Game Over 
Perfect 10
In the afterglow of UT’s Rose Bowl shocker, we revel in Vince Young’s mastery of the game, compare this year’s national champs with their forebears, and channel the ghost of Harvey Penick.
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Darrell’s offense was once ridiculed as three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust, even though his 1969 national champions were the highest-scoring offense in UT history until this year. Vince Young throws more passes in a game than Darrell’s teams threw in a season. Darrell’s creed was that two out of the three things that can happen when you throw a pass are bad, but he knew when and where to use the weapon. Remember the 1964 Cotton Bowl, number one UT against number two Navy and its Heisman trophy quarterback, Roger Staubach? The best passer that day wasn’t Staubach but UT’s Duke Carlisle. The game is still about blocking and tackling. Darrell knew that, and so does Mack.
Before the Rose Bowl, a lot of people were calling USC the greatest team in college history. Now they’re wondering if this UT team is better than the UT team of 1969. It’s a question without an answer. Vince Young would have made one hell of a wishbone quarterback, though I’m not altogether certain he would have beat out James Street.
Jappy
>> January 6, 12:59 p.m.
Jappo:
I seem to remember that the Friday night before the Texas-Oklahoma game in 1963, when Darrell phoned the Cole Avenue apartment, you answered and asked him what brings him to town. That’s about as unpartisan as it gets. I get a kick out of the image of you buying an orange coach’s jacket and a white jersey for your grandson all these years later. You have gained in wisdom as you have matured, little grasshopper.
I feel sorry for people who can’t get a thrill out of a major event like this year’s Rose Bowl game and the national championship coming back to Austin after a 35-year absence. I’m not just talking about Aggies: I mean people who don’t get emotionally involved in sports. They are missing something important in life. Everybody should have a team—actually, several teams—to root for. The greatest thing about it is that there’s always next season. No matter how good or how bad this season was, we’ll get ’em next year. Unless you’re a fan of the Texas Rangers baseball team, in which case we may not get ’em, since we never have. But as a sports fan, there is nearly always something new going on, another game coming up, another chance for redemption. And you change sports as the seasons change. Love affairs bloom and fade, and new love affairs begin. So partisanship in sports is something to take pleasure in.
I should admit that I don’t actually go to very many sporting events these days (and I didn’t go to the Rose Bowl). That’s why television was invented. For 25 years, when I was writing for Sports Illustrated and various newspapers, I was paid to go to sporting events, and I always had a parking pass. Two things stop me from going these days: parking and instant replay. Mostly I just go to Lady Longhorns basketball games. I’m a big fan of the team, and I’m suffering with this freshman group as they grow up. And I went to the roller derby last summer at the Thunderdome. (By the way, that A&E reality series on Austin’s Lonestar Rollergirls is a winner.) But not going to the games doesn’t mean I don’t care. I’m a TCU grad, and they went 11-1. I spent my sophomore year at the University of Texas, and I live in Austin, and I am 13-0 with the Longhorns. My 24-1 season is something to be unashamedly partisan about.
Yes, Jap, I remember when we started calling Darrell “Delbert.” We went to some social gathering, and he didn’t want people to know who he was, so we introduced him as Delbert. And it worked. A few weeks later, after the national championship, he was about as anonymous as the Beatles. That’s what I mean about sports. As one of baseball’s wise men, Yogi Berra, probably said, “Your future is always ahead of you.”
Bud
>> January 8, 6:09 p.m.
Bud:
If you’ve been watching TV, you know already that Vince Young ruined my Sunday and possibly the remainder of 2006 and the start of 2007. The ingrate just announced he’s turning pro. A pox on his house.
Okay, maybe I’m overreacting. I admit that his draft stock in the NFL will never be higher. Vince said that he made the decision after talking to his momma and his pastor. He promised them that he’d come back and finish his degree. Presumably they reminded him that he’s certain to be one of the top three choices, which means he’ll be guaranteed about $25 million. We all need sound adult advice from time to time.
If the Houston Texans, who have the first choice in the draft, don’t grab homeboy Vince, they’re even dumber than I think they are. I hear that they’re still set on Reggie Bush. The only way Bush can help that miserable franchise is if they can trade him for five Pro Bowl linemen.
Looking at it realistically, what else could Vince prove at Texas? Sure, he could return for his senior year, maybe win the Heisman, help UT extend its winning streak to 33, and possibly even win a second straight title game. Or he could blow out his knee against Sam Houston State.
Vince’s afternoon press conference came as a shock to nearly everyone. Six or seven hours earlier, I’d awakened from my nightly Vince dream already sweating next season, calculating like some miser scouring his coin purse how the Longhorns can possibly replace AP All-Americans like offensive tackle Jonathan Scott and defensive tackle Rod Wright, not to mention half of the best secondary in college football. Then I remembered that Michael Griffin—whose amazing interception at the corner of the goal line was to me the defensive play of the game—will return, as will some fantastic skill players, such as Jamaal Charles, Ramonce Taylor, Billy Pittman, Quan Cosby, and Limas Sweed. No coach in America has a better supply of talent waiting in the wings than Mack Brown, and having his face on Wheaties boxes can’t hurt.
What Mack doesn’t have—I mean, who does?—is another Vince Young. The Longhorns will go into next season with a quarterback who has never played a down of college football. Forget another national championship. Mack will be lucky to make it to the Sun Bowl.
Let us pause now and be thankful for what we had. Let us hope it will come again. Let us forget that it won’t.
Jap
>> January 8, 6:56 p.m.
Jappo:
So he’s gone to the great NFL in the sky. The realist in me says he would never have had another peak experience in college to match the one he had at the Rose Bowl. That beautiful photo in the Austin American-Statesman of him standing in the midst of a shower of colored bits of something (was that confetti or the air in Los Angeles?) said it all. If he had come back to UT for his senior season, even as loaded with talent as the Longhorns are, it’s a long, dangerous road to next year’s championship. So he would have had to come back for his teammates and not just for himself.
And, of course, there was the elephant in the room. It is called “medial collateral ligament.” Tear one of those and no physical genius is ever the same again. Out the window would go tens of millions of dollars, not only for playing professional football but for endorsements. Vince is a total natural for endorsements. He’s got the smile and the ease, and he looks good on television. Now he can start cashing in on his personality. There are many things in life more important than money, especially if you’ve already got some of it in the bank. Now he’s protected from a financial disaster that would have come with injury. Of course, Vince will never get injured. In the galaxy he comes from, they may have bred bodies that won’t break. Just think of the preseason publicity that would have been lavished on Texas if he had come back. It would make Elvis Presley’s manager blush.
Having decided to take the money and run, may he be guided into the right professional organization by the wizards of his galaxy. The summer after O. J. Simpson won the Heisman trophy at USC, in 1968, I went with him to the Buffalo Bills training camp. Remember how Puss Erwin at the Fort Worth Press used to punch you in the chest with his knobby finger and say, “You’ll never make it, son”? The Buffalo coach took a look at O.J. and said he would never make it in the NFL as a running back. So O.J. wasted his first few seasons on special teams before a new coach turned him loose to break records as a running back. Surely such a thing will never happen to Vince Young.
The bright side is now we can watch him play twenty times a year.
Happy days,
Bud
My Library
