stillwater runs deep

I've become somewhat obsessed with Oklahoma State recently, not so much because they beat us, as they always seem to do, but more because they were cleared of all charges, by the NCAA, relating back to last year or the year before, when I first got here, that they'd done all kinds of inappropriate things with recruits like give them free call-girls etc.

Now this was the racket. T. Boone Pickens, an eccentric billionaire, had already given them hundreds of millions to spend on the football team, and it didn't matter; he'd given hundreds of millions more to the school itself so the library wouldn't go wanting for books. These hundreds of millions, of course, they spent recruiting Texan kids to come up to Stillwater and then turn around and beat those Texas teams where all their friends had gone to play football. There was a serious grudge any time an Okie team played a Texas team and they play big and rough and everyone knows this is serious business in both places. So, if you're good at this stuff, and you're able and willing, they'll court you big-time and you can come up, have a free education Oklahoma-style, whale on those Texas boys, and nobody'll be any the wiser. Somebody told the NCAA, obviously some sore loser, so now they have to spend a couple million more trying to get everyone to shut up and especially let people know this kind of stuff happens at every school, they've all got a few million when it comes to getting a better coach or making sure the NCAA boys are happy.

Meanwhile back in Texas, we're like, how come these boys keep beating us every time, we need to raise $800 million for football only, not to forget the library of course, but it's time we can compete ourselves for our own Texas boys and make sure that coming here is at least as attractive to them as going to Stillwater or some such place. Now it's true, as they say, everyone is giving these football players stuff, free cars to use, free hookers, night on the town, whatever. That might look a little different in Lubbock than Stillwater, or Austin or Fort Worth or wherever, but the key word is free and remember it's a four-year deal, by the time you're done you go pro and then you have a few million of your own, provided of course you still have a collarbone and interior fibula. That's your job. You work out, take care of yourself, take whatever you need to take to make sure the pain goes away and come the weekend, you can get out there and bash some head.

Remember they do this stuff at every school. They're all in competition for the best players. This means making class look easy and the education look valuable, the time available to practice and work out and live a little, whatever. So this Ok-State cornerback was passed out in the drive-through of the Whataburger, 4 am the other day, and they finally released him even though their other cornerbacks are injured, they have to look to the NCAA like, we're following the rules now, we promised, we're not going to tolerate any of this night-on-the-town wildness that somehow ends up in charges and lawyers in court eating up whatever's left of that four hundred million or whatever. You going to mess around, get caught, stay up all night during football season, you're out of here. This is serious business, this football, and we don't need any of this crap.