Dear Opponent: West Virginia

Each week, we send a letter to that week’s opponent, just to let them know we are thinking about them before the game. This Saturday, TCU will play West Virginia, in Morgantown, at 11:00 am Central Time

Photo: © Ben Queen-USA TODAY Sports

This work of epistolary comedy is dedicated to the KillerFrogs Fan Forum Literary Review Board. 

With love, 

T.

DISCLAIMER: THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN WRITTEN FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY; ANY ATHLETIC WISDOM OR INSIGHT OR KNOWLEDGEABILITY THEREIN, NOT DIRECTLY QUOTED BY MY COLLEAGUES, IS NOT ONLY PURELY ACCIDENTAL BUT UNFORTUNATE.

"I have come here to chew bubblegum and talk trash.  And I'm all out of bubblegum." 

--"Rowdy" Roddy Piper (slightly amended)

Dear Mounties,

I am writing this with the utmost trepidation.  Fear grips my hand, has near paralyzed my fingers.  They weigh heavily as stones, the keys clang like cannons, sweat clogs my pores and I wear my skin as thick as a cement cloak, wet and heavy, molding me into a verbose, lachrymose statue.  

Friends from West Virginia, your reputation precedes you.  I recognize I am addressing the absolute finest institution of higher learning in the nation--nay, the world--and that every misplaced modifier and botched subject-verb agreement, every infelicity and solecism, will be noted by your entire highly dignified readership.  It is not lost on me that you attend a school in which the average student boasts a 150 IQ, with SAT scores that are not so much off the charts as unchartable.  You come from a legendary land of genius and sophistication, turning out by the thousand Renaissance men and women who rival the greatest luminaries of the Enlightenment.  Whenever one of your graduates pens an essay on quantum mechanics, Einstein weeps.  When he or she writes a poem, Shakespeare rises from the grave in utter despair, demanding that every play, including Lear, be hurled into the nearest fire, en masse.  As for your philosophy, Kant has gone extinct, much to the relief of poor philosophy undergrads everywhere.   

Nor is the genius of your mascot lost on me.  Far from the backwoods simian some less discerning commentators would traduce, he is an absolute masterwork of irony:  a humble polymath completely representative of Emersonian self-reliance and Thoreauean manliness, who rises at dawn to scratch off two sonnets and a villanelle, maintains his cabin till the afternoon, hunts down bears escaped from the Waco Zoo with his barehands till dinnertime, the remains upon which he feeds, and retires in the evening with books on all subjects, in all languages, finally falling to sleep on a bed he carpentered himself.

Having said that, Davy Crockett is a Texas hero, born in Tennessee.  Were you the Tennessee Mountaineers, I would offer no protest.  But seeing as West Virginia is hundreds of miles from Crockett’s Tennessee birthplace, I'm afraid this constitutes a base violation of a Texas hero's Name/Image/Likeness, an issue I will return to in this letter's postscript.  I'm surprised your Brandeis-quality legal students did not spot this oversight.  But, as Alexander Pope says, "even Homer nods."  

And in addition to your school's academic pedigree, you boast a legendary football team.  

Considering your current record of three wins and four losses, many TCU fans might be under the impression you are not very good this year.  But I know better and am hip to your football team's ingenious strategy.  Recognizing you aren't currently quite what you once were, the CFP slightly out of your grasp, rather than battle it out for scraps, you would prefer to lie low, waiting for the exact unsuspecting team before you strike--as you did with Baylor.  That particular team began the season ranked No. 1 in the Big 12 (though why exactly, and by whom, exactly, remains to me a complete and total mystery).  You recognized the absurdity of that ranking, hunkered down, took a couple deliberate and polite losses, and dealt the deadly blow when the opportune time arose.  You belong to an age of college football predating the multimillions, the high-gloss uniforms and Kirk Herbstreit circle jerks in which the fact you won is less important than whom you beat.  

And now it is TCU meeting you in your venerable home.  Our boys are on a seven game high; we're going to be playing in a much cooler environment, with a different altitude.  You are aware of the fact; you are prepared.  I have my fears that an Ali/Foreman-style upset could be awaiting us, you taking your time, keeping cool, us hitting hard and getting winded.  In short, I suspect you are playing possum, of which centuries of experience have made you experts.  

And what could be more glorious for you than to say you handed TCU its first loss?  

As we both know, and as your formidable philosophers maintain, there is one inexorable, underlying law of all human experience, and its name is irony.  For TCU to lose to West Virginia would be the jewel in the crown of your understated season, a meta-ethical triumph in which the intellectual values of your school and athletic performance meet.  

But I've exposed your strategy.  

And now we'll win.  

Glad to get that out of the way.  

I look forward to a civil and highly intellectual contest of athleticism such as hasn't been witnessed by the Western world since the Ancient Olympic games of the 8th century BC.  

Tout a toi, 

SI 

P.S., relative to the fact that you have shamelessly plagiarized Davy Crockett's Image and Likeness, on behalf of the TCU/Texas Heritage Coalition and the TCU/Alamo Preservation Project, in consideration of the prestige and notoriety of the person in question, I demand that you send $100,000,000, payable to Sports Ignoramus, to Ye Olde Bull and Bush on Montgomery (76107).  In the event that this considerable amount is too excessive for your convenience, I am willing to settle with half if you are willing to help the KillerFrogs Fan Forum Literary Board learn how to read.  Be warned:  it's a considerable task that might not be worth the money.  Also:  they bark. 

P.P.S., I will always love you for beating those Bores from Waco. 

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