My Life Blog

The six year losing streak ends at Austin. 

Varsity’s horns are sawed off…and this delights me to no end. 

Who should get the better bowl game?  Each team is 9-3 with the Aggies holding the head-to-head edge.  I’m unsure whether two one point losses to OU and Nebraska will factor in.  We’ll see.

Should Fran still be fired?  Yes.  But its assured that he won’t be now.  Let’s see what he does with this positive momentum.  Tennessee blew us out in our last bowl game.  Let’s try not to repeat that.

My MVP: Stephen McGee.  Wow!  I’ll take him over Colt McCoy any day.

Its mere minutes after the Aggies 28-27 loss to Nebraska, so my emotions are still very raw.  But I think I will read what I am about to write tomorrow or the next day and feel the same way.

Coach Fran must go at the end of this season.  I’ve seen enough.  Sure, he’s resurrected the team from last year’s 5-6 record and he’s made the team more competitive, but he can’t win the big game.  I’m convinced that even if he has the athletes that he is still apt to continue to lose.

Today, A&M rallied to take the lead 27-21 late in the fourth quarter, then intercepted the ball in Nebraska territory with around 3 minutes to play.   A small ball-control drive and a field goal at the least would have iced the game.  However, Fran went conservative.  He ran the ball outside and our running back wasn’t smart enough to stay in bounds.  That saved Nebraska at least 20 seconds.  Seeing his mistake, he runs the ball straight up the middle for no gain.  Now its third and long and he needs to at least get within range for a field goal.  A QB scramble then sets up what would be the longest FG this year.  But alas it was blocked.  Nebraska’s ball with a little over two minutes left.  They drive 71 yards with no timeouts, score the TD, and kick the extra point to win by one.

Like last week, the Aggies faces a 3rd and 2 in the late third quarter.  Instead of running Javorskie Lane, he calls a passing play just like last week.  To be fair, the pass should have been caught, but it wasn’t and that set up fourth down.  What does he do?  Field goal.  At that point in the game, still down by  8.  As poorly as they had played up to that point, a TD is what they needed.

The FG scenario today reminded me of the game last week against Oklahoma where he had 3rd and goal at the 2 and then threw an incomplete pass.  He then kicks the FG to trail by a point with three minutes remaining.  A&M never got the ball back.

The point I’m trying to make is that Coach Fran plays too conservatively.  Unlike Coach Stoopes at Oklahoma, Coach Fran has no guts whatsoever.  His conservative calls today cost the team another win.  It should be noted that some of the players play stupidly too.  Running out of bounds when you need to run the clock.  Taking a roughing-the-passer penalty when it was going to be 4th down.  That’s poor coaching.

You could look at the 8-3 record and wonder why I am complaining.  But realize, we almost lost to Army — had to get a late goal line stand to preserve the victory there.  Against Kansas, a basketball powerhouse, but not a football juggernaut, we trailed the whole game until a TD in the last 30 seconds of the game won it.  Missouri could have beaten us if their opening TD drive had not been scuttled by a flukey goal line fumble turned touchback.  We needed a one-handed grab on 4th down to prolong a game-tying TD drive against Oklahoma State.  That game ended miraculously with a blocked extra point in OT for a 1 point win.  The most solid Big XII win would seem to have been the Baylor game, but even that game wasn’t settled until 6:34 left in the fourth quarter.  So the bottom line is that the record stands at 8-3, but could easily be as bad as 3-8!

This week I heard a rumor on the radio that Coach Fran needed to win out against Nebraska and Texas to keep his job.  At first, I thought this was absurd.  After all, we were sitting with an 8-2 record with a narrow 1 point loss to Oklahoma.  But as I analyze the record, its really pretty flimsy.  Take away a few plays and calls and we could very well be looking at something similar to last year’s 5-6.  And that’s not good enough for a coach in his fourth year.

So my opinion: Coach Fran must go!

Mavericks 0-3 on the young season.  Someone please explain what’s wrong with this team.
Aggies lose to Oklahoma by a single point.  If only Franchione were as brave as Stoopes.
Cowboys lose to the Redskins in the weirdest ending I’ve ever seen.  Three FG attempts in the final 30 seconds!
Stars lose in the last minute to Vancouver.  Well, this makes up for the win in Edmonton which definitely was not earned.
But I did see that the Fightin’ Texas Aggie basketball team debuted in the rankings at #13.  You could only understand how monumental this is if you had first gone a couple of decades without ever seeing them in those rankings.  Looks like we’re in with the Big Boys now, so that’s pretty exciting!

Consider what you might think if your wife gives you ten sessions with a personal trainer for your birthday.

Do you wonder if she thinks you are out of shape?  As in, is this some kind of message?!

Well, this was Suzanne’s gift to me for my recent birthday.  I turned 42 and its fair to say that my level of fitness has been better.  When I was 37, I was probably in the best shape of my life.  However, in the five years since, I’ve let my diet and my exercise regimen slip.  So training sessions is just what I need right now to get back my mojo.

To clarify, it wasn’t a message on her part, but rather a creative gift.  She definitely got for me what I would not have gotten for myself.  I have had a fear of submitting myself to a personal trainer for fear that they would run me ragged.  As it turns out, I have just had my third session and this hasn’t been the case.

What I’m learning instead is that I still have a pretty good basis strengthwise and that much of my previous research has been confirmed.  But more than that, I’m getting the benefit of someone educating me on my technique and designing a different kind of workout.  This is really important because it helps to optimize your workouts.  I think many of my past workouts haven’t been very efficient.

So I’m highly recommending anyone who works out to give a private trainer a go sometime to explore these possible improvements in your own workouts.

…I’ve been upgrading my site. If you are reading this within a feed reader, you’ll notice absolutely nothing. However, if you’d like to click on over to my site, you’ll see a few new things.

To begin with, I discarded my Typepad blog in favor of a self-hosted blog using Wordpress. I’ve also separated out my life ramblings into its own blog. The thought process there is that friends and family probably care more about this content than the content I might offer up that is more work-related. So that implies that I have a work blog and a life blog. Hopefully, I’m not over-exposed!

I’m hoping to eventually get my resume up, but for now its a placeholder. Its not so much that I want you all to know what my qualifications are, its more that I want to be more publicly accountable for managing my accomplishments. Said another way, I’ve been considering my recent accomplishments and feel like they aren’t in keeping with my standards, so I am hoping that my online resume will be a constant reminder of what I want to achieve professionally.

For those of you that we always send Flickr links to, well, those days are over. I’ve added a photo gallery to the site to make it pretty seamless. Of course, you can still go to Flickr, but you have less reason to now. The gallery is pretty cool; there is a sets page and if you care to drill down into a set, you can see thumbnail pictures of the set’s pictures. If you want to view the larger version of the picture, just click on the thumbnail. Lastly, you can also find photos by tag.

As I mentioned, most of the technology is Wordpress and a few plugins for Wordpress that I was able to install. Other parts of the site are served up from a Ruby on Rails application. The astute reader will note that there is not much for a Rails app to really do. You would be right. However, I’m setting myself up for future features.

If you are curious about the picture in the masthead, that was taken in Kauai (of course) from the lanai of the house we stay in on the North side. I chose this picture because it has a terrarium like feel to it which I think is quite funky. Unfortunately, the photo quality leaves a lot to be desired.

I hope you find the site more appealing!