| NO. 1 TEXAS By Gene Menez, Sports Illustrated For the record this was not my idea. One of the bigwigs at CNNSI.com told me to put together a quick piece on my years at the University of Texas so that people can learn why the magazine has selected the school as the No. 1 athletic program in the country. "Uh, well," I began hesitantly, "when I went to school, it wasn't exactly ..."
"Great," he said. "Have it in by Tuesday."
So I canceled a tee time and started sifting through my sad collection of dusty newspaper clips (I worked all four years at the school paper, The Daily Texan), media guides and press credentials in the hope I'd find something helpful. The search only confirmed what I had thought: My stay at Texas (1991-'95) was the worst time to attend school there.
The football team lost all four games to Texas A&M, went to one bowl game, lost to TCU and Rice, and earned a share of just one conference championship -- and that only because Texas A&M was on probation. (The team went to the Cotton Bowl the year before I arrived and to the Sugar Bowl the year after I left.) Coach Tom Penders and the men's basketball team, which I covered for the paper in 1994, reached the Elite Eight in 1990 and the Sweet 16 in 1991, but never got past the second round while I was there. Neither did coach Jody Conradt 's women's basketball squad, which always had advanced deep in the tournament before I arrived. The baseball team was solid but not special, going to the College World Series twice but never winning it all.
In short, being a Texas student and fan those four years was like being a fan of good music in the late '80s (U2 notwithstanding). No question things have improved significantly and the university deserves to be No. 1 in our very scientific analysis. But had the rankings been made while I was in school, I'm not sure Texas even would have qualified as "Others receiving votes."
Still, there are moments I'll never forget. On the eve of the Texas-Oklahoma football game in 1992, while reveling with hundreds of others at the Across the Street bar in Dallas, I saw a member of the UT golf team quickly maneuver his way toward a portable toilet. But instead of going inside, he ducked to the left and vomited next to it. His course management has improved greatly; he's now on the PGA Tour.
In the spring semester in 1993 I was in drama class completing the end-of-the-year course/teacher evaluation form when I looked to my right and saw one of the players from the football team trying to copy my responses. He thought it was a test.
During spring football practice in March 1992 three suspended players, who had been charged with misdemeanors stemming from a fight, unexpectedly returned to the team. After practice John Mackovic , three months into his tenure as coach, fielded questions from other reporters about why the players had been reinstated. I asked, "Were their charges dropped?" and Mackovic glared at me as if I had just moved his wine collection to a boiler room. He then turned to another reporter and said, about me, "This guy is going to go somewhere." It was only after a few months of witnessing Mackovic's contempt for the local media that I learned he did not mean that as a compliment.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't trade my four years of college for Vin Diesel 's black book. The education was first-class; Austin, by far the best city in Texas, rocked. And if I ever want to experience a winning, big-time college athletic program, there's always grad school.
Hook 'em.
Sports Illustrated reporter Gene Menez is a 1995 graduate of the University of Texas. |
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| NO. 2 STANFORD By Kelli Anderson, Sports Illustrated Stanford, a jock school? The sprawling athletic empire that Sports Illustrated just named the No. 2 program in the country is far removed from the place I attended back in the 1980s. The Sears Trophy hadn't been invented, the campus did not have a fitness center (but there was a bowling alley, a much more suitable venue for smoking the cheap cigars and drinking the generic beer favored by fitness-minded students at the time), and the idea of students camping out to secure men's basketball tickets -- as they did a few years ago -- was laughable. Sure, the Cardinal was spectacularly successful at the so-called country-club sports like swimming, tennis and golf. But many other teams, it seemed, tried to fill out their rosters at registration. Responding to flyers or personal entreaties, I played rugby for a semester and participated in practices for crew, water polo and ultimate frisbee -- four club sports I had no experience in nor any particular talent for. Everything I touched, apparently, cried out for upgrades. Women's crew and water polo are now serious varsity sports (the latter was national champion last year), and rugby and frisbee are serious club sports that have also won national titles.
The major sports were also a lot more casual in my day, at least from the spectators' point of view. In my four years at the Farm, the men's basketball team had only one winning season, the women just two. I didn't even know what the NCAA tournament was until long after I had picked up my diploma. Tickets? Not a problem, especially if one followed a friend's sensible, time-saving plan: If the men's basketball team was within 20 points at halftime, he would depart Green Library and mosey on down to Maples to grab a seat -- any seat -- for the second half.
Then, as now, football was the main draw for students, though not because the results on the gridiron were any less mediocre than those on the hardwood. With John Elway at quarterback, however, winning was often a possibility. My freshman year, the only winning season I saw as a student, we had a small hope for a Rose Bowl bid, but only because half of the Pac-10 was on probation. Two years later the Cardinal flirted with another winning season and a bid to the Hall of Fame Bowl. To the Stanford Band -- of which I was a member -- this meant a holiday road trip to an exotic locale: Birmingham, Ala. All the Cardinal had to do was beat Cal in the Big Game at Berkeley, a feat that has been pulled off with thumping regularity in the past decade but was a much trickier task during my dark era.
As has been recorded in legend, the 1982 Big Game was a classic, even before its mind-bending ending. In what would be his last college game, Elway engineered a thrilling, last-minute drive for a 35-yard field goal that put Stanford ahead 20-19 with four seconds to go. We musicians, all wearing white hard hats to fend off the frozen citrus the hospitality-challenged Cal students loved to throw at us, were happily milling about the end zone as Stanford kicked off. We were going to a bowl game! In Birmingham!
But then The Play happened: Cal's impossible, five-lateral charge through the band that ended in a game-winning touchdown for the Bears and a crushed trombone -- and enduring celebrity -- for my friend Gary Tyrrell . Perhaps my most indelible sports memory from college was watching Elway and Stanford coach Paul Wiggin stalk by me that afternoon, murderously pissed off. The band eventually was exonerated from blame, and even Wiggin and Elway learned to laugh again, years later. But another soft spot in the Stanford athletic department had been exposed, and I, naturally, was part of it. As one spectator was quoted in SI a year later, "It appeared to me that the weakest part of the Stanford defense was the woodwinds." I have no doubt that unit has since been upgraded, too.
Sports Illustrated senior writer Kelli Anderson is a 1984 graduate of Stanford University.
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