Tag Archives: University of Texas

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Durant exhibits true class

Basketball experts — real and/or imagined — are debating today whether Kevin Durant or LeBron James should be the National Basketball Association’s Most Valuable Player for the 2013-14 season.

I’m not one of them. I’ll just go with Durant, who has been named MVP for the season that has yet to be completed.

The former University of Texas star who’s been lighting it up for the Oklahoma City Thunder has demonstrated a quality not always visible among today’s professional athletes.

He is truly humble and grateful for those who helped him along the way.

Take a look at the video of Durant accepting the MVP award. He thanked his family, his boyhood friends. But he saved his greatest accolade for his mother, who watched her celebrated son with tears streaming down her face.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/05/07/nba_mvp_kevin_durant_my_mom_is_the_real_mvp.html

Kevin Durant won the scoring title this year for the NBA. He’s led his team into the playoffs once again. He’s become the star every expert said he’d become.

He also has shown that celebrity status and adulation need not diminish one’s strength of character.

Well done, Kevin Durant. You’ve made your mom proud. That’s the most important achievement of all.

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Now, let the new UT football coach do his job

With all due respect to the mega-millions of dollars that Red McCombs has made in his life, he needs to stick to selling cars.

The University of Texas booster big shot has criticized the selection of Charlie Strong as the next University of Texas head football coach. Fine. McCombs is entitled to his opinion.

http://msn.foxsports.com/southwest/story/booster-on-texas-hiring-strong-kick-in-the-face-010714

But the university has a highly paid athletic director, Steve Patterson, and a staff of football experts/gurus who know a thing or two about the game. Charlie Strong comes to Texas from the University of Louisville, where he presided over another pretty good football program.

The Longhorns program remains one of the Cadillac programs out there for any coach to lead. Strong looks like a winner. I’ve read he’s an old-school coach, meaning he expects his players to behave themselves on and off the field. I also take the description to mean that he wants his student-athletes to be students as well as athletes, meaning that he expects them to study hard and earn their degree.

McCombs said he is unhappy with the selection process that brought Strong to Austin. He doesn’t think Strong is head coach material, that he’d make a good assistant or a coordinator.

Interesting. McCombs’s expertise comes from where? His ownership of professional sports franchises? Did he play a little ball himself when he was in school?

He’s given lots of money to UT, which I guess means he’s more entitled than most folks to express an opinion about who the school hires to coach its football team.

I’m going to rely on the judgment of the actual experts in this kind of work.

I’m guessing Coach Strong is going to do just fine.