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Tweets of the Week: Bears Jellystone Longhorns

It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these.

NCAA Football: Texas at Baylor
The official description for this image says “Steve Sarkisian watches his team compete” as he clearly stares directly toward the ground.
Stephen Spillman-USA TODAY Sports

Close observers of the ODB twitter account (of whom there are exactly zero) will notice that during certain times of certain weeks during/after things are going/have gone well, I start liking lots of tweets. Sometimes dozens of them. This is for a purpose—I am collecting them. And every so often we reach what feels like a critical mass to me of Good Tweets (TM), and forth from the Chorus editor springs a “Tweets of the Day/Night/Week/Whatever” that is basically just me showing all of you what I thought was funny, noteworthy, or important.

Normally I do this in chronological order, but not this time. This time we’re starting with Travis’s weekly Sunday School for Baylor Football. I’m not posting the entire thread for obvious reasons, but I suggest that when you get some time to dive into it, you start with my tweet below, pack a lunch, and buckle up. This has to be Travis’s longest thread ever.

NOW we can get to the less-informative/insightful stuff, a lot of which comes from me.

The Pre-Game:

On Thursday morning I tweeted something trolltastic about starting a cryptocurrency centered on Texas. Little did I know that this would set off a veritable firestorm of Twitter controversy.

Our Burnt Orange neighbors Burnt Orange Nation took exception to this:

It’s not difficult to see where this was going now. I’m making fun of them for being mediocre despite all their advantages; they’re making fun of us for being poor. Normal stuff.

Things pivoted to one of my favorite conceits from our friends about how much we owe them for “subsidizing” us in the Big 12 and how ungrateful we are.

Importantly, there was a since-deleted follow-up to this tweet that referred to us specifically as a Conference USA-quality school located too close to 35 (???) whose only redeeming quality was a local Fazoli’s. Mark the Fazoli’s thing down because we’ll come back to it in a little while.

There’s a reason I enjoy this “subsidization” concept—the Texas Constitution includes one of the greatest actual examples in the history of higher education that seems to go unmentioned far too frequently.

Clearly this is not the first time we’ve had this sort of conversation.

But let’s get back to this week with a brief break. There’s a new baby Baylor podcast in the world that is two episodes in and contains two names familiar to ODBers. Thursday afternoon I listened to both episodes so you didn’t have to (but you should!). Check out the thread below.

Then, Friday morning, the Texas Athletics social-media team dropped this absolute gem on us:

I’ve talked enough about this already that I don’t think I need to get too deep into it again. Suffice to say that, viewed most charitably, it’s a cute reference because Yogi is a bear and we’re Bears. The connection is rock-solid. But it makes no sense because Yogi is also the hero of the story.

I love memes, perhaps more than I should. I also love college athletics, so if you combine those two things in funny or interesting ways, I am in. I still periodically go back and look at/watch the Arkansas tweet from after their game against Texas, and it slays me every single time. But this meme makes no sense. Nobody wants to be Ranger Smith.

But there’s way too much of me in this so far, and apparently we figured out a way for Joy and Lady to trigger tweets, which may be a first from actual bears.

A bear obviously did not write that tweet, but it apparently caused the tweet to be sent. This raises several interesting philosophical questions about what it means to be a bear, a human, or to exist at all.

The Game!

These are all about the same play, which was Baylor’s first TD of the game. Also from the first half, I believe:

This also happened—Ebner jumped over a guy on a kickoff return.

The recruits certainly had a lot to see, and there were a lot of them.

Note: I’m pretty sure I made this up, and our band did not do a tribute to Texas by calling them toxic. Pretty sure.

Gerry doing his thing:

Then Texas did a thing they should not have done.

I was referring, of course, to this:

Which either directly preceded or followed:

Around the same time, this is what the players were thinking:

Which also occurred about the same time as this:

I initially used this video about Davion Mitchell during the NCAA Tournament, but it worked again here for what Bernard did on this play. This was basically it for Texas, but I wanted to know more about the OL perspective here. I went to three of our recent greats for how this would go over in film review:

The Aftermath:

There seems to be some confusion about how this developed. It was not Texas fans chanting this. It was Baylor fans. And it was hilarious.

I know what you’re thinking—Oh, Bijan Robinson didn’t play, that explains everything! Understandable, but wrong. He did play the entire game.

Aranda got into his bag after the game, as well:

And no, he wasn’t joking.

Now, do you remember when I told you to write down the part about Fazoli’s? This is why. I did not see this tweet when it happened, but put it right behind the Arkansas one on my list of 2021 favorites from after games.

Even BON had to recognize it, albeit begrudgingly.

But we weren’t done yet.

The Last Word:

I agree with all of this and was not joking when I went into my First Look and prediction threads with a lot of trepidation. This was a talented, well-coached (at least on offense) team that would have loved to win that game yesterday. Alas...

They did not because Baylor did. This is a really good Baylor team we’re seeing, and if people tell you to enjoy it while it lasts, you should!

I know I am.

Oh, and one more thing:

Because these folks are the best.

#SicEm. I’m sure I missed a few things despite my best efforts, so throw them in the comments!