Daily Bull 5.25.17 - Iraq’em Tech

It’s easy to drop a load on cities. They’re dirty. They’re crowded. They’re used as literal toilets by vagrants and vermin. Driving in many of them is akin to passing rusty scrap metal through a digestive track.

As our pal Spencer Hall outlined marvelously “The Place Where You are From Sucks.”

And how could the place not suck? It’s full of humans. The WORST.

Texans are a proud bunch. The Dallas vs. Houston slap fight will never end. Two endless concrete slabs with the thinnest of skin. We will never hear the end about the unbelievable tired, self-righteous, self-important, kitschy, really not weird awesomeness that is Austin. There’s San Antonio with its Taco EPCOT.

Then there are the forgettable speed bags around the state:

• El Paso - cleaner than Olde Mexico!
• Arlington - dumb enough to finance a McMansion football stadium for a billionaire. Ill-advised credit and funnel cakes are in their DNA.
• Corpus Christi - Midland on the Sea
• Plano - home of stepdads and botched boob jobs
• Amarillo - brown, cold, windy as shit, flat - and that’s the chamber of commerce pitch
• College Station - a younger Cypress!
• Tyler - Dallas Jr. Varsity (not a compliment)
• Midland - evidence of the hell people will go through for money

So on and so forth...

People get reallllly defensive when you tease the piece of dirt on which they were born on the blue marble that is earth.

Former good football coach Tommy Tuberville took a break from considering a run for senate (christ) and got on the radio waves in Birmingham.

As you’ll recall, Tubs followed football folk hero Mike Leach at Tech. Not an easy task. Tubs had been ousted at Auburn after conference championships and an undefeated season followed by some Iron Bowl losses (easy way to get canned at Auburn imho).

Tuberville coached at Tech for three years and had middling results that were on par with the football program’s forgettable history. It was an apathetic marriage where both parties were positive they could get a better spouse. You know the type.

In a shocking twist, Tubs bolted from Tech to take the job at Cincinnati. No, not the Bengals. Well now he’s lost that gig too.

On the radio he reckoned he oughta reminisce about his years in Lubbock. To quote:

“Somebody asked me, ‘What’s Lubbock look like?’” Tuberville said. “It looked like Iraq.”

His on-field results suggest this might have been part of his recruiting pitch while coaching the Raiders.

Naturally, this offhanded comment circled the internet and got Lubbockians into a tizzy:

That is a completely ignorant and offensive statement from an East Coast Carpetbagger who came to Lubbock to try to fleece the locals and rebuild his reputation after completely losing his touch as a football coach.

Lubbock has desolate areas; there’s no denying that. But where Lubbock may have scrub-brush, a more urban area has a busted-up neighborhood or crack houses. Lubbock looks clean compared to larger cities (you can actually thank the wind for blowing the trash into a corner).

Why, it’s Shangri-La!

Well Mike Leach plug-and-play quarterback B.J. Symons - he of the trillion passing yards in a single season (only 505 against A&M!) - took a break from selling jetskis (ed. note - probably not true) to chime in on Tubs and Iraq:

Certainly not mincing words.

To be fair, Saddam Hussein never abandoned the Air Raid offense. If we’re going to play the metaphor out, Lubbock became a wonderful destination once there was a change in leadership.

Just like Iraq.