Derek Does Dallas

I've been absent as your humble scribe for a few days now because I went up to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex for the weekend with friend and colleague Jaime for what he appropriately described at Cyber Hacienda thusly (and do stay over at his blog to check out today's post on the stupid "hotblooded Latino/a" cliche):

[The weekend was] a win-win for the sport enthusiast/history geek. It's almost a fantasy weekend for us, especially since he is getting married soon and I have a second child on the way. Such trips will be fewer and farther in between.

The weekend was a lot of fun, if a bit exhausting. We flew in Friday night, and after getting ourselves a bit lost in Denton, Texas (we found our bearings after stopping at a Jack in the Box, which can really solve any problem) but eventually settled in to our Radisson directly across from the football stadium at the University of North Texas. Odds are you've not heard of it (It is Mean Joe Greene's alma mater, and as a consequence the nickname of the sports teams is the "Mean Green") and yet just to show that Texas is simply bigger than most places, UNT has 31,000+ students who attend school on campus. It has several PhD programs, including one in history. And of course UNT is far from Texas' largest university. In any case, we stayed in Denton, about 45 miles or so north of Dallas, because we had a day-long conference on teaching history through biography at the university on Saturday.

The highlights of the weekend came on Saturday afternoon and evening, when we went to the Rangers-Angels game, saw the home team win by a half dozen (12-6) on a night when the Angels' Chone Figgins hit for the cycle. We arrived early enough to catch some batting practice, to wander the stadium thoruoughly, and to get a few pictures with a mariachi band that showed up for Hispanic Celebration Day at the Ballpark at Arlington. From there we enjoyed some North Texas shenanigans.

Sunday was geared toward the nationally-televised Cowboys-Redskins night game at Texas Stadium. Redskins-Cowboys is one of the great rivalries in the NFL, a league with a dispropotionate amount of great rivalries, so I will not drink the "best rivalry in football" Kool Aid that fans of both teams were selling last night. (Cleveland-Pittsburgh and Green Bay-Chicago are at least two that I would argue are as intense.) But it is true that 'Boys-'Skins is a serious event, especially when both teams believe themselves to be playoff-worthy, as both teams do this year. It is increasingly clear that the NFC East was vastly overrated coming into the season, but it will be a competitive conference because all four teams are similarly mediocre.

I hate the Redskins and am a big fan of Drew Bledsoe based on his Patriots years and how he handled the potentially divisive situation with Tom Brady in 2001, so I appropriated the Cowboys last night. ("When in Rome . . .") The Cowboys kicked the Redskins all over the turf last night, which did not show a lot of signs of the saturation that it faced in the hours leading up to the game as a result of torrential rains that wreaked havoc throughout the Metroplex. Bledsoe looked great (There are a lot of good Cowboys fans; there are also a lot of morons. Every time Bledsoe threw -- wisely -- a pass out of bounds rather than force something, and every time his receivers dropped the ball -- something that happened a lot -- some morons behind me would call out for Tony Romo, a savior in the mind of many despite the inconvenient fact that Romo has never thrown a pass in a game that counted.) and despite enough penalties, drops, and general screups to make Bill Parcells say after the game that his team's performance made him "sick," the Cowboys simply pounded the Redskins, who scored their only touchdown on a Rock Cartwright 100-yard kickoff return. Meanwhile, Terrell Owens' (mis)adventures continue, as he dropped three passes, though we later discovered that he broke his hand early on. (Broken hand or no, you have to think that the dropped passes, and especially the dropped touchdown in the first quarter, buy Bledsoe a little bit of insulation from Owens' notoriously sour treatment toward quarterbacks whom he perceives as having failed him. It will be awfully tough for Owens to exercise his petulence against Bledsoe this season after that performance last night.) The fans in the stands had fun with the Redskins loyalists who braved ramshackle Texas Stadium, particularly in the fourth quarter when the Cowboys opened up the 17-point lead that proved the margin of victory.

5:30 this morning came awfully early, but the upside was that I somehow managed to get back in time (well, five minutes late) for my 9:00 class this morning. I am dragging now and have to survive a graduate seminar tonight. I think I need a weekend to recover from my weekend, but it was well worth it.