Author: Mike

As the season creeps closer–I’m not sure what anyone should be writing other than this season provides the Thunder with a chance to land a high lottery pick of their own if they choose to go into full tank mode. A pick that would translate into being SGA’s running mate in the years to come.

I don’t see any point in predicting number of wins or where the Thunder will finish given that once Chris Paul is traded you would assume Gallanari will be gone soon after as well.

Fair or not—Billy Donovan will be in the final year of his Thunder contract and even he doesn’t know what his team will look like after Dec. 15th.

The Fox telecasts should be interesting to say the very least. I hope someone explains to Michael Cage the Thunder will be trying to lose games at some point. The Thunder bloggers will have their work cut out for them to keep their writing on the team interesting.

I’m going to be fair and patient in that I would have traded Russell Westbrook just as Sam Presti did for the simple reason it didn’t make any sense to spend that type of money for a forty something win level type of a team.

I’d also write the fans in OKC shouldn’t bitch because ownership in Oklahoma City did everything they could to keep the team relevant after Kevin Durant escaped from Oklahoma City.

You can’t say Sam Presti didn’t push some buttons. Oladipo, Sabonis, Carmelo, Alex Abrines, Ray Felton, Jerami Grant, and Paul George. It wasn’t like Sam Presti didn’t try everything to make Russell Westbrook work in OKC after Durant’s escape to Golden State.

I have no idea how the college market fans in Oklahoma City will handle this season. This won’t be like the Hurricane Katrina season or the 23-59 team that first year after the Sonics move here from Seattle.

This will have a different feel. This is when we find out about the staying power of the Thunder season ticket fanbase in the real world of major league sports.

How ironic Chris Paul won NBA Rookie of the Year back in that first Hurricane Katrina season and he now is back waiting for his agent to move him to a relevant team with a chance to contend. It’s the perfect exclamation point to the rise and fall of the Thunder as they attempt to reset the franchise.

Otherwise…the West in the NBA will be fascinating to witness for NBA junkies like myself. I’ll watch the Thunder games—but the real interest will be in watching the Clippers, Lakers, Warriors, Rockets and Jazz. And don’t discount some teams even beneath them as the West is loaded like never before.

On my little blog, I’ll still follow the Thunder, but it will clearly be in a different way than ever before.

The college football game I watched the closest this week-end was O State vs. Texas in Austin.

The reason?

Spencer Sanders. I wanted to see how the Gatorade Texas High School Player of the Year responded on the biggest stage with the lights the brightest.

He responded like I thought he would. Like a star about to be born. Like a version of Vince Young albeit with a better throwing motion than Vince Young ever had….even in the NFL.

Mike Gundy has a star. A quarterback in this era of spread offenses and dual threat QBs who can be special.

I thought Texas would win and they did by six points. Texas has better athletes and has a very nice quarterback of their own in Sam Ehlinger.

OU and Auburn are my two favorite college football teams to follow, but Spencer Sanders will ensure I don’t miss watching any O State games moving forward.

He’s worth the price of admission in person or the time invested if you’re watching on television.

Mike Gundy has never had a dual threat guy like this. Bobby Reid was a bust. Zac Robinson was okay. Brandon Weeden couldn’t even beat out Alex Cate when he first arrived in Stillwater. And Mason Rudolph like Landry Jones will make a nice backup for the Steelers.

But Spencer Sanders has a national star aura about him primarily because of what he can do with his legs.

First time I watched him on video he reminded me of Vince Young.

But Vince Young struggled his freshman and sophomore seasons. It wasn’t until the Horns beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl before his star began to meet the hype. The rest is college football history. The win over USC was one of the greatest college football games ever.

Can Spencer Sanders be this at O State? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know if Mike Gundy can be Mac Brown or Bob Stoops or even Lincoln Riley.

Gundy is a nice coach for sure, but I’m not sure he can take this to the next level with both OU and Texas as top ten programs at the same time. This won’t be the Texas after Colt McCoy departed or the OU of Bob Stoops who repunted the ball to Tyreke Hill.

This will be a Big 12 where O State is going to have to elevate its program to heights even higher than in 2011 when Boone won his only Big 12 championship.

But as a college football fan, I do know this—I won’t be missing any Spencer Sanders games.

Only one O State player has ever won the Heisman. His last name was Sanders as in Barry. This Sanders has the same electric feel about him.

Barry Sanders had Mike Gundy as his quarterback. Spencer Sanders has Mike Gundy as his head coach.

Mike Gundy needs to bring his big boy game as a coach because like Barry this Sanders has a chance to be very special. Mike Gundy needs to be special as well.

Labor has been induced in Denver. My daughter-in-law Elaine will soon be bringing Little Dr. El Prez Jr into the world. My son was concerned he would miss the Broncos-Packers game at noon, but that’s just the way it goes. The Packers are my favorite team and I expect them to beat the Broncos on the very day our grandson enters the world.

In 1988, when my son was born—I snuck over to LNC the next day as the Sooners hosted the No. 1 Arizona Wildcats in that magical season for OU when they made it to the national championship game. I can still name the five starters in ten seconds….Mookie Blalock, Harvey Grant (Jerami’s dad), Stacy King, Dave Sieger, and Ricky “Amazing’ Grace. My favorite basketball team of all-time.

I wanted to name our son Mookie, but my wife would have none of that and we settled on Christopher. I once told Abe Lemons I tried to name my son Mookie and he just shook his head with that smile of his.

I cant wait to be a grandfather.

Since the Thunder will be tanking hard once they unload Chris Paul it will be the grandson and football consuming me for awhile here on the blog. Plus, of course the village idiot Trump here and there.

It was a great day of college football yesterday. OU was idle. Texas made Vegas look smart beating Mike Gundy’s confused team by six points. Auburn jumped into the title hunt by getting a road win at A&M. Just so we’re clear…Auburn now has a neutral field win over Oregon and a road win over A&M and will climb my poll accordingly. LSU isn’t your mother’s LSU…they can score the football in a big way.

Georgia and Notre Dame have nice teams, but I don’t see championship QBs. To me…the championship QB are Lawrence, Tua, and Hurts. Fields, Fromm, and Nix are on a lower level. I need to see more from Burrows.

This is my first college football poll of the season.It goes:

1 Clemson

2 Alabama

3 LSU

4 Oklahoma

5 Ohio State

6 Auburn

7 Georgia

8 Wisconsin

9 Notre Dame

10 Texas

Big, big, big game this evening in the Big 12. The winner should emerge as the team to challenge OU for the Big 12 championship both in the regular season and conference championship game.

An enormous challenge for redshirt freshman Spencer Sanders to take on Sam Ehlinger’s Horns in Austin in his first real road start against a ranked Power 5 team.

Texas simply cannot lose another game if they aspire to make college football’s Final Four. The Horns will have to run the table if they want to make college football’s playoff for the first time.

The field to make the Final Four will be tough to crack. Clemson, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, LSU and Ohio State just to name six. We should have an eight team playoff, but it is what it is.

In the Boone Pickens/Mike Gundy era O State is 7-2 versus the Horns this decade. That’s a stunning stat. The Cowboys have won five straight in Austin. The Cowboys have owned the Horns there’s no question of it.

Neither of these teams have shown much defense in their first three games. Both defenses are typical Big 12 defenses. One would think this will be a shootout….48-42 or so.

Vegas has Texas floating around as a five to six point favorite.

A great test to see where Spencer Sanders is with his passing game in his fourth game as college player.

It’s a good slate of games this week-end….Notre Dame at Georgia, Michigan at Wisconsin, Auburn at Texas A&M. USC knocked Utah from the ranks of the unbeaten last night at the Coliseum.

It’s hard for me to even take the time to think about the Oklahoma City Thunder right now. But I will at some point. It might be December 15th, but I’ll get there. There’s no hurry. This is going to require patience.

I saved this interview for today. I like Mike Gundy actually. I think he’s a very solid offensive coach. His offenses over the years clearly speak for themselves. I’ve by chance talked to him a time or two. I like him. He has a sense of humor.

So while I clearly call this the Boone Pickens Era at O State it’s not meant as a diss towards Gundy. If my kid was an offensive player heading off to play DI ball he would be a guy I’d want my son to play for.

If Les Miles had stayed at O State to kick off the Boone Picken’s era I’m not so sure he would have done any better than Mike Gundy. Maybe. You have to figure his defenses would have been better, but would Miles have been able to score with the ping pong offenses of the Big 12 conference?

Miles was 2-2 versus OU and those wins came against OU in 2001 and 2002 when the Sooners were coming off a national championship and the Sooners had NFL caliber players on the defensive side of the ball.

But in the end, Boone would have been very demanding with any head coach he had leading his college football franchise….including Les Miles or Larry Fedora or Todd Monken.

A very big game for both teams tonight in Austin from a Big 12 Championship Game standpoint.

It looks like I will become a grandfather this week-end. What a journey! I can’t believe I made it this far.

A grandfather.

It will be a ‘little’ boy coming into the world at eight and half pounds. His name will be Robert Allen Jackson named after my father.

I bet he looks just like my father, my son, and me.

I can’t wait to go fishing with him. Or watch him at hockey practice or watch him hit his first golf ball. Or watch him curl up and fall asleep with Perk and Tucker.

My son looked like the little boy Jonah in Sleepless in Seattle. I would guess my wife has seen this movie at least a thousand times. It even made my Top Ten list of chick flicks.

God, I feel old…a grandfather.

I feel almost certain my wife will be playing Sleepless in Seattle sometime in the next week to show me how much Robert looks like Jonah.

I wonder what would have happened to me if my wife hadn’t called me from Auburn on that first semester break.

It was destiny.

I’ll probably be watching chick flicks all week-end in between a couple of college football games.

Destiny is a funny thing.

This will be my second pick after I watch Serendipity. Serendipity and Four Weddings and a Funeral have for a long time been one and two on my all-time chick flick list.

Is it still raining? What an epic ending scene.

I keep seeing all these polls relating to Trump losing to the top four Dem candidates and I think it’s Fool’s Gold.

It will be the economy, stupid.

It will be the markets. It will be those 180 million Americans with private health care insurance who don’t want Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders screwing with the system.

It will be China. It will be how these trade treaties with China are perceived a year from now.

Does anyone at this point hold on to the thought America has a moral conscience any longer?

The evangelicals, the fiscal conservatives, the military….give me a break. They won’t vote their moral conscience. At least ninety per cent of them won’t.

They’ll vote their economy, stupid.

Most independents will in the end vote their economy if the Dems don’t choose a moderate and go George McGovern circa 2020.

The DNC could have a video of Trump having sex with daughter Ivanka and it will still be the economy, stupid.

Ninety per cent of the evangelicals would still be for Trump as long as the economy is making them money in their 401k’s.

It is what it is.

Here’s the Trump Fight Song for the evangelicals, the fiscal conservatives, the military people…all of them.

It is what it is…at least be up front about it.

Would we be here right now if Barack Obama had been white?

Would we be here right now if Barack Obama had been a moderate white GOP senator from Florida like Little Marco Rubio?

If Little Marco Rubio or Low Energy Jeb Bush had been president and killed Bin Laden, created 200,000 jobs a month, pulled us out of a depression, saved the U.S. auto industry, and had a 97% approval rating would Donald Trump have been the GOP candidate in 2016?

Really?

So while it is the economy…it’s also the fact Donald Trump tapped into America’s inner racial conflicts which still exist.

You think Clay Bennett, Sam Presti, or Billy Donovan would be caught on record like this?

NOT A CHANCE.

Michael Bennet never had a chance.

He isn’t a pussy grabbing reality television star. He didn’t promise everything from a free home to a free college education to the moon to the millennials.

He isn’t a woman. He isn’t black. He isn’t Hispanic. He isn’t too old. He isn’t gay. His last name isn’t Williams or Yang or Castro.

He’s just qualified and would have made for an interesting president.

He’s a white male moderate and he never had a chance.

I would hope Joe Biden might have Michael Bennet on his short list for vice-president. But for the reasons I stated above I doubt that could happen in this America.

That wouldn’t satisfy the ultra left wing of the Democratic Party which seems intent on making Donald Trump something Bush 41 never was…namely, a two term president.

Elizabeth Warren just drew a huge crowd in New York. So what. Is there any doubt whatsoever the Dems are going to win the state of New York?

The question will be who wins the states of the Rust Belt, Florida, North Carolina, and maybe two or three states in the middle of the country we’re not thinking of just yet.

If you wonder why America is in the hole it has dug for itself with a never ending sequence of political stupidity look no further than the third debate by the current Democratic Party.

They must not understand how Donald Trump got elected in the first place. They must not understand Bernie Sanders and giveaway policies will not play with the independents who will decide this election.

Hillary and Bill Clinton seem like moderate Republicans compared to the list of ten minus Biden and Klobachar who stood on that stage in Houston.

I’m not even sure how Barack Obama would play with this crowd given how they talked about him in the first two debates.

Here’s a clue, Dems….you’re going to win New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and the western coast. You might want to construct a strategy where you can win some senate seats and possibly the presidency in between.

But as I already knew back when this election started, which btw was the day after Trump’s inaugural address…someone like Michael Bennet never had a chance.

Well…this is the part of the week when I like to post something on the upcoming presidential election. But since I’m still in a state of depression over the Dems performance in their debate…I just can’t do it this week.

Todd Palin, after thirty-one years of marriage to Sarah Palin, couldn’t take it anymore and filed for divorce from the former governor of Alaska who was John McCain’s running mate in 2008.

Of course, it was Palin who endorsed Donald Trump in Iowa in 2016 and helped make all of this possible.

Best wishes to all of the Palin children…Trik, Tac, Bristol, Ninja, and Tree as they work as a family to get through this as one.

I was just kidding that was sarcasm. Their names are really Bristol, Willow, Track, Piper, and Trig….and therein I think we see what Todd might have been dealing with these past three decades.

The Cleveland Brown are a disappointing 1-1 after two games. The Titans and NY Jets should have been two wins for a team which was favored to win the AFC Central. The Pittsburgh Steelers are on the ropes. The Bengals are the Bengals and going nowhere. Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens have replaced Baker Mayfield as the darlings of the AFC in two weeks into this young NFL season.

The Browns acquired OBJ in the off season to give Baker Mayfield and his offensive coordinator Todd Monken a home run threat to go along with Nick Chubb and Jarvis Landry. To date Baker and Todd Monken have not figured it out.

The axiom in the NFL is that the quarterback has 2.8 seconds to get the ball out his hands. This isn’t happening with Baker right now. He’s holding the ball too long. Like he’s over-reading or over thinking. Nick Chubb isn’t getting the ball enough. The tight end isn’t getting the ball enough to suit me. The offense looks like the second week of preseason should look.

I have no idea why this is a problem. I know this — the problem better get solved this week because the Browns next four games are against the LA Rams, Seattle Seahawks, Baltimore Ravens, and Tom Brady. All four of these teams are 2-0 and appear to be playoff bound. Two of these teams were in last season’s Super Bowl. The Baltimore game one would think will be critical if the Browns are to be contenders instead of pretenders.

I would guess Todd Monken and Baker will pretty much be living together these next few weeks trying to get this offense on track.

I love Monken. Todd Monken was T Boone Pickens’ offensive coordinator on that 2011 O State Big 12 championship team when they beat OU 44-10. Monken went on to head coach at Southern Miss and last season was Tampa Bay’s offensive coordinator. I’m pretty sure Todd Monken at some point would like to become an NFL head coach. I would think this next month will be as critical to Todd Monken as it will be to Baker Mayfield becoming the next Brett Favre.

2.8 seconds. Count it in your head. This isn’t the defenseless Big 12. An NFL quarterback has 2.8 seconds to pull the trigger and distribute the ball.

Baker Mayfield and Todd Monken have a big week ahead of them with the LA Rams killer defense as their next opponent.

I love both Baker and Todd Monken, but you have to call it as it is — they need to get it together in a hurry.

The OKC Thunder aren’t even remotely on my radar screen as we hit the last week of summer. I’m watching college football and a few NFL games here and there.

The Big 12 as always is going to be fun with one would think OU and Texas as the top two teams in the league.

The quarterback play in the league is excellent and there is a great matchup in Austin on Saturday night as O State takes on Texas in an ABC nationally televised game.

Proven Sam Ehrlinger versus freshman Spencer Sanders.

I’ve had this one circled since I saw the schedules. Huge game for both teams and the winner should emerge as the team to challenge OU for the league title.

Big time game for Spencer Sanders as a freshman on the road in front of the nation to show his stuff.

The Big 12 hasn’t won a national championship in football since the 2005-06 season when Texas beat USC in one of the great games in college football history.

OU got to the 2008 title game against Florida and Texas got to the 2009 title game against Alabama, but both teams lost in competitive games.

Since then no Big 12 team has advanced to the title game though OU has made it to three Final Fours.

With Clemson, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, and LSU are all looking formidable so far—the road to the Final Four will not be an easy one for the Big 12 champion.

But this game in Austin and Notre Dame versus Georgia should give us two very interesting college games to watch this week-end as we finally begin to transition into autumn.

As I sit each week-end and watch Jalen Hurts and Spencer Sanders…I can’t help but think of the season Vince Young had in 2005 for the ‘Horns. I have it as one of the greatest individual single seasons in college football history.

So in honor of Vince Young’s Heisman/national championship season…I’m honoring him with this look back at one of the greatest national championship games in college football history.