Tilting at Windmills

We’ve been quiet here on TaW about Sergio Kindle’s drunken rampage through Austin’s west campus for one reason only: I’ve been on vacation.

Not the kind of vacation Sergio likes to take where he’s rolling with his boys at 2 a.m. (admittedly), drunk (allegedly), careens his ride into some girl’s west campus apartment (admittedly), flees the scene (admittedly), has his boys help extricate the car and push it down the street so hopefully nobody will notice (admittedly) and waits 8 hours to call anybody and own up to it (admittedly).

No, I was on the kind of vacation that involves lots of sand, water and a roller girl offering to do the dishes. I’ll save that for another post, though.

Kindle, penciled in at starting defensive end for the Horns this fall, was already on TaW’s Texas All-Garbage team for a 2007 DWI. At the time, Mack Brown showed a lot of sack (or at least as much as he has) when he said the matter would be handled appropriately:

“We’re aware of Sergio’s situation and are disappointed anytime one of our players is accused of wrongdoing,” Texas head coach Mack Brown said in a statement. “We take a strong stance against drinking and driving and will thoroughly investigate this situation.”

Mack manned up and suspended Sergio for three games – Arkansas State, TCU and Central Florida. Mack has some delicious suspension choices on this year’s schedule with Lousyana-Monroe, Wyoming and UTEP all looking like nice Kindle-less candidates. Let’s see what kind of a “strong stance” Mack takes this time around.

The kicker here is easy, though: Kindle should be in fucking jail. Don’t quote me some bullshit Texas statute that says if you flee the scene of a property damage accident, all you have to do is leave a fucking note. If you’re not a star defensive end/linebacker at the University of Texas, APD is going to put you in jail for that little stunt, seeing as how you already have a drunk driving citation on your jacket. That’s common fucking sense.

What really happened that night? Well, internet anonymity aside, as an Intertubes message board veteran of almost 15 years, I’ve learned to smell bullshit from random posters. A person claiming to be a west campus resident who saw the aftermath sounds legit, though. You’ll have to scroll about halfway down the page to read the entirety, but here’s the main part you’re looking for:

His lawyer claims “his left front tire struck the curb, causing him to lose control. What the lawyer probably does NOT know is that the left hand side of the street is always packed (and was that night) with parked cars.

Sergio managed to drive through an area where there was no curb until about 5 feet before the wall he struck, because it was the driveway for the Jefferson West garage.

There is no way he could have hit the curb with his left front tire, unless he is referring to hitting the curb when he was already careening into the wall at 30mph.

I distinctly heard two screeches separated by about 1 second, then a loud crash. I, and most other people who live along the road, came out on their balconies to look at this spectacle. A large silver sedan (Grand Marquis?) with maybe 24″ or 26″ chrome rims, and I think airbag suspension (it made a loud hiss when they finally pushed it down the curb).

Sergio got out of his car, got down on his hands and knees, spitting blood on the ground (you can still see it) yelling “MY LIFE IS OVER,” likely a reference to how this could be/was a second offense to his DWI two years ago. He then slammed the back of the car, and got in to try to start it. No dice, that car was dead. One of his passengers said “Serg, calm down! No one is HERE yet. NO ONE KNOWS YOU DID THIS.” Sergio continued to freak out, understandably, then they got their stuff together, and pushed the car out of the wall, and up the road. I couldn’t see what happened after that, but apparently they abandoned the vehicle about two blocks north.

Our love-hate friends over at Barking Carnival got cute and decided to go take some pictures of the scene, concluding “meh, no big deal.” It looks like when they got there, workers were just beginning and all that showed was a little hobbit hole. Well, we at TaW did our own investigative work:

Does that shit look minor to you?

Kindle’s jock-sniffing lawyer, Brian Roark, of course says his client did the right thing by calling the apartment complex the next morning and owning up to it – instead of doing it immediately like anybody else would … if they were sober.

“He knew he was hurt at the time and that he needed to go home and go to bed.”

Read: He needed to sleep it off.

It’s almost like they teach a class at Belmont on what to do if you’re busted or think you’re going to get busted for DUI – not a bad idea considering the Horns’ string of arrests in the past 3-4 years. Even worse, UT thugs are now progressing from simply kicking in coed’s doors looking for a stolen TV (allegedly) to actually driving right into their bedrooms.

"I didn't need no car. Serge is a pussy."

Kindle says he’ll pay for the estimated $8,700 in damages himself, admitting fault in the matter. Seriously, does this smell right to anybody else outside of the 40 Acres? Who’s going to replace all of the property inside the apartment that he destroyed?

He knows he’s damned lucky that:

a. Neither 21-year-old Ashley Zapata, nor anybody else was home, nor did he injure anybody (allegedly) except himself.
b. His boys had the foresight to help him move his car down the street, probably recalling the lessons learned from the DUI-avoidance classes the UT AD supplies (allegedly).
c. The Texas criminal statute is so poorly written that he might just escape on a loophole the size of the hole he put in the apartment.

The complex is also moving Ashley and her roommate to another apartment, which given that the girl is inconvenienced and no doubt has some emotional trauma thanks to a drunk, fuckup football player, may skirt the line of a minor NCAA violation.

Ask yourself this, too: how many of us (myself included) who have daughters would be taking Kindle, UT and all of Kindle’s boys who helped him cover this up to the civil suit woodshed over the incident? Does anybody seriously think that’s not going to happen?

I’m not going to take one iota of Horn-fan’s moral righteousness over shit this year, either (not that I really ever have). No doubt we’ll see Sergio in the Cotton Bowl in October and, barring curbs, last calls or buildings, he’s talented enough to have a good game against the Sooners.

Don’t worry about whether or not he and Mack are going to catch a ration of shit for it that day, though: my seats are two rows above the tunnel. I’ve got this one.

You know bias when you see it.

Being an unabashed, biased OU homer, I’m qualified to point out fellow spades. There are times when it’s OK to be a homer … you’re getting paid by a university/team/organization and you naturally want to cater to your meal ticket; your make your living elsewhere, but your livelihood depends on you being a unbelievably ignorant, obnoxious homer (holla James Hale, Robert Allen and Geoff Ketchum); your best friend’s girlfriend wants to know where your bud has been spending his weekday nights, and you feign ignorance with the daintiest “bros before hos” tap-dancing you can, careful not to offend so much that she decides not to hook you up with her twin, augmented, morally-loose friends who “do everything together” and say they like short, pasty white guys that like to air-guitar when they drive.

Here are two fresh examples of biases that this Dude just could not abide:

1. Mack Brown is apparently claiming another Big 12 title he did not earn. Added to the collection of co-Big 12 South championship rings is now a claim to a share of the 2008 Big 12 championship. The irreverent Red Dirt Kings dug up these tasty nugs from a UT recruiting video (thanks for letting me post swipe them, fellas):

I pretty much know I’m right about OU actually winning the conference championship, but just to make sure, I guess I better go rewatch a.) the Big 12 championship game where OU cockpunched Mizzou, and; b.) the last 2 minutes of the UT-Tech game.

But we’ll let this one go, I guess, because it’s laughable and because it’s OK to be biased towards Texas if you’re Mack Brown. That’s his job.

2. Two college basketball gurus over at Rivals think there are two coaches in the country right now doing a better job than our Jeff Capel. Fine, those guys get paid to write shit and call it an opinion, who am I to stomp on their livelihood. However, the one that caught my eye was Jason King’s dubbing Bill Self as coach of the year.

Still, somehow, Kansas is 20-5 overall and 9-1 in the Big 12, where it trails undefeated Oklahoma by 1.5 games in the standings. If the Jayhawks take care of business as expected and defeat Iowa State and Nebraska at home this week, they’ll play the Sooners on Feb. 23 in a game that could determine the league’s regular-season championship.

Win or lose against Oklahoma, Self’s efforts this season will be remembered as nothing short of masterful.

Ok, now this is just asinine (and before the Texas fans want to bring up Thayer Evans, save it – you made your points, too). Nevermind that Kansas lost to a 9-14 (they were a blistering 2-6 at the time) UMass team in Kansas City. How about losing to an Arizona team that’s in the middle of the Yak-10 and had just lost to A&M a couple of weeks earlier. Losing at Michigan State? Ok, the Spartans are pretty good, you can have that one. Losing to Mizzou on the road? Another good team, but you need to beat your rivals to go anywhere in this league.

What really galled me was the obvious bias. It’s commendable that King wrote Kansas Jayhawks – A Year to Remember. I even like his cutesy autograph gif he puts on the site, that’s a keeper. But don’t give me Bill freaking Self over Jeff Capel when …

Jason King has been considered the leading source for Kansas athletics since he began covering the Jayhawks in 2000. King spent seven years as the KU beat reporter for The Kansas City Star before becoming a national college basketball and football writer for Yahoo! Sports.

This kid and whRon Franklin should sit down and have a glass of warm milk together some day and slap-fight the homer out of each other.

UPDATE: The Carolina Panthers have hired Floyd the Barber as their new defensive line coach. Floyd comes home from the St. Louis Lambs, where he coached the d-line and braided Afros for coaches Scott Linehan and Jim Haslett.

The Sports Animal is reporting that Oklahoma defensive line coach Jackie Shipp has been offered the defensive line job with the Carolina Panthers.

Opie's calling, Jackie

As usual, OU’s Internet sites are sound asleep on this breaking news. The Rivals guys are too busy kissing Geoff Ketchum’s ass to report this story, and over at OU Insider, we have it on inside information their spell-checker locked up on N-F-L.

The league doesn’t fit with Shipp’s professed preference to be a line coach, recruiter and mentor, not to mention heavily-muscled mean mofo. Plus, what kind of a bucktoothed dumbass wants to coach Aunt Bee’s favorite NFL team?

But anything is possible.

Stay tuned.