November 23, 2010

Parish – Closed

Simmer down, Aggies, simmer down. Yes, the rotting corpse smell of the Longhorn football season has you deranged and howling like a pack of starved coyotes, but remember: Like Jesus, the Longhorns will rise again. Texas may be 5-6, but they’re still sick with talent. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Dixie Chicken, the Bush Library, and the Animal Husbandry Barn aren’t the highlights of the Longhorns’ recruiting trip. Down on the Forty Acres, recruiting is a bit more of a slam dunk. All Texas has to do to land a Top 10 recruit is to take him to 50-cent wings night at Sugar’s. College Station doesn’t even have a Sugar’s … or even a Yellow Rose or a Landing Strip … unless maybe you count the Animal Husbandry Barn, which is sort of like the Chain Drive only much bigger, smellier, and freakier. Needless to say, College Station’s quaint charms don’t appeal to everyone, so when the Ags have a respectable season, you have to give them props. It’s not easy to Shanghai decent athletes to College Station – certainly not intelligent ones, so big ups to Mike Sherman and crew for cobbling together a winning Aggie team this year. Other than former A&M legend Jackie Sherrill – a true innovator with the insane brilliance to use livestock castration as a motivational tool – few heirs to the Aggie coaching throne have shown as much promise as Sherman, whose competence and sacrifice is rewarded with a paltry $1.8 million a year contract (the kind of chump change that Mack Brown keeps next to his toilet). For such a meager sum, it’s amazing Sherman even crawls out of bed in the morning, but somehow this year he and the Aggies have put together an 8-3 record. That’s a complete turnaround from the Aggies 4-8 season in 2008 when he began his sentence. Fortunately Sherman’s stint as head coach at Green Bay was good training for his return to Aggieland. He now knows that the bitchiness and petulance of a highly recruited college athlete are nothing compared to that of an NFL player making 10 times the coaches’ salary. At least you can bully a college kid with curfews, extra laps, and harsh, withering looks. If it gets really ugly, you can even tell the boosters to stop leaving envelopes full of cash in his locker (remember, this is A&M) or, worst-case scenario, cut off his supply of steroids. Whatever Sherman is doing, even if he’s hacking the nuts off a bull before every game, it seems to be having a positive effect. Mack Brown, on the other hand, seems to have spent the last nine months tooling around town in his bling’d out Mercedes, snorting rails of coke off the bare asses of coeds, and breaking mirrors with his maniacal, high-pitched Appalachian cackle. While it’s true that kind of playa lifestyle never hurts recruiting, it can cut into the actual coaching. After a humiliating six-loss season, it’s safe to assume that Brown is now back on task. He may have grown a little soft in the middle – possibly even the prefrontal, but Brown is smart enough to understand that last Saturday’s smackdown of Division I-A powerhouse Florida Atlantic won’t satisfy even the most soft-headed of Longhorn fans. He also knows that if he loses to A&M, DeLoss Dodds will be after his balls with a rusty pair of pruning shears. Even still, there will be joy in Mudville. Why? Because we’re the goddamned live music capital of the known universe. An average Saturday night in Austin rocks the shit out of College Station on New Year’s Eve. This weekend is no different. Saturday you can (and should) catch an awesome bill at the Parish featuring a homegrown trifecta of musical badasses: folk-pop funsters Marmalakes, party punkers the Frontier Brothers, and orchestral tour de force Mother Falcon. A set by any one of these acts will put a smile on your face that not even a gloating Aggie can wipe off.