Bubba only about half-hog on Sam
Bubba McCoy, fielding an unusu- ally early Thanksgiving call from me because I wanted to take his temperature on the football situation, said he thought it was, as much as anything else, the vivid picture on the 75-inch, high-definition screen over the mantel.
What he meant is that college football is an out-of-control cultural juggernaut largely because of people who vegetatively watch its powerful room-filling images on Saturdays.
He related life in the McCoy den from the depth of the recliner: “I sit down here about 11 a.m. on a Saturday and just get mesmerized with the big, clear picture, the team colors, the close-ups on the cheerleaders, the way these quarterbacks throw the ball the length of the field way up high and these guys run to it and lay out and catch it with one hand and come down on their necks, then get up like nothing happened.
“And then there is the final score. The final score tells the truth in a world where used-car dealers like me are now some of our most credible, reliable people. The score is all we’ve got left in a world gone wholesale BS.”
And Donald Trump wouldn’t even accept the score.
“Could we leave politics out of it for a day, at least?” Bubba growled.
I said I fully understood what Bubba was saying about the power of the final score, which gets in the way of happy delusions.
I remembered the Friday before the first game of the season when Sarah Sanders hosted Sam Pittman at the Governor’s Mansion. She tweeted, with all the vapidness of preseason hype at her disposal, that he was the best football coach in the country. A few scores—3-7, 10-48— have quantified in a way that political punditry cannot that he isn’t and that our governor is given to hyperbolic poppycock. “What’d I say about politics?” I mentioned to Bubba that a lot of people are saying college football is being ruined by super-conference consolidation, the NIL earnings allowed the players, the obscenity of coaches’ salaries along with absurd buyouts for failure, and the transfer portal by which your favorite freshman tight end will be playing for somebody else next year.
“That doesn’t stop me from watching,” he said, getting back to his diagnosis of the problem. “Look—the world is about to blow up. The country is about to fail from within like the Roman Empire. And you want me to worry about K.J. Jefferson having some NIL money for trying to play quarterback without an offensive line? A man needs his escape now more than ever.”
So, what was his view on Pittman?
“I don’t think Arkansas can do any better. We’re settled into an 8-4 to 3-9 range. We can buy him out, pay for another coach, then give that one a raise and a buyout for one winning season, then pay him that buyout after the inevitable miserable season. Or we can just keep paying Sam until the contract runs out and see if he’ll take a pay cut for a re-up. If not, there is somebody else who can walk around looking confused on the sideline.”
Is Bubba content with that, as the distinguished UA dropout he is, not to mention one of the finest Student Union players of hearts, spades and dominoes in the institution’s history?
He replied, “Do you ever think about how much time and energy we’ve wasted rooting for the Hog football team over the last, what, seven decades? And what does it get you? It gets you down 0-21 midway through the first quarter against an Auburn team that’s no good. But I couldn’t bring myself to click the remote either off or for another game. It’s a disease, I tell you. What is it you call it?”
Hogaholism.
I wished Bubba a happy Thanksgiving, which reminded him he needed me to pick him up a couple of bottles of Santa Margherita pinot grigio and drive them over. It’s his annual Thanksgiving dinner assignment from the missus, and there is no Santa Margherita pinot grigio nearby.
And the instructions each year are specific. No substitution allowed.
He thought maybe I could do him a nice turn in exchange for his cooperation with these columns that people oddly seem to like.
I said I’d bring it as far as Craig’s on Saturday if he’d meet me for lunch, the gout threat of pork be damned.
He went for that.