last year and expect to come out on top. It did NOT appear to me, as it has so many times in the past, that our guys were just outclassed by theres (perhaps along the D-Line this is still the case, IMO). Our boys can play. Team speed has gotten better. There were a lot of missed tackles on a few plays, but for the most part, the issues were in positioning, losing track of the ball, getting beat by the PLAY (not the man). We looked night and day better than we did last year. It mostly seems to me that people are upset that Tulsa and our conference mates have passed us by, which is something they all did several years ago, before Todge was given the reigns. I was plenty disappointed with some things today, but I don't think it's as doom and gloom as everyone wants to make it out to be. Tulsa and Kansas State are way ahead of where we are. Accept that for now, not forever. It's reality, and no amount of Green Kool-Aid will make it not so.

Yes, I also noticed Nwigwe's game was pretty stout. One of the few bright spots of our defensive play.

Yeah, my brother is a cop in Cleburne and we talk about this because I'm a late night driver and I get pulled over a LOT but I've only had one ticket in my entire life. 99.99% of the time you get pulled over for some tiny bulls**t late at night because they're LOOKING for something else. This is actually a way that leads to a lot of arrests for guns, drugs, assault, etc. for the police. One time, when I was moving to Los Angeles, I got pulled over TWICE in a span of 20 minutes out in West Texas. My two speeds were 74 in a 65 and 69 in a 65 (yes, 69 in a 65). They weren't trying to mess me over for speeding. They saw a guy with a ton of junk in his car at 3am in the middle of nowhere West Texas, and thought they'd take a look. These stops cost you like 30 seconds, but I can't tell you the number of times my brother has put serious criminals away by stopping them for not signalling or illegal u-turns at 3am.

did he say dollars? i think he meant "ameros."

They won't come to things IN LA, but they're expecting people to make the commute halfway to Pomona?

Hah! I knew it! You THINK! You failed the Commie Queer Test, Brainiac. A TRUE red-blooded American male doesn't think EVER, much less during sex. You must be one of those elitist fruitcakes, probably like to vote for well-educated peoples with "ideas." Me, I want a guy I can sit and have a beer with and not think about anything while we watch Top Gun. I don't know anything about Greeks, but I can only assume that they are from far away, and therefore browner than myself, and thus more dangerous. Bushy eyebrows, eat vegetables... ... in short, I got you, commie.

Point to one country and I can add six more, many of which are in the Middle East, and are now cutting their export due to their own consumption needs and shortages of natural gas. Others (non-OPEC) are declining for political, environmental, and tax reasons. As for Brazil, they still import quite a bit of oil, primarily for diesel fuel, and will continue to do so as they further develop. The overall difference in their oil consumption due to a conversion to ethanol has been miniscule. There are plenty of articles about all of this. I never said the sky was falling. I said don't get your hopes up and base the price of a world Commodity on a market where it's already saturated and for which growth is fairly predictable. You're only proving my point when you bring up the futures market. Reality in the market is what people BELIEVE. THAT'S what drives the cost for oil, and what you pay at the pump. Right now, they believe that the demand in places like China and India won't slow down, and that the slow down in production from net exporters won't be enough to keep up.

SMU and TCU already have rivals... each other. You can't just insert yourself into the middle of it because you want to. Right now, our best bets are those in the Sun Belt that share a border and have similar growth potential to ourselves. I think Arkansas State probably has the most potential strictly as a rival, as there is a Texas - Arkansas natural rivalry (a sentiment that I rarely see expressed in regards to Louisiana or New Mexico) and the big boys (UT-Arkansas) don't regularly play each other these days (not like they used to). I think you can find a solid number of ASU alumni and fans in the North Texas area (enough to help drive some demand for the game). You make a big deal out of it being a border war, you give some kind of trophy, you drum up demand for the game. The problem with any of these rivalries is that rivalries don't spring up overnight, and our history isn't one that allows for the renewal of any past rivalry, because very few people have knowledge of or give a crap about our past.

US demand is down. World demand is climbing, however, and will continue to do so, as China, India, and Brazil continue to grow. The consumption growth for 2008 is anticipated to be twice the rate of production growth. The change in US demand won't account for even a fraction of what these other foreign countries will require. I wouldn't get my hopes up about the conditions in the US having any far reaching impact. The best hope is that density in places like China and India keeps the demand from continuing at its current rate (some 6-9% increase each year). Basically, these places are crowded as is, and the impracticality of automobiles may eventually have an impact. However, that's not the case at present.

You mean this dude?

I just wondered if anyone had been playing this. I've been playing the crap out of it. It's a free online football sim game that works like this: You make a football player, give him attributes, and get him signed to a team. Some of those teams (like mine) are human owned and some are CPU. You get 400 Flex Points free. This is the game currency, and can be purchased with real life money (this is how people pay for the game, in essence) after your initial bit. You don't have to, as I have several friends who haven't, though it admittedly limits what you can achieve in the game. You can also get Flex Points for referring people to the game. They have to create an account and be active at least a couple of days. So YES, I would be getting some for people who sign up through the link (actually, a member of my team would, because I'm full up on referrals). I just want to be up front about this. It's not a scam and it's not signing you up for penis pill e-mails. I own one of the teams in the game, but we're pretty full on personnel (otherwise, I'd be on here offering contracts). I've had a ton of fun with it. Anyway, if you're interested, here are the links: Signup link: http://goallineblitz.com/game/signup.pl?ref=2839955 Newbie Forum: http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread....pl?forum_id=19 (this will explain a lot of stuff. I highly recommend the player creation thread). One of my player examples: http://goallineblitz.com/game/player.pl?player_id=459748

I think Scott Hall should be our starter next year.

Yeah, it would've been 11-0 and everyone would've been happy with wasting our bullpen I guess. Instead, we throw out sacrificial lamb Nippert who's barely pitched the last few years and just got traded to us. Other than the fact that we HAVE pitchers like Nippert on our roster, going up 11-0 and beating LAAAAAAAA doesn't really resemble recent Rangers' baseball, IMO.

Yeah, this one hurts. Another mistake made because JD thought we could contend, so we needed a "more ML ready pitcher."

Our minor league system hasn't been this highly rated in almost 20 years. I don't understand how anyone can say it seems like we always have solid prospects, when I can't remember a single time when there was anything like what we have now. The ceiling of the prospects we have now is decidedly higher. I don't like the presence of guys like Broussard or Cat, but other than Botts, I don't see any young players getting hurt by not playing in the majors right now. If they can't win the battle against the spares we run out on a regular basis, then they're AAAA players anyway. And, to be perfectly fair, Botts has a nasty hole in his swing and has nowhere he can play suitable defense, so while I agree that he's been left down far too long, he didn't make it as difficult a decision as it could've been, though I wish he could wrest some PT away from guys like Cat and Broussard, who bring very little to the team anyway. We don't have any high minors OF prospects because the team HASN'T been properly committed to rebuilding in the past. If they HAD been, they'd have kept AGon and traded Tex, and whatever package we got for him a few years ago would already be up, and we might not have ever buried ourselves with MY's albatross contract. These were the kind of moves that Beane used to make before he went batsh*t ego crazy. It was impatience initially with Volquez that forced their hand on him. He never should've been brought up the first time when he was walking 4-5 batters/9 IP in AAA. If they had left him where he was, he could've been given a proper developmental curve in the minors and we might not have had to push him all the way back to A ball this year, and we might've been able to come up with something else to get Hamilton. It's like those that want Hurley, right now, to be pitching in the majors, when he has plenty to work on in the meantime. It's like those who wish to see Salty in the majors now, despite the fact that he still has a lot to do to get his defensive game up to par, AND we have a young, serviceable starting catcher right now we're trying to drum up interest in. It's not like either one of these guys has gotten the Botts treatment. Who else, Boggs? A 25-yr-old in AA last year? Mayberry, the predictable bust - a 1st round project OF out of college? A guy whose swing they had to re-work and still can't hit the ball? On the Hamilton deal, the reality is that we have more pitching prospects than we do high ceiling OF prospects, and a guy like Hamilton (at one point, the #1 prospect in all of baseball), who is young and under control for a number of years and still has options, was about the best thing you could hope for. I hate hate hate having to deal pitching, and I'm not big on the risk factors with Hamilton, but this trade was about the relative strenghts and weaknesses of two organizations.

Well, this year it seems like they're finally committed to rebuilding, so we'll see. It takes a lot more patience than Hicks has shown in the past, but it appears they're going in the right direction. That said, it's a long journey, and they're pretty lacking in young OF talent and most of the big upside arms they have are in the low minors, so it will be a while. They've got nothing but prayers in the rotation, and no real 1st baseman, so don't look for any immediate success. This thing will be pretty much wheels off for a few years. I also like the moves in the front office (hard NOT to like adding Nolan to the staff), and after JD's initial abysmal trades (CY, AGon, Sorryano), he's done a solid job. It looks like we'll have to wait to see if he can trade for quality major league talent, though. 75 wins territory for this team.

He doesn't have to blow smoke to simply REFRAIN from making a negative comment. I don't believe we'll be in position to win the Sun Belt, but it's pretty silly to talk about how likely it is we'll be out of the race by that point, since it's still only spring. It's not any real prognosticating. He doesn't really have the juevos to make it as a real prediction, but every chance he gets he puts things like that out there. A GOOD journalist would simply say that "most students will be gone and the Sun Belt Conference title could already be decided by then." That's how you play it objectively. It's not hard. Would you say it's blowing smoke to not make a prediction about our potential standing in a Conference Race that won't even START for 6 months? He doesn't need to say "and North Texas might be overlooking ASU as they pack their bag for New Orleans." He just needs to quit being such a turd.