By GIL LeBRETON
glebreton@star-telegram.com
Tell me again why I am driving to Dallas — and not Arlington — on Saturday morning to watch Texas and Oklahoma play football.
Oh, right. The corn dogs. The "magic" of the State Fair. The $150 towing fee that you pay after that lot you parked in turned out to be somebody’s barber shop.
It’s going to be a memorable football game, no doubt, Saturday’s annual border scrum between the Sooners and Longhorns. The big shirts at UT Inc., have publicly steered clear of calling it a revenge match, after last season’s tiebreaker controversy. But between the Longhorns’ BCS angst and Sam Bradford’s Heisman, there are enough storylines simmering just below the surface to command the nation’s attention.
Of course, with an 11 a.m. Saturday kickoff, who’s there to fight for attention? SpongeBob SquarePants?
Texas quarterback Colt McCoy was asked this week to describe the annual Red River Rivalry showdown.
"It’s really awesome," McCoy said. "It’s a tremendous feeling, understanding all the tradition that comes with the game — like playing it at a neutral site. It’s a big game."
He was talking about the annual walk through the Cotton Bowl tunnel. The two teams, emerging from their 77-year-old locker rooms to the smell of ... State Fair chicken-fried bacon.
Ah, tradition.
And don’t forget the people, my UT and OU friends always say. Half the stadium is rooting for Texas, and half the stadium is cheering for OU.
Gee. You mean like every other football game in the country played at a neutral site?
Tradition!
I don’t claim to understand Dallas city politics. Fortunately. But somebody needs to explain how they can ignore potholes and let the Dallas Cowboys slip away, and then turn around and dump $50 million into cosmetic upgrades for a stadium whose time has passed.
The makeover added 16,100 seats. And some new toilets.
Tradition!
A short way down the turnpike, of course, sits the finest billion-dollar stadium ever built by man. You won’t smell any chicken-fried bacon, but Jerry Jones will sell you a $60 pizza.
If the Arlington fire marshal agrees to look the other way, Jones could probably squeeze 110,000 of those equally divided UT-OU fans into his new stadium. Some, admittedly, would have to stand, but here’s a bet:
All 110,000 would be dry and cheering at room temperature by the opening kickoff.
The old Cotton Bowl’s concrete environs can’t guarantee that. It can’t even guarantee a reasonably convenient parking space.
Sooners and Longhorns fans swear by the old stadium’s friendly sight lines, and they are partly right about that. But the new Cowboys Stadium features the ultimate sight line — the 160-foot-wide video board hanging right over the playing field. It makes the Godzillatron at Royal-Memorial Stadium look like the bedroom Sony.
The annual meeting of Texas and Oklahoma has been staged in Dallas continuously since 1929, and it’s understandable that old habits die hard. But stadiums come and go. Even the New York Yankees felt the time had come to say goodbye to the ghosts of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.
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