Daily Bull 7.19.17: Coach Terry Price has fired up the grill again

It’s happened before.

Many times.

Coach Price unleashes THE CHIEF, stokes the box with crisp, aged wood, and tunes that fine engine to a low and pungent smoke overnight. He throws on pre-historic sized slabs of meat. He squints through the haze, gauging flavor, temperature, texture, and run gap schemes and thematics. It’s the defensive cookout, and the defense will show up.

One of the key indicators of being an 18-22 year old college dude is the impact free food has on your psyche. A provided meal is always a great occasion. It lifts your spirits and puts a spring in your step. When you factor in that the person providing you with this free food is a guy who barks orders at you for several months out of the year as you’re sweating and perishing out on the sun-blasted practice field, and that food is carefully hand-crafted BBQ he’s created overnight on a custom rig that he actually NAMED...well, that’s got to feel pretty special.

Defense is a team effort. And not just in the usual football cliche-y ways. An offense can be carried by one superstar. A defense still has to be a fairly complete unit for that superstar to flourish. Likewise, replacing that superstar is even more of a team effort. Just having team cookouts isn’t going to automatically create team chemistry. But there’s something to be said for consistency, and as Aggies, we know that if we do something a few times in a row it quickly becomes tradition.

Terry Price firing up the machine is a pretty good tradition.