Untitled (The Legend of B.J. Symons)

5,833 passing yards
9 games with 400 yards of offense
448.69 passing yards per game
52 TD's
25 INT's
661 yards v. Ole Miss (3rd highest of all time, he also has the 7th and 15th highest games)

That's one season. ONE SEASON. Those would be pretty solid career numbers for most quarterbacks. But B.J. Symons only got one season to start at Texas Tech. Symons was a fifth year senior by the time he got a chance to play. Kliff Kingsbury had finally graduated and moved on to a mediocre NFL career (the same place Symons ended up). B.J. took advantage of the opportunity, as you can see up there. His worst senior game was 230 yards and his best was 661. He played the second half of the season with a torn ACL. The guy was a gunslinger through and through.

The point of this story, is that both that Mike Leach is a genius, and he has recruited some badasses. Looking back, Kliff Kingsbury was probably the worst QB of the Mike Leach era. B.J. Symons, Sonny Cumbie, Cody Hodges, Graham Harrell. All badasses

On that note Graham Harrell should be in the Heisman race this year. I agree with Mike Leach when he says that the fact that Harrell is really really good at what he does, should not work against him with Heisman voters.

European Basketball is More Fun to Watch

If you care about basketball at all, then learn some Spanish, Italian or French and start watching European basketball. Its better. It really is. I can't throw and fancy stats out there to tell you why but I was watching a Spanish League highlight video today which included almost no dunking, and the dunking it did include was almost all produced by exceptional passing. What it did include was the aforementioned exceptional passing, players who could actually make jump shots, point guards making plays instead of dribbling around the court meaninglessly, big men with real post moves, and an unfortunate clip of Walter Herrmann taking off his entire uniform, so that he could dunk in his boxers.

I won't go on my rant about why the NBA sucks. Other than having a league filled with a bunch of offensively deficient guards, athletic post men with little or no polish, and being entirely focused on superstars and their personal achievements, it could be a good league. It is, as a matter of fact, infected with the sports league strain of chlamydia. Until it fixes the underlying problems, it will always have these unfortunate side effects. Those underlying problems are indeed a post for another day.

I digress. The point to be made is not that the NBA is crap, which it is. The point to be made is that European basketball is more fun to watch. Maybe not everyone on the court is a former dunk contest champion, and they don't run the 40 in 2.9874 seconds, but they can.......play basketball. Holy shit. Why would any pay millions of dollars to people that already have skill, when they could pay millions of dollars to unproven projects who repeatedly underachieve and end up playing in Europe anyway.