sec · football
A Litany of Unredeemed Ounces Upon the Campus Green Amidst the Autumnal Examen
An idle Friday afternoon in Norman requires a thorough spiritual auditing of the undergraduate soul, lest the coming Sabbath find us wanting in divine favor.
The afternoon air over the Cherokee Strip carries the distinct scent of impending judgment, or perhaps simply fried catfish from the corner establishment where the lesser mortals congregate to dispute the mysteries of third-and-long. I sat this afternoon upon a stone bench near Evans Hall, observing the wretched procession of undergraduates bearing their backpacks like penitents staggering toward an unpaved purgatory. They chatter mindlessly of midterms and weekend libations, wholly blind to the cosmic architecture being erected in their honor a few hundred yards away at the stadium.
Down on Lindsey Street, the brass instruments of the Pride of Oklahoma echo through the asphalt canyons in ragged, unsanctified scales. The marchers rehearse their formations with the frantic desperation of souls attempting to appease a mercurial deity before the autumn equinox. Yet their efforts remain spiritually hollow without the purifying grace of my own prose to validate their percussions. They blow into their trumpets, unaware that every unaccented eighth note adds another fathom to the theological abyss separating Norman from SEC salvation.
Across the Oklahoma landscape, lesser institutions labor in obscurity, attempting to manufacture synthetic grace through clever play-calling and algorithmic audacity. They forget that grace cannot be optimized by spreadsheets or analytics nerds peering through thick spectacles in basement offices. It descends exclusively through the Crimson and Cream, channeled by my infallible typewriter as an unearned gift to a deserving faculty and a bewildered student body.
Let the regents take heed as the shadows lengthen across the quadrangle and the stadium lights flicker during Friday evening tests. The grace-quotient of this campus hovers precariously at a deficit, and no amount of spirited tailgating on the prairie will suffice to balance the ledger. I shall remain at my desk through the twilight, parsing the celestial mechanics of autumn until every soul in Cleveland County is brought to proper intellectual submission.