Last month, University of Florida head football coach Will Muschamp dished out both a little sugar and a little salt when talking about the Gators’ road opener at Texas A&M, which will also be the Aggies’ debut in the Southeastern Conference.
As Rick Brown of the Lakeland Ledger reported:
“It will be a very SEC-like atmosphere,” Muschamp said. “It’s one of the few places in the Big 12 that I would say that about.
“You ever been to College Station?” Muschamp asked. “It’ll be the only time you go.”
The September 8 contest “might be the most hyped game in history between two programs coming off 7-6 seasons,” wrote Brent Zwerneman of the San Antonio Express-News, who got new A&M head coach Kevin Sumlin to quietly return fire.
“He needs to worry about his own team,” Sumlin said.
But College Station mayor, Nancy Berry, was not as quiet.
“Howdy, Muschamp!,” she begins in a video posted to YouTube (embedded below), which shows what College Station has to offer by Photoshopping the overly excitable coach into photos of, among other things, the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, Chef Tai’s food truck, and an Aggies yell practice.
She also promises to send Muschamp a gift basket.
As Ben Kercheval of NBC Sports’s College Football Talk noted, “there’s been a certain ‘once a Longhorn, always a Longhorn’ type of… something… that’s followed Muschamp from Austin to Gainesville.”
And that’s the thing. It’s okay for somebody from Austin to say College Station isn’t all that happening. But Gainesville, Florida? Great atmosphere for college football, but it’s not exactly Paris.
(That’s right … wait for it … not even Paris, Texas.)
