Thoughts about...Stuff Vol. 1

Things are happening, man. They’re happening all the doggone time. Since my fearless leaders here at ODB let me make up stuff as I go and Couldn’t Be Me is wrapped up for the season, I’m back with a brand new series. Maybe I’ll do it every week, maybe I’ll do it once a month, maybe I’ll never do it again. Who knows? Nobody that’s who. It’s a mystery. That’s the magic of amateur internet sports content.

Anyway, there’s stuff going on in Baylor Nation and I have thoughts about it. Some of them are fun, some of them are not so fun. None of these thoughts are really long enough to warrant their own stories so they’ll go in this brand new column “Thoughts about...Stuff”.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and HOT TAKES on these things too, so share those in the comments. Let’s go!

GIVE KIM MULKEY HER THINGS, DAMMIT!

Look, it’s pretty plain to see that there’s never been a coach as great as Kim Mulkey at Baylor in one of the major sports (I say “major” because the other Mulkey, Felecia, has won EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of the 8 Acrobatics & Tumbling national championships in the brief history of the sport, but that’s a much smaller pool of schools with 25 teams competing as of 2019) and there never will be again. She’s everything. She is the chosen one. Give her her things.

Your 8th ranked Lady Bears took on the 1st ranked UCONN Huskies earlier this week at the Ferrell Center and handed Geno and the squad their first regular season loss in FOUR YEARS. UCONN hadn’t lost a regular season game in regulation since their last loss to Baylor in 2013, <counts on fingers, carries the one> THAT’S ALMOST SIX YEARS. It was their first double digit loss in just short of SEVEN YEARS. And it was at the hands of Kim Mulkey’s squad. Because of course it was. That’s who we are, because that’s who she is.

She was an All-American point guard, went to 4 straight Final Fours and won 2 national championships at Louisiana Tech. She went to 7 Final Fours and won a championship as an assistant coach at Louisiana Tech. At Baylor she’s won the Big 12 regular season and tournament championships 8 times each, gone to 3 Final Fours, had the first ever 40-0 season in college basketball, and has 2 national championships. She’s the first person to ever win college championships as a player, assistant, and head coach. You know how long people been playing, assistant coaching, and head coaching college basketball? It’s been a long ass time! And nobody did that before she did it. She even has an olympic gold medal as a player. And she’s OUR leader. What????

PLUS, SHE BE ICY.

LOOK AT THIS VEST. LOOK AT THIS PRINT. IT GETS NO COLDER!!!

SHE’S THE GREATEST WE’VE EVER HAD OR WILL EVER HAVE AND WE ALL NEED TO ACKNOWLEDGE THIS AT EVERY POSSIBLE MOMENT. GIVE HER HER FLOWERS. GIVE HER HER STATUE. NAME THE NEW ARENA AFTER HER. GIVE HER ALL OF HER THINGS, DAMMIT.

...and WIN, all our victories for the green and VOLT?

Aight the last one was a bit of a cold take. Everyone knows Kim Mulkey is the GOAT. Now we warming it up.

Background: It’s been floating around for a while now that Baylor is getting new logos and potentially new shades of green and/or gold from Nike this year. See below:

The Sailor Bear logo, cool. Sweet. Love it. Do it.

But more importantly, Baylor needs to embrace Volt as the school’s 2nd color. Gold is cool and everything but you’ve seen our white football jerseys. You’ve seen those pee-stain colored shoulder paws. You’ve seen the Gold Rush shirts at H-E-B for god knows how long. Those getting you hot under the collar? You looking at those shirts like “aww yeah, that’s the stuff”? If you weren’t born and raised a Baylor fan did you ever see that shade of yellow on anyone ever and think “man, that looks so good on you”? Of course you didn’t. You thought they looked like a piece of cheese in a cartoon. Or worse, a Packers fan.

But volt? Volt looks incredible on everyone as the men’s basketball team has proven for a few years now.

Look at this glorious picture. How much lamer would it look if their jerseys were the color of that Gold Rush shirt you got in 2008? It’d look lamer than a Mattisbear dunk attempt.

Even that hideous polo Scott Drew has on is 10 times cooler than it would be if you swapped the volt out for that Rollie Pollie Ollie colored nonsense we call gold.

Everywhere you see gold in any Baylor uniform in any sport should be replaced with volt. We should even have chrome volt helmets. I don’t even think that’s possible and it’d look kind of stupid but we should still do it because if I’ve learned anything from hating the Dallas Cowboys all my life it’s that if you make uniform choices that look kind of stupid long enough they eventually get called “iconic”. I mean seriously who thought those random blueish-silver pants that don’t match anything else on the uniform were a good idea? Get that outta here.

I don’t know why I got on that tangent. Just make everything volt, you cowards.

Guess we gotta do this Matt Rhule - NFL thing again

This is so annoying.

For the record, I don’t think Matt Rhule is leaving this season and I don’t really understand why NFL teams are interested in him (despite me believing he’s a great leader for Baylor) but I understand why he’d be interested in the NFL. I wouldn’t be mad at him for leaving Baylor to go to the NFL or even to take the head job at Penn State should it open up down the road.

What I would be mad at is if we have to spend another offseason hearing about him tossing his name in the ring for head coaching jobs on account of “not burning bridges” or “building a network” or some other such nonsense. All of that is dumb. If he wants the jobs he should interview for them and if not then he shouldn’t. More importantly than being dumb it’d be harmful to what he’s doing here. 2 years in a row of publicly laying the ground work to leave would be incredibly easy negative recruiting material for our opponents to use. We’ve already had reports of rivals telling recruits crap like “they’re gonna get the death penalty”, which is ridiculous. How much more damaging would credible threats like “Matt Rhule is gonna take the next NFL job that opens up” be?

We just don’t need all that crap. If he wants to leave, he’s a grown man who can do whatever he wants and that’s fine. But hopefully he’s up front and honest about whatever it is he decides to do. Nobody likes surprises on the coaching carousel.

Balancing the College Football Playoff

The national championship game is Monday night and SURPRISE!!!! Alabama and Clemson are playing again. They’re 2 great teams and it oughta be a pretty good game or whatever but come on. How much do you really care about watching all of that game? ESPN isn’t even doing the very cool and fun coach’s film room thing this year and they’re replacing it with the awful Monday Night Football crew.

Screw that noise. You don’t need that in your life.

Instead, you should join me and some other fine folks of Baylor Twitter as we watch and live tweet Avengers: Infinity War instead. That’s right. Infinity War is on Netflix now so at 7pm CT on Monday we’re all gonna fire it up together and live tweet it with some of the Baylor fam. Feel free to join us and use #BTsnaps (get it, cause BT is for Baylor Twitter and we’re snapping because we’re losing it about Alabama and Clemson always playing at the end of the year and in the movie Thanos...yeah you get it!) We did this last season with The Godfather and it was awesome - plus the movie was over in time to see the thrilling conclusion of the game - so now we’re doing it again and if you do something 2 years in a row it’s a tradition. Join the tradition.

Aight well whoop there it is. The first ever Thoughts about...Stuff is in the books. Thanks for stopping by and don’t forget to sound off in the comments. You know you want to!