Texas Fans Think Big 12 Refs Are Racist Because NOW There’s Something Wrong with This Conference

This is as rich as it gets. The mighty Scipio Tex of Barking Carnival (and I mean mighty not in jest because Scipio is as good a sportswriter as a sports blog deserves to have) wrote a piece on Saturday night about how the Big 12 has a big problem and that problem might be that its referees are racist (that post, lest you think this is me projecting one Texas fan’s thoughts upon all Texas fans, has over 1,200 comments).

It also might be that its refs were cajoled from their $10 blackjack tables out west and handed a couple of striped shirts and a whistle. Or it might just be that Boone Pickens slipped a thick envelope underneath the little officials room door a couple of hours prior to kickoff on Saturday (he has donated $100 million to a pair of UT health care institutions, you know).

Here’s how the piece climaxes and then ends.

Beyond the realm of pure fiction, all subjective calls went against Texas. Not many. Or an important one. All. This is what I like to call a pattern. We just watched a fixed football game. The first I’ve ever seen or can recall in all of my years. What’s the Big 12 going to do? Nothing, that’s what.

That’s pretty rich, isn’t it?

The Big 12, which had a rocket launcher held to its temple a few years ago by Texas until it was given its $15 million/year network and, in doing so, stripped half of the rest of the teams (including Oklahoma State) of the ability to make a healthy amount of dough on third-tier rights, now has a bias problem after three whiffed calls in a crap game in mid-September.

[Jennifer Lawrence thumbs up emoji]

Look, you’ll get no argument from me that OSU was given a gift on Saturday in Austin. It’s a game it somehow both should have won by three touchdowns and lost by two. But to invoke Tim Donaghy and make it only like the 11th least-plausible reason behind the loss is the height of Texas fans’ inability to handle its new (probably temporary) spot in the college football kingdom.

This is what it feels like to suck, Texas. Every call goes against you. Every ball bounces the other way. Every mistake is exacerbated. I know you’re not used to trading the Range Rover for a Taurus and having to get a 9-5 job that pays less than you used to pay the live-in nanny, but this is how the rest of us have always lived. Time to deal with it.

Or maybe not.

Texas fans don’t enjoy success as much as they pat it on the head and tuck it away in a little suitcase of aristocracy that they consider to be the God-given right of having been delivered into the 40 acres from birth (and whisked away by three midwifes and a wet nurse immediately, of course).

Conference titles are barely a reason to maybe whip out the crystal shot glasses and pour the above average bourbon. National titles are slid in as talking points for the next Capulet Masquerade.

So how do you expect them to handle going 1-3 for the first time since 1956?

I guess this is what fans of the rest of the teams in the league have to get used to. Texas is like the fat kid at recess who chortles when he sits on smaller children but weeps uncontrollable alligator tears when a 1st grader cuts him in the lunch line. It’s a cold world.

Every person who’s ever written a blog post about referees starts with some version of “I don’t normally complain about the refs, but …” The one I liked above is not exempt.

Yeah, you got a couple of bad calls and and one indefensible holding penalty late in the game that cost you one of your four wins this season. That’s a bitter taste, isn’t it? The rest of us know it well.

I’m guessing one of the zebras was suspended from midfield by an invisible zipline and tilted a pocket-sized mirror just right so your punter couldn’t see the snap, too, right?

I’m guessing a Big 12 VP slithered down to Oklahoma State’s locker room at halftime and slid Glenn Spencer a notebook with every play Texas was planning to run in the second half of the game (which, come to think of it, would have taken about 90 seconds to sit down and draw up).

I do love that there was a college football game played in which the headsets on the Oklahoma State sidelines worked only intermittently and not at all for most of the time — a situation that made Spencer say “I have never coached a game like that in my life” — but that wasn’t the conspiracy that was bemoaned afterwards.

The question is, if you’re Texas, how do you recover from devastation like this? It’s one thing for Baylor or Texas Tech to be on the receiving end of a blunt blow to the middle of the face from their own conference because they’re used to it. In Austin? Not so much. The gifts have always flowed.

Might be time to take your ball failing network and go home play Notre Dame 12 times a year.[1. Actually, judging from the first week of the season, that might be a bad idea.] At least then, your self-aggrandizing could fall on ears that are used to hearing it. Somehow, you’d both claim to have finished 11-1.

You could rid yourself of this woeful excuse for a conference and everything that comes with being the ugly stepchild moniker that has so inappropriately been delivered to you. Honestly, this is how children act. I have a couple of them. Authority is to be praised — whether it’s worthy of it or not — until said authority turns on you. Big 12 refs suck. We get it. All refs suck. We get that too. They don’t only suck because you’re the offended party.

On the other hand, I do feel bad for Texas, I guess.

Now they’re going to miss a bowl game by three wins instead of just two.