A 12-Step Program for College Football Addicts
Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over the idea that our alma mater should win the national championship – and that our lives had become unmanageable annually when they did not.
Step 2: Came to believe that no power greater than our own lusty egos could restore us to sanity.
Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of our head coach, as we understood him – in a culture duly dedicated to the vicarious accomplishment of fan success through the successful actions players, coaches, administrators, and deep-pocketed alumni.
Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves – and why we need someone else to achieve things for us.
Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs – that we viewed ourselves as too inept to even win a stuffed purple elephant at a carnival whenever the game required enough talent from us to hit an empty drinking glass with five pennies thrown from three feet away.
Step 6: Were entirely ready to have others cover all these personal defects of character – and to affirm that our low esteem about our low athletic talent levels were correct in the first place.
Step 7: Humbly asked others to overcome our shortcomings – so we could play athletic games in our own behalf – or else, make our peace with the reality that buying season tickets as fans was as close as we were ever going to get to the real action on the field.
Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed in behalf of our alma maters, and became willing to make amends to them all – even to the UH Cougar fans – every time we needed to break their hearts by hiring away their best stepping stone coaches.
Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure our alma mater’s chances of winning the national championship.
Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory – and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it – and when we were right to also quickly make others pay for standing in the way of our progress.
Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. – Make that “almost” praying only for knowledge of his will. – If UT ever has to tell Tom Herman that he will have to “knock the snot” out of Kansas in the last game of the season – just to have a slim-to-none chance of keeping his job another year – we pray that Charlie Strong can be there to cheer him on to whatever dubious win is still possible.
Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to other college football fans, and to practice these principles in all our affairs, as long as we were still free to anonymously keep on doing all we liked to do on the sly to keep our alma mater in the only hunt that matters in the center of our dog brain appetites for money, power, and success by vicarious institutional associations and accomplishments.
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Irony Footnote on Tom Herman’s first peripheral word to his new players at UT. Herman told them that they are going to find his disciplinary approach to coaching very similar to the one they had experienced under former Coach Charlie Strong, but then he offered a word of caution by pulling out social media’s favorite definition for insanity. i.e., “Insanity is when we keep doing the same things that failed previously, hoping for a different result” as he further noted that there would be some changes from the previous coaching administration.
The irony here is simple. UH does not need to hire another Tom Herman. Ever. If possible.
Publisher, Editor, Writer
The Pecan Park Eagle
Houston, Texas
The Pecan Park Eagle 
November 28, 2016 at 5:54 pm |
Bill, this is life in the college games. Just hope that you can get anothert good coach for a while. He’ll inherit some good athletes. .Glad LSU woke up. I think they have a comer..