PN-G bamatex

Yes, I am. Vince Young wouldn’t have won a national championship in this era. If RJ has the right tools around him, I think he can.

My only regret is that I couldn’t get home more often to watch him play in person. I’ve been telling my classmates at law school for two years now the Longhorns are getting the best QB recruit they’ve ever had next year. Hopefully he’ll be wearing a state championship ring when he gets there. If Texas ever starts playing consistently, I can see him bringing home a national championship at the next level. He might even knock off Alabama in the process. (Once.)

That seems categorically unfair, but I’ll take it as long as we’re the #1 seed.

What is this I hear about PN-G playing the first round at home?

That’s correct.

Roschon was exceptional as always and I’m proud to see him get his revenge on Nederland after they spoiled our perfect record last year. That said, the PN-G defense was the game changer last night. I never thought I’d see PN-G go +3 in turnovers against Nederland in the Faircloth era. We had a pick six called back on a post-turnover block in the back, and Roschon took it to the house on the very next play. That kickoff fumble recovery just about broke Nederland’s back. We had trouble stopping the run at times, but we made adjustments and we did what good defenses do: we took advantage of Nederland’s mistakes. Roschon looked great, but the defense gave him a bunch more opportunities to look great. We’ve made a ton of improvements on that side of the ball the last three games. Give those kids their due.

I wouldn't get ahead of myself. Hispanics in Texas vote Republican a lot more than in other states. Nationally, about a quarter of Hispanics vote Republican. In Texas, Ted Cruz had 37% of the Hispanic vote and that's historically low. Every other Republican on the statewide ballot carried more Hispanics, including Patrick and Paxton. Abbott carried 44% of Hispanics in 2014 and Perry carried 38% in 2010. George W. Bush carried 49% during his last gubernatorial bid in 1998. There's a number of social and cultural factors that I think play into it, but Hispanics here are disproportionately Republican. The Texas Republican Party has also been more successful at electing Hispanics to statewide office than its blue counterpart; George P. Bush and Ted Cruz himself are prominent examples, and we just elected the first Hispanic Republican senator to the Texas Senate in Pete Flores, who stole a border district from the Democrats. It's worth noting that Hispanics comprised 24% of overall turnout last night, an historic high, but one I don't think will be met again for three or four cycles. It's normally hovering between 12% and 20%, and I honestly think the massive increase has everything to do with that turnout game I mentioned earlier. In an ordinary year with a lesser ground game for the Democrats, that number probably goes back down for the foreseeable future.

A couple more notes on the Beto-Cruz election (my thoughts, not from the horse's mouth): In addition to everything I stated earlier, I think this race really boiled down to an old fashioned turnout war. Independents and Democrats (identified by their casting votes in Democratic primaries) comprised a substantially larger portion of the voting electorate than they normally do. That's not because the Democratic base or the number of independents in Texas grew substantially in two years as it might indicate at first glance. It looks to me like a lot of Texans who voted for Trump in 2016 didn't show up to the polls this time, where just about everybody who voted for Hillary Clinton made it a point to. Trump won 4.685M out of 8.696M voters in Texas in 2016. Ted Cruz won 4.240M out of 8.324M voters. Ted Cruz won 425K fewer votes than Trump in an election with 675K fewer voters overall. Meanwhile, Beto O’Rourke won 4.018M voters versus Hillary Clinton’s 3.878M for a difference of 140K additional votes. We know that Beto registered a ton of first-time voters, probably comprising that 140K voters and then some. Trump’s margin of victory over Clinton in 2016 was 808K votes. If you start with that 808K vote margin, take away those 425K votes that didn’t show for Cruz, and add in Beto’s newfound 140K votes, what do you have? About a 243K vote margin. Cruz actually won by a margin of 223K. The math there adds up a little too well. It looks like Beto turned out every single Hillary Clinton voter in the state plus some, where Cruz couldn’t bring out all of Trump’s voters. That makes sense in an election year where the Democrats have the momentum and Republicans don’t, especially after two crazy Republicans decided to act like the redneck al Qaeda. It makes more sense when you take into account that Beto only won four counties that Hillary didn’t (Jefferson being one of those counties, and the other three being suburban counties in Dallas and Austin), all of which went for Trump by comparatively narrow margins in 2016. But I say all of that to say this: I think the fact the math here lines up almost perfectly just reaffirms that the political landscape of Texas today really hasn't changed all that much since 2016. Beto just did a way better job of turning out his base than we did. Given the kind of campaign he ran, visiting every county a half dozen times and running the most voracious ground game Texas has ever seen, that really seems to be the most plausible explanation to me.

And he does so intentionally.

Ed Emmett lost because Ed Emmett had some serious campaign blunders. That said, he was an excellent county judge who deserved reelection. For Houston's sake, I hope to God Rodney Ellis runs things behind the scenes and not this kid. For those wondering, here's essentially what happened with the Beto-Cruz race. I won't say which horse, but a lot of this came straight from the horse's mouth. Ten days ago, we were up by double digits in every race in internal GOP polling. Abbott, Hegar and Bush were all up by 18+. Patrick and Paxton were hovering around 12. Cruz was coming in right at ten points. Then Pittsburgh and the pipe bomber happened. O'Rourke played the typical Democrat in claiming that his campaign was totally unsupported by PACs when in fact he had support from quite a few PACs, just not in the form of direct campaign donations. O'Rourke kept himself and his campaign out of it, but several of those supposedly non-existent PACs made a big deal out of the president's rhetoric in the Dallas and Austin suburbs. The result? Williamson and Hays Counties went blue for the first time in decades. Denton and Collin Counties stayed red, but barely. We started losing voters immediately after the pipe bomber pulled his stupid stunt and it only accelerated as we got closer to election day. To roughly quote my horse, we lost five points in the last five days of the voting period. They kind of backed off over last weekend and we bounced back well on Election Day. But it wasn't enough to recover anything like the lead we started with. To my knowledge, nobody made as big of an issue in any other state, and that's why there's such a stark difference in the results. Republicans overperformed public polls in 48 out of 50 states, the lone exceptions being Texas and Nevada. McSally in Arizona was ahead by fractions of a point and is on track to win by a full point. DeSantis and Scott were both down by two in Florida and are about to win by half a point to a point. Kemp was ahead by a fraction of a point in Georgia and is about to win by two, if Abrams will ever let it go. Hawley in Missouri was ahead by about half a point and pulled it off by about two. Braun in Indiana way overperformed the polls there to beat Donelly by several points, and Blackburn in Tennessee was always projected to win comfortably but still way overperformed her numbers. Heitkamp lost by more than she was expected to in North Dakota. On the House side, the Democrats were projected to gain 39 seats by Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. They've got 27 and their ceiling, depending on how things shake out in races that are too close to call, is now 34 seats. Given the national trend, if you take away Pittsburgh and the pipe bomber, we're looking at a totally different election in Texas. As much as I hate to say it, the Lone Star State was the only real blemish on an otherwise very good night for Republicans. Trump lost the House like pretty much every president going through his first mid-term, but he lost way fewer seats than Obama and actually gained a stunning amount of ground in the Senate. I just wish he would have talked about the economy a little more. We might have had a better outcome in Texas and might have actually kept the House.

I took a look at the turnout numbers yesterday. TargetSmart has assembled all of the early voter information from every state in the country on their website, and they’ve done some partisan modeling based on prior voting history. If their modeling is accurate and my math is right, Cruz has a double digit victory in sight. That jives with what some of my sources in Austin told me last week.

I stand corrected.

My favorite comment at MCM last year, referring to how much we rely on Johnson: ”He better get used to it now if he wants to play at Texas.” Dude wasn’t lying,

I graduated from PN-G in 2011. I distinctly - and fondly - remember watching PN-G beat Barbers Hill five times in four seasons. We used to joke about Faircloth getting arrested for desecrating our national mascot. Rez Ipsa is correct that we suffered a third round loss to Manvel in 2010, by a score of 56-46 if I recall correctly. Pardon my candor, but I have never seen a team or a crowd as utterly classless as Manvel was that game - and I’ve been to LSU, and dealt with Ohio State fans at the Superdome. I vividly remember watching the drill team flipping off our band before the game began. I have high hopes Roschon will deliver some long overdue payback this year. If the defense keeps playing like it has the last two games, those hopes may be realized. Back in the days of the old 19 and 20-4A, the only 19-4A team that could beat PN-G consistently was the other purple and white meat.

#20 Texas A&M at Auburn (-3.5) #13 WV at #17 Texas (-2) #6 Georgia (-8.5) at #9 Kentucky #14 Penn St at #5 Michigan (-10.5) #4 ND (-10) at Northwestern #1 Alabama (-14.5) at #3 LSU (We will not cover that spread.) #7 Oklahoma (-13.5) at Texas Tech

I predict LSU beats Alabama this week, both teams win out from there, go to the playoff ranked #1 and #3 respectively, win the first round, play each other in the national championship where Alabama pitches a shutout, and prove to everyone that instituting a playoff to avoid a repeat of 2011 just created a repeat of 2011.

Correction: PN-G goes all six rounds, but is disqualified from the state championship the day before because way back in the second round, Coach Faircloth accidentally brought his cell phone into the stadium and put it in his locker six hours before the game started and Barbers Hill found out somehow, causing PN-G to forfeit all of its playoff wins from then on.

But condescension becomes you quite nicely.

No, I'm saying that the punishment needs to fit the crime. The coach made an honest mistake and violated a rule. The manner in which he violated it did not contribute to the outcome of the game. Therefore, the coach should be disciplined, but the game shouldn't be forfeited. Punish the coach, not the kids.

I went back and dug them up on a computer. Judging by the picture and a picture of our football team and coaches, that could be any of about four different coaches on our staff. Not really sure how anybody's getting a positive ID on him, absent his name being released elsewhere.

I still can't see any pictures.

I never argued that "Faircloth and the whole PN-G staff didn't know this rule." I said, citing Faircloth's statements in the press interview, that apparently this specific coach misinterpreted the rule. It's not stated anywhere, but I got the feeling from the interview that he might be a first year coach, and I saw someone put in here that he's actually a middle school coach. Back in the Burnett days, I remember middle school coaches helping out with high school games. Don't know if that's still the case or not, but if we're talking about someone coaching middle school, it seems plausible to me.

Let's go back to the exact text of the rule. NCAA Rule 1, Article 11(a) reads, in relevant part: "Television replay or monitor equipment is prohibited at the sidelines, press box or other locations within the playing enclosure for coaching purposes during the game." That last clause, "for coaching purposes during the game," appears to be the key element on which the PN-G coach's misinterpretation of the rule hinged. I suspect based on Coach Faircloth's statements, though I admittedly don't know for sure, that the misinterpretation hinged on the understanding that he couldn't take pictures or video with an iPad to be used in connection with coaching decisions during the game, but could still take pictures and video during the game to be used after the game is over, which is a reasonable interpretation based on this portion of the relevant rule. (I note here that it's also plausible he simply saw "television equipment" and distinguished that from an iPad which is not a television, but I think it more likely that a layman would reasonably understand this probably means video equipment of any kind.) The problem is that the sentence following that first one in the rule reads as follows: "Motion pictures, any type of film, facsimile machines, videotapes, photographs, writing-transmission machines and computers may not be used by coaches or for coaching purposes any time during the game or between periods." Now, as a lawyer, I can pick out based on the plain text that this second sentence acts to narrow the range of acceptable conduct posited by the first sentence. Where the first sentence simply says that coaches can't use television replay or monitor equipment in the specified areas for coaching purposes during a game, the second sentence acts as an absolute bar against any use of "[m]otion pictures, any type of film, facsimile machines, videotapes, photographs, writing-transmission machines and computers" by coaches at all during a game, regardless of the purpose of the use or the location of the equipment in the stadium. That's clear to someone trained to interpret rules for a living. But I can also see how a layman wouldn't immediately grasp that, and how the second sentence can easily be looked at as a contradiction of the first, or how the rule taken in its totality appears confusing at first glance, or how one would read into the second sentence the same conditions as those present in its immediate predecessor. It's very easy to understand why a layman, having just read the first sentence, would *presume* that the all-important final clause of the first sentence - "for any coaching purposes during the game" - carries over to the second sentence, even though it's not explicitly stated. Frankly, I've seen courts make bigger mistakes in construing poorly written provisions of actual statutes. And frankly, I think this rule needs to be redrafted to clear up any potential confusion. Honest, good faith mistakes can be made on easy misinterpretations. It happens in the real world all the time, and it's likely what happened here. In any event, if the facts are as I understand them to be, then this presumed misinterpretation would easily explain why a PN-G coach was taking pictures or video using an iPad during the game, but wasn't using that video or those pictures in connection with the game. The PN-G coach in question very likely thought that it was perfectly acceptable to take pictures and video of things he saw which he might think were important to mention during practice the following week. And if that is the case, as I suspect it to be, it's perfectly understandable why Nederland's coach would think that the infraction had no effect on the outcome of the game, and thus didn't warrant forfeiture - a position I happen to agree with, and an argument I think very well could win over the UIL on appeal.

I fail to see how that's applicable to what I said, but okay. In any event, it may not matter if it's a courtroom at all. If the coaches' minds were really made up based on ulterior motives before the meeting ever took place, that could be bad faith and the basis for a lawsuit. Just spitballing, here. And more to the point, all I'm saying is that if you're going to preach the "right and honorable" narrative, it's probably not a good idea to state your view that the district committee wasn't doing the "right and honorable" thing in voting the way it did.

Guys, guys, guys, clearly he was waiting for his girl to show up for some Netflix and chill.