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Thursday, September 23, 2004

Longhorns: Saturday's Forecast 

85 degrees, 50% Chance of Rain, Some Heavy.

So let me get this straight: Hurricane Ivan hits Florida, does its thing, changes course, heads back out into the Gulf, and now looks like it's going to hit the Texas coast, meaning we get a weekend full of its rainy remnants?

And Jim Garrison thought "the magic bullet" took a crazy course.

Normally I enjoy rainy games, and this weekend's Texas-Rice contest would be no exception, if it weren't due to a little bit of history. Ten years ago, the Horns visited Houston as the team most considered the favorite to win the Southwest Conference.

Then it started raining. And it kept raining. And it rained some more. The sloppy conditions killed Texas' running game, which gained about 10 yards on the flooded turf of Rice Stadium, and the James Brown-led passing game that had propelled the Horns past OU a week earlier couldn't rekindle the magic. Rice beat Texas that night, 19-17, for the first time in decades. The Horns dropped two of their next three and ended up in the Sun Bowl instead of the Cotton Bowl.

I like to think that our running game has improved since then, but playing in a monsson can be a great equalizer. With an already thin RB situation, I'd hate to think of Cedric Benson slipping and sliding against eight-men fronts on a soggy turf.

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