Daily Bull 4.25.17: Underachieving & Proud

It’s a slow Monday. The NFL Draft is around the corner, except that people are saying Mean Things about Myles Garrett, a very Nice Young Man who undoubtedly deserves to be the #1 draft pick.

Then this happens.

An Aggie’s online psyche is one of the most complicated algorithms in the known universe. An Aggie will intensely scan each and every tweet for the slightest perceived offense and lash out with an instant vitriol that has now surpassed even the most notorious of fanbases.

When an attack this brazen, one so nakedly aggressive and direct, occurs, it is almost too much for an Aggie’s online defenses. Accustomed to parsing through hundreds of words in search of just one backhanded compliment to exploit, now they are faced with multiple frontal assaults on the sensibilities of everything they hold dearest: being an Aggie and hearing “Texas A&M” and “most ______ in the country” in the same sentence. It’s the classic shock jock formula, and as expected, it has worked because the timing of this deployment was flawless. It also strikes extra close to home because the argument has considerably more than a hint of the truth to it. That’s being generous.

This aspect of sports is exhausting. Not the constant din of sniping and defensive bristling amid the echo chambers of social media. That’s easily ignored by tuning out. No, the constant need for things to be defined. X Team is the most ________. Y team always _________. Bob Athlete is the most _________ since Joe Athlete! Your team is the most egregious and hated, of course. It’s a Mad Libs of fiery critical adjectives and sports media is just feeding reams of them into this thirsty shredder of collective indignation. Shoehorning complex human beings into bland absolutes because they think that’s what our Neanderthal Sports Brains require. Each one gets hundreds or thousands of retweets, half of them with the classic rider “who cares what u think” attached.

Who cares what sports personalities think? Apparently a shitload of people still do, otherwise they wouldn’t have this platform from which to dive gleefully headfirst into a sea of knee-jerking attention. If this really bothers you so much, don’t get mad at the mouthpiece. Just stop consuming all the filler. Tune in for the games in the fall and leave the rest of it to the apocalyptic wasteland scavengers of the off-season internet. That’s what underachievers do.