Mike Finger

Aggies create another big moment without rising to meet it | Finger

The metaphor, like so many others in sports, has been overused and bastardized into complete meaninglessness. When Jerry Jones repeatedly says he’s “all-in” this Dallas Cowboys off-season, it has nothing to do with the original poker definition, in literal terms or even in spirit. Jones isn’t really talking about boldness. He isn’t talking about betting every chip he has. And he certainly isn’t talking about facing the consequences if his hand isn’t good enough. But if he ever could say, “I’m al…

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Rodney Terry will have a summer to clean up all the turnovers, and a year to draw up a better play. The next time Texas needs a basket to extend its season, it probably won’t opt for a contested fadeaway 3-pointer from the corner with 10 seconds to spare. But something else will change, too, and how Terry reacts to it figures to define the next phase of the Longhorns’ program. Saturday night, in a 62-58 second-round NCAA tournament loss to Tennessee, he was depending on good pl…

NEW ORLEANS — Fourteen years later, there will be no what-ifs this time. The starting quarterback will stay in the game. The freshman backup will stay on the sideline. As Garrett Gilbert can tell Arch Manning, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Fourteen years later, the gargantuan defensive tackle who disrupts the whole evening will play for Texas instead of against it. To pull this off, T’Vondre Sweat doesn’t need to crush the shoulder of a Heisman Trophy finalist. But he can make Michael Peni…

NEW ORLEANS — Sooner or later, Quinn Ewers was going to turn and look over his shoulder, just like everybody always expected him to do. When he finally did it Saturday morning, he saw the most popular backup quarterback in America, surrounded by the largest media throng in the Superdome, hanging on the kid’s every word. Shouldn’t this have bothered the starter, especially one who’s long heard rumblings about who might replace him? Wasn’t it enough to make a guy second-guess himself, just a coupl…

Let’s say Texas A&M hires UTSA’s football coach. Let’s say the Aggies make Jeff Traylor an offer, and let’s say he accepts it. Let’s say the Roadrunners then have to find a replacement, knowing that the next time a program with unlimited resources and national championship aspirations wants to find the next big thing, UTSA might get raided again. Before we get into anything else, can we just take a second to appreciate how amazing that is? Before we start talking about loyalty, or about non-deni…

Texas A&M is about to pay an ineffective football coach about $77 million to stay home, and there is no moral justification for it. But there are some bright sides. For the Aggies, the bright side is that they’ll never have to reckon with any uncomfortable truths. Money got them out of this mistake, just like money will get them out of the next one, so they can go right on believing they’re still just one big check away from a national title. Eight underwhelming decades suggest otherwise, but he…

AUSTIN — Steve Sarkisian hasn’t made his College Football Playoff case yet. A few days after he crowed about having “the best win in the country,” his Texas team nearly offered up one of the season’s most inexplicable losses. A Longhorn blowing a 20-point lead on national TV? People hadn’t seen that since the first time Kevin Durant played Victor Wembanyama. But on Saturday afternoon at Royal-Memorial Stadium, Sarkisian and company managed the kind of escape that UT’s highest-profile basketball…

PHOENIX – At my parents’ house there is a framed snapshot of a 4-year-old boy in a recliner. He’s barely big enough to sit on the cushion without falling off of it, and his outstretched arms are holding open a San Antonio Express sports section almost as tall as he is. It’s hard to tell from the picture, but there’s a decent chance he’s reading the agate page, where the Major League Baseball standings ran each day. The first time the boy scanned the list of teams and asked which one he should ro…

PHOENIX – Victor Wembanyama isn’t Kevin Durant yet. Thus far in the kid’s NBA career, he has not let a defender rip the ball away from him while protecting a late lead, nor has he misfired on a potential game-winner. In the final six seconds at Footprint Center on Tuesday, Durant did both. But even as Wembanyama reveled in the afterglow of his team’s second chaotic victory in a week, he knew better than to believe he’d outplayed one of his idols. Up close, for the first time, he saw how a skinny…