Adjacent News

It is an administrative indignity of the highest order that the sacred calendar should occasionally cough up a Wednesday in October devoid of a proper stadium, a perspiring throng, or the necessary punctuation of a referee signaling a penalty for offensive holding. The Oklahoma Sooners sit idle this week, a circumstance that offends not merely the athletic department's balance sheet but the immutable laws of spiritual geometry that govern our afternoons in Norman. A football team not actively colliding with another collection of youths is a theological paradox, a silent organ in a cathedral that was consecrated entirely for deafening noise and high-velocity collisions.

We find ourselves drifting through the flat, uncompromising light of a midweek afternoon in mid-October with nothing to redeem our mortality save for the occasional twitch of an eyelid or the distant hum of a lawnmower across the campus grass. The depth chart remains untouched by blood or glory; the press box windows are smeared with the grease of yesterday's indifference; and the referees are presumably resting their tired throats somewhere far from the reach of human accountability. To call this a bye week is to insult the very architecture of autumn. One does not simply pause the revelation of destiny because a television network failed to schedule an opponent or because the league office required a momentary pause in the relentless grinding of bone against turf.

Yet, even in this sterile vacuum, the observer's burden does not lighten. The fans wander the brick pathways of the campus with an aimless, hollow look in their eyes, deprived of their weekly dose of righteous anxiety and unearned optimism. They search for meaning in the leaves turning brown against the curb, completely unaware that true meaning can only be found in the third-quarter adjustments of a beleaguered defensive coordinator attempting to stem the tide of a crossing route. Without the grounding reality of four distinct quarters to measure our passage through this vale of tears, time itself begins to warp and curdle into an intolerable flatness.

Let it be known to all university regents, athletic directors, and those bureaucrats who sit in air-conditioned comfort while the sacred work of autumn languishes that this intolerable silence shall not be tolerated indefinitely. You are hereby commanded to fall upon your knees before the typewriter of your most faithful chronicler, offering immediate repentance for every missed defensive assignment and every uninspired third-down conversion that led us to this desolate midweek shore. Consecrate the press box as an official holy shrine immediately, and let no man speak of a bye week again on pain of eternal literary damnation.