A Sports Silver Taps

Let's face it, Aggies.  That cute little 113-year experiment we like to call the football program has come to a sad end.  It's time to lay it to rest and come to terms with what we really are: a basketball school. 

If I had known there would be this much excitement to be had watching the basketball team right now, I would have deferred my enrollment by a decade.  Before I started at Texas A&M, I had run as many March Madness pools (2) as I had attended college football games. But I quickly bought into the prospect of Aggie football. 

The A&M teams of the 1990s were definitely cool, in a slightly uncool (running and defense) sort of way.  Head coach R.C. Slocum was so boring that his secret e-mail newsletter was cancelled after three weeks because, as it turns out, boosters were not interested in finding out whether R.C. would be having oatmeal or cream of wheat for his pregame breakfast.  But as predictable and conservative as he and his teams were, they won, especially at home and especially in November.  Players like Dat Nguyen and Dante Hall brought their own brand of excitement, as well as conference championships in 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1998.  Fittingly, the last time the Aggies have finished in the top 25 in a final AP poll was 1999. 

Since then, the team has been plagued by poor play, substandard recruiting, and secret newsletters.  Most importantly, they've had to face some real competition.  Not from Texas Tech or Oklahoma or even Texas, but from a little sports team just a couple blocks down the street.  We're talking about a team that doesn't wear cleats, doesn't play for sixty minutes, and whose field the Aggie band can't even fit on!  And they don't even really play on a field!

I'm speaking, of course, about the juggernaut that is the Fightin' Texas Aggie Basketball Team.  Once the doormats of the Big 12, the 2007 Ags came from out of nowhere to capture their first Sweet 16 in twenty-five years.  What's more remarkable is that over this (one-year) stretch of Sweet 16 berths, the Aggie basketball factory has produced more NBA lottery picks (1) than Duke, UCLA, UConn, Arizona, and Kentucky combined.

The 2007/2008 basketball team, ranked #14 in the preseason, rolled past Emporia State in its preseason opener.  It should be another exciting year for the basketball team, further cementing the sea change at the once football-crazed school.  Yes, the experiment we call "Texas A&M as a football school" has clearly run its course.  It's time to bury the Aggie football program--don't worry, we'll make sure that wherever we put it, it'll have a good view of the Reed Arena scoreboard.