Are my eyes really blue?

I sat at Cafe Du Monde knocking down beignets and cafe au lait and reading the USA Today, and saw the news that Apple was buying NeXT for $400 million – and bringing Steve Jobs back into the fold as an advisor to the CEO. And I’ve said it before, but I clearly remember thinking “well, this is it. We live or die on this one.”

It was worse than we thought, to be honest. It wasn’t much known, but to some accounts Apple was only 90 days from bankruptcy. The product line was a disaster area – the battery issues with the PowerBook 5300 meant that Apple couldn’t ship a reliable PowerPC laptop two years after the transition began – and there were all kinds of strange dalliances with things like the Pippin game console, or the eWorld online service, or the godawful Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. But looming above everything else was Windows 95 and the fact that Apple was no closer to shipping a next-generation modernized operating system. Pink, Taligent, Copeland – all busts. The general consensus was that Apple would have to buy their new OS from someone else, and that someone was generally assumed to be Jean Louis Gassee’s Be, which already ran natively on PowerPC hardware and brought all kinds of modern features with no legacy cruft.

But Be knew they were in the catbird seat, and they were driving a hard bargain, and when NeXT was on the table, Steve turned on the Reality Distortion Field to the max, and next thing you know, money changed hands and Himself was back. Less than a year later, I’d be making my living off the support of Apple products. I still am. And Apple went from the brink of collapse to the most valuable company on Earth.

It’s going to be important to remember in days to come: you can come back from a hell of a lot.

Some fourteen years ago, back when we were starting the great pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq and people were talking about the next smoking gun being a mushroom cloud, a phrase that ricocheted around the echo chambers of the American right was “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” In other words, we should be prepared to shitcan large chunks of the Bill of Rights – not least the first, fourth, fifth and eight amendments almost in total – because the threat to our national survival was too great for things like enumerated rights and freedoms.

Today, December 19, those same people will argue that the Electoral College formula created in 1787 to gain the assent of slaveholders to the new Constitution is so sacred in 2016 that we must elect the embodiment of weaponized ignorance because the formula says so. This bit must be slavishly followed, because…well, let’s not mince words: because as in 2000, it means partisan advantage in the face of contrary popular will. And if there’s one thing the GOP worships in 2016, it’s partisan advantage.
This is the Southernization of American politics, because the GOP long ago adopted that most critical of Southern framing: us versus them. US is right, forever and always, and THEM is always irredeemably evil. There is no coherence or cohesion to what US believes; the notion of government as jackbooted thugs coexists side by side with Blue Lives Matter police worship. The exact same policies become anathema as soon as the other side adopts them (such as the Heritage health plan from 1994, aka Romneycare, aka Obamacare). 
 
That, and you’re entitled to your own facts. Belief, if you like, because beliefs are stronger than opinions. Conspiracy nonsense is believable, which makes it true, whether it’s the CIA cocaine operation at Mena or the murder of Vince Foster or the fake birth certificate for a Kenyan baby or the pedophile ring run out of a DC pizza joint. No amount of proof is sufficient to demonstrate it’s not true, especially if you believe hard enough. 
 
And that’s the risk. The enemy, as was said so many years ago, isn’t conservatism or liberalism. The enemy is bullshit. Bullshit too plentiful and overwhelming to refute. Bullshit that wins out on volume because it’s too much to beat down every single individual packet of bullshit. The bullshit will always get through, and people who don’t know better – or won’t know better – will fall before it.

Actually, there is coherence and cohesion to the modern GOP belief system: it’s called bullying, and it’s how “Blue Lives Matter” can coexist with the open carry of firearms and how the admiration for a Russian totalitarian can launder the exposure of classified information. The Trumpets who are now trying to read California out of the Union as somehow not really America have it all wrong. Silicon Valley is full of natural Trumpists: people who aren’t aware there are other people who aren’t like them, who are the embodiment of I GOT MINE FUCK YOU, who don’t care that we live in a society. That should have been warning enough for anyone that this was possible. As Uber, so Trump: do what you like and the facts and the law be damned, because your sycophants and worshippers will laud you for it.

And there are plenty of those. The GOP has spent the last 25 years powered by weaponized ignorance fueled with bullshit. It started in the Clinton years with exaggerations, misrepresentations, things that could be explained but if you’re explaining you’re losing. Then it got progressively worse, with lies about things that could be disproved but were complicated to demonstrate. And the bar just kept getting lower and lower until 2016, when the GOP lied constantly about things that could be instantly and trivially disproven – knowing that their base would reject the proof. And because our system can’t cope with shamelessness, we got burned. Badly. The problem is, if you can’t have truth, you can’t have a society. We have to be able to interact truthfully. If we can’t, we don’t have a society.

Donald Trump managed to seize the office of President with a minority of the vote, enabled by foreign powers and the willing collusion of an enabling political party. His win is compromised, his legitimacy is incomplete, and he is owed no more respect than he himself offered his predecessor. In the meantime, we need something we haven’t had before: an Opposition of National Unity, with Democrats and those Republicans willing to disavow their man joining forces to try to limit the damage in the name of what we at least used to think of as our shared values – at a minimum, experience and professionalism and not letting a foreign nuclear power drag us around by the dick. It’s a weak person in charge. You can smell the weakness in every tweet, every lashing out. And weakness in high office usually ends badly.

Because that’s what it’s based on – weakness rooted in fear. Since 2001, fear worship has become the sole organizing principle of the GOP, and their sole pitch is “We can make things go back like they used to be.” Which is a lie, but one that lets them deliver a never-ending series of things preventing that. Until we get rid of all the brown people, all the gay people, all the working women – until then, they’ll always have someone to blame. Someone else, of course, because the hallmark of the Southern GOP is the idea that our side should be immune from the consequences of our actions.

But if we survive this, there must be a reckoning this time. No more kumbaya, no more let-us-reason-together, no more we-want-to-look-forward. A completely unqualified person has been made President. Republicans let this happen and made this happen. This time, we have to correct those who made the mistake. No forgiveness. No forgetting. You fucked up. You pay. You bear the consequences of your actions. For two decades, the GOP has been the party of scaring the shit out of Ed Earl Brown so the one percent can live a life without consequence. If there is to be one mission for the Democrats, let it be this: actions have consequences. Those who did this must be held to account for it.

And in the meantime, I’ll be here, in the most populous state of the Union, the largest economy in the Union, the state that I so often described for better or worse as “where the future comes from”.  The state which – but that’s another post.

It was different being a Star Wars fan in 1979. We knew The Empire Strikes Back was coming. We had Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and the Han Solo novels, none of which were really meant for a juvenile audience. We had Star Wars itself, and the soundtrack double LP, and the storybook version and the comic book version and the novel version (which actually dropped six months before the movie). We had maybe 20 action figures and a half dozen ships. And that was all. 

This was a world without the Internet, without cable TV, without VCRs. If Star Wars wasn’t in the theater, it wasn’t where you could see it. Today, when my niece decides she’s into Star Wars, there are eight feature films and at least two cartoon series and video games and a million toys and a whole Expanded Universe of new material since 1991 even if 90% of it no longer counts. If you want more story, they’ll give it to you no questions asked. 

We didn’t have that. At all. If you wanted more Star Wars, you were reliant on your imagination. If you wanted to know how the stole the plans or how Darth Vader returned or what happened next, you had to make it up. That’s why Empire was so huge in 1980, and why The Force Awakens was the event of a lifetime last year. In both cases, it was something we had never anticipated having: more. This is what happens next. 

Rogue One is different, in a way. It’s an experiment. It’s a bet that you can branch off the main story of the saga and tell some ancillary stories. It’s a story that basically takes place in the first two paragraphs of the opening crawl of Star Wars. In a lot of ways, it’s the prequel we wanted: not a lot of wittering about, all taking place a generation earlier, but an immediate how-did-we-get-to-the-skies-over-Tattooine story. The same Rebel base, the same political environment, the same fashion and wardrobe, the same design aesthetic as 1977. It’s a nostalgia play as much as The Force Awakens, but in a different way. 

So here we go. Reviews are mixed, but enthusiasm is high, and we’ll soon have another piece of new canonical feature film – something  I would have sworn in 1990 or 2012 that we’d never see again. And I’ll be there at 7 PM tomorrow, and for a couple of hours, in every way a 44 year old can be, I’ll be six again. 

The MacBook Pro 13-inch, Late 2016, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports finally landed on my desk at work yesterday. 24 hours in, I think I have it imaged and sorted more or less the way I want it. Close enough for not-for-profit enterprise IT work, anyway. Thoughts so far:

* My previous laptop was a 13-inch MacBook Air from 2012, which was STRUGGLING to the point I had left it permanently parked on my desk and replaced with a first-gen MacBook (12”, Core M) – which is the blogger’s delight but is useless for actually doing enterprise IT work of any kind. This is basically the scale of the 13” MacBook Pro Retina which I should have been using all along.

* The battery life thing may really be a problem. But in fairness, the first 24 hours are no time to gauge the battery life of a new device. There are backups restoring, files transferring, setups executing in the background – best to wait two or three days before you judge.

* My wife, who would rather sing Trumpets of Troy than take her hands off the keyboard, is the perfect use case for the TouchBar. It gives you the power to switch between tabs or pick between multiple dialog box buttons with a single tap. Me, with my four-finger typing style and left hand riding high on the keyboard? I keep hitting the ESC key by accident. And not even hitting the ESC key, hitting the TouchBar to the left of it, which nevertheless registers as an ESC touch. NOT COOL.

* The keyboard in general seems better than the one on the MacBook, which was shallow and weird. I like having the larger keys much better than the high separated chiclets on the MacBook Air. I still feel like it misses keystrokes if you go too fast, though – I’ve had to retype my password more than once on several occasions.

* It didn’t pick up on the Apple Watch despite my setting up iCloud, so I will probably be relying on the TouchID button for fast login. This is not a problem for now, but could be one once it’s running closed with an external KVM setup (I have a Magic Touchpad and wireless keyboard on order, along with the string of adapters necessary to get my 30” Apple Cinema Display working on it). The login shibboleth of the Apple Watch is one of the few things usefully separating it from a Fitbit Charge, so I kind of need that functionality.

* I haven’t owned or used a personal laptop in I don’t know how long. I took everything off my work laptop long ago and staffed the iTunes syncing out to the home desktop machine, and have used an iPad as my home “laptop” for the last four and a half years (amazing to think we are almost seven years out from the original iPad launch). I’ll be interested to see the extent to which I find myself doing things on here instead – but other than blogging, I don’t know what that would be.

The first viable smartwatch is no more. Pebble, which became the one proof that maybe you could buy hardware through Kickstarter, has been officially eaten by Fitbit, the leader (and in many ways last brand standing) in the fitness-wearable market.

This is a software deal, mostly, and in its way it makes sense: Pebble has the only platform-agnostic smartwatch worth mentioning. Fitbit is the only largely-successful maker of wearable fitness devices, to the point of becoming almost Kleenex-esque; makers like Withings and Jawbone and even Nike have found their space diminished (in Nike’s case, to the point of giving up and throwing in their lot with Apple). Only Fitbit seems to be having any success, much like only Apple seems to have any traction left in the “smartwatch” space now that even Motorola has chosen not to ship a new device to go with Android Watch 2.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s probably a good match. Fitbit’s hardware is generally well-regarded, while the Pebble was at least an existence proof that a smartwatch could be a viable product. Combine the two and you can come up with a fitness tracker that’s at least capable of more than just ringing and showing you have an incoming text, potentially. Even if Fitbit isn’t interested in going much beyond the notifications, they could at least use Pebble for a richer slice of “next event and who’s calling”.  Given that the smartwatch market isn’t going much of anywhere, a Pebbit (Fibble?) might have a longer runway than either would have separately.

But ultimately, the market isn’t at a point where Ed Earl Brown needs something on his wrist to tell him his phone beeped. I get good use out of my Apple Watch to prompt me to fill those three rings every day – and to use the Breathe app to try to get my heart rate down without eating more Xanax, and for the glance-ability of time and temperature and next appointment – but I’ve repeatedly demonstrated that if I don’t actually have it, I get by just fine with the watch I bought myself for my 40th birthday that I anticipate lasting the rest of my life. Smartwatches may just turn out to be another shibboleth for people with more money than sense.

Of which.

* It’s always strange going back through December posts. It’s clear that I started to really sour on the direction this country was taking in 2010, and reading on into 2011 it seems like we’ve been on track to get where we are now for quite some time – but I’m trying not to think about that. Instead, I look at things like how I finally splashed out on the Navy surplus peacoat in December 2010. I love it, it’s a big wearable horse blanket of a thing – but I don’t get a lot of chances to wear it. If I’m lucky, November through mid-February, and maybe two weeks in January if I’m not lucky. But it looks right on me somehow. It feels right on me somehow. It’s exactly the coat I needed back in the era of “wear big heavy coat to work, take it off because the heat is turned up to 76 in the office”.

* In 2008, Vanderbilt limped to the finish line of a 6-6 season by losing to UT and Wake. In 2011, they won their sixth game on the road against Wake to make a bowl happen. In 2012 and 2013, a bowl was locked up before time to slice the turkey. And way back in 2005, they beat UT on the road – but only to get to 5 wins.  Something has shifted in the last decade or so with Vanderbilt; the baseline expectation has grown to 5 or 6 rather than 3 or 4. And it’s achievable; we’ve beaten UT 3 of the last 5 and gone to five bowls (counting this season) in the last decade after going to three in history before that. The bar has moved ever so slightly, and even if it’s only enough to get us to the Iowa State level, it’s a positive sign for the future of the program. Now’s the time to raise money and invest even more in it, because we have the existence proof that 6 wins is reproducible in a non-Brigadoon setting. Sustainable? Maybe, maybe not. More sustainable with stadium renovations and facility upgrades? Maybe.

* I’d like to welcome the rest of the country to the search for American manufacturing. It’s over here behind my new shipments of Flint & Tinder boxers and American Giants slubby black T-shirts and LC King Pointer Brand jeans. With the acquisition of the workout shorts and finding the two old short-sleeve button-ups to go with the polos and hula shirts, I daresay I’m just about set to possibly wear an all-American wardrobe at any time (so long as I stay in California with its standards of dress). I even have that Moto X, for as long as it lasts (not long, the way it performs, but still). I’ve had my money where my mouth is for longer than Google kept it there.

* I got the Kindle in 2010, I think, and the iPad mini was bought on Boxing Day 2013. The Kindle gave up the ghost a couple of months ago, but that iPad keeps chugging along just fine, able to run iOS 10 and perfectly suitable as a replacement for a personal laptop in every way that matters to me. Given that our corporate turnaround on hardware is three years, the notion that a tablet will do for three-plus is very reassuring – and because it’s a tablet, the battery is big enough that three years worth of wear and tear isn’t as crippling as it is on a smartphone (as that Moto hits three years old and groans under the load of a two year old Android version that doesn’t even get updates anymore).

*Every year at the holidays, I swear that this is the year I cut down on the soda, do more to exercise, try to unplug from the wider world and engage with my local reality rather than disappearing into social media or the like. I think in 2017, I’m going to have to do it for real. I’ve already killed my primary Twitter (and not really missed it at all), I’ve firewalled all the political stuff into a separate account that only gets looked at once every couple of days at most, I’ve trimmed the political RSS feeds down to almost nothing, I’ve started stockpiling lists of things to read and watch for distraction. More on this later. But there are other things I want to do in 2017. I’m going to actually try to develop a new hobby: saltwater fishing. (Stop laughing. I caught a lingcod off Davenport last weekend.) I’m thinking of forcing the issue on exercise by increasing my Vasper visits. I may even try to go back to taking the train (though I doubt that will last, just because driving to work when I can pull between 40 and 50 mpg is relaxing and convenient).

* If I could somehow bottle the feeling of beating Tennessee in football and putting on WIzzard’s “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” I would basically never need another pharmaceutical for the rest of my life.

…the traditional reflection on what if there’s no playoff and bowl tie-ups are as they were when I was in high school at the end of the college football season.  Without further ado:

SUGAR BOWL: ALABAMA vs OHIO STATE. This basically becomes the de facto national title game, and it’s tough to quibble with it.

ROSE BOWL: PENN STATE vs WASHINGTON. This is the game to see who gets a bite if Alabama loses but Ohio State is unconvincing. If one of these teams blows the other out, 

ORANGE BOWL: CLEMSON vs OKLAHOMA. None of the Florida teams are strong enough to displace Clemson by a long shot, and Oklahoma is the best of the old Big 8 teams (which are carrying the “Big” “12” at this point).

COTTON BOWL: OKLAHOMA STATE vs MICHIGAN. A hell of a matchup occasioned by the fact that the B1G is as topheavy as the SEC isn’t (Seriously, Auburn backs into the Sugar Bowl in our world? Tennessee had a shot at doing so? Are you kidding me with this shit?)

FIESTA BOWL: WISCONSIN vs USC. The leftover bowl gets the Best Of The Rest and this should be entertaining, if nothing else. (Seriously, the B1G is out of control.)

PEACH BOWL, SINCE APPARENTLY THE BOWL WHERE VANDY PLAYED TEXAS TECH IN 1974 IS A BIG DEAL NOW: COLORADO vs FLORIDA STATE, because who gives a shit.

Now, here’s the twist: if you go back to the actual conference alignments, that means Penn State is out of the Rose Bowl.  In that case, you get Bama vs Penn State and Ohio State vs Washington, and a situation where if Penn State wins, the Rose Bowl winner has a case to make for a national title. Plus, Ohio State is your B1G champ. It’s also possible that since the Orange Bowl tie-up was the Big 8 and not the ACC, you might just get Bama-Clemson in a straight fight. Point being: there is one undefeated Power 4+1 team, and none of the other contenders have a clear-cut case why they deserve the spot more than the other two. So, how is this situation any better than it was in 1990? Now we get two games to a finish, and if you’re a power conference team with one loss you’re free-rolled in – although actually winning that conference, or your head-to-head record, no longer matter.

Other thoughts:

1) The case for SEC supremacy is kind of feeble given that the second-best team ranked out at 14. Meanwhile, the B1G has 4 teams in the top 8. The delta between the SEC’s top and second teams in the playoff rankings is the largest of any conference. Alabama may be the Death Star, but the rest of the league is thirteen stormtroopers.

2) The Ol’ Bald Poach got Penn State to the Rose Bowl. There is no god but Loki in college football.

3) In the playoff top 25: Western Michigan, Pitt, Temple, Navy. Not in the top 25: any team from the entire old Southwest Conference. No Texas, no Aggie, no Houston or Texas Tech. Not for nothing did I use “Power 4+1” – take West Virginia out, which makes NO sense, and the “Big” “12” has all of two teams in the top 25. 

 

Compared to years past, the B1G is the new SEC, the SEC is the new Big XII, and the “Big” “12” is the new Big East. We’re starting to see the outline materializing for four sixteen-team superconferences and a possible path forward. And if your conference title and head to head record is less important than your overall standings…you’re in the NFL. Might not be the worst outcome.

2000 was my third Christmas without my father. It was the second one spent in Alabama. I was single, and the Christmas season had just begun to make that feel like it might not be a good thing. And it wasn’t like past holidays, because my two closest high school friends had decamped to farther climes – so the old days of coming back and hanging out were done. 

It was a tough time to be back home, fraught with memory and the realization that nothing would be the same. My brother was newly divorced and his one kid was less than two years old – not much to relate to. The whole house was awash in a dark cloud, and that was before taking into account the effects of the election. It was a cold, sad, grim week of sitting around waiting and wondering what the new world looked like. And Christmas Day was the worst – you unwrap presents, such as they are, you eat your biscuits and strawberries and watch the Blue-Gray Game, and then it’s 3 PM and there’s precious little to do but sit and be miserable and hope that someone – in a world where cellphones mostly don’t do SMS, wifi is almost nonexistent and social media as we know it IS nonexistent, where you need a laptop and a cable to plug it into when at home – will be online to chat. 

But I gutted it out, got on the plane  the next day and flew home to Northern Virginia. And remarkably, when I got there, I had communication from my two best friends in DC: we’re going down the pub. And so that night, I was with my friends in the Irish public house of our frequency, knocking down pints and singing along, and we had a grand old time. 

It’s a useful reminder: you never know where life is going to go in the month after Christmas, and sometimes you just need to get by with a little help from your friends. 

 “Something was different last year, and if I had to put a finger on it, I’d say it’s when we all collectively realized that there may not be a happy ending.  Stupid keeps winning, ignorance keeps winning, racism and bigotry keep bubbling up even as we get traction on gay marriage, the climate keeps changing, the drought goes on, Congress gets more worthless and the media that covers it gets even more so, sports becomes ever more rigged and gimmicked and sports media gets ever more shrill and predictable, and the tech boom shoots money out of a firehose at complete assholes while everyone else tries to scrape by in a world where a suburban 3-bedroom townhouse can cost a million dollars.”

-27 Jan 2015
 
Well, almost two years on, there you have it. Pretty much exactly the no-happy-ending I predicted. We lost containment – stupid has always been mass-produce-able with unskilled labor and we’ve let it out of the box. Couple it with Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and boom, an unlimited supply of useful idiots. 
 
Please spare me the shock at the “fake news.” Shirley Sherrod. The birth certificate. The Clinton Chronicles. Vince Foster. Yellowcake and tubes. We don’t need Russia to feed us fake news and haven’t for decades when we have Fox and the New York Times and forwardable email. It takes a lot of damn gall for the newspaper of Howell Raines and Judith Miller to lecture about fake news. Politics went post-factual twenty years ago and nobody cared because “opinions differ” and “the truth is somewhere in the middle” rather than where the damned facts are. It’s how Hillary Clinton, whose issue positions were largely indistinguishable from those of a sitting president with 58% approval, could lose: not because of ten months of fake news but because of the twenty five years of it previously.

As much as Mark Zuckerberg wants to throw his hands in the air and say “not it,” that excuse doesn’t hold water. Facebook – and the Internet more generally – has a way of giving equal footing to every opinion, and if the Internet is how you get your news, then you’re getting all the filtering mechanisms stripped out. Time was, a major print newspaper or network news broadcast carried a certain weight of credibility, but if a spam site in Macedonia has equal firepower, it’s time to consider than maybe the Internet isn’t a force for good in democracy and informing the public. Which means that I was wrong, Dr. Pride, and maybe nobody owes me a PhD after all. Sorry about that.
 
Look at the world the last 10 years: Prop 8 in California, Brexit in the UK, and now we have this. If there’s one lesson to take away, let it be this: Nothing is unthinkable anymore. We can no longer say “that could never happen” because it fucking well did. If the state that the rest of the country identified with uncontrolled radical liberalism can outlaw gay marriage by popular vote, if the UK can slit its own throat in world markets and set its economy on the precipice, if we can elect a tabloid figure and walking Reddit board President of the United Fucking States, anything is possible. Delete the words “it couldn’t happen here” from your vocabulary. It could. It can. It has already. Stop pretending there are guardrails, that there are cultural barriers and historical precedents that keep everything from going off the rails, because there fucking aren’t. Don’t rely on anyone else to make the case, to do the job, to hold the line. This is not self-correcting. This will not all come out in the wash. This has to be actively reversed, and that takes work. Demographics won’t handle it in 10 years if nobody votes. Senators won’t balk at touching the third rail if it doesn’t shock them to touch it. The good guys can’t win with 48 percent.

So what happens now? Gonna have to fight. Gonna have to push back. To the last man, to the last trench, to the last vote, to the last ballot, to the last dollar, to the last day of the American experiment – we fight. Right now, Hillary Clinton has over two million more votes than the candidate who got elected. Never let that go. Never shut up about that. Never take the light off the fact that this person was elected with fewer votes than his opponent. There is no mandate. There is no moral authority. There is no blank check. For all his caterwauling and conspiracy-mongering, Donald Trump won an election as rigged as the American system can accommodate. Not a day should go by until 2021 that this doesn’t come up, loudly. And the correction of the American political system has to continue apace, such that we never again have a President who got fewer votes than another person running against them. When the popular vote is a loser twice in five elections, the system is broken.

This is disruption. This is what happens when someone ignores the regulations, the accepted standards of behavior, the very rules themselves. If nobody acts to sanction them, they win. As Uber, so Trump. Only difference is, instead of sclerotic taxi companies, this time the pillars of our democratic process got disrupted. Maybe we get them back. Maybe not. Definitely not, if we don’t act. Now, and every day for the foreseeable future.

What are you prepared to do?

IF I HAD THE WINGS OF AN EAGLE

IF I HAD THE TAIL OF A CROW

I’D FLY MY ASS STRAIGHT OVER KNOXVILLE

AND SHIT ON THOSE BASTARDS BELOW!!!

 

I didn’t watch the game as it happened. I haven’t watched much all year – largely because I didn’t need the kind of trauma this team has given me the last couple of seasons. I just hosted the holiday party and trusted the guys to handle their business. And amazingly, it all worked out, in a way that I couldn’t have expected when the year started.

3-9 the first year, a disaster. 4-8 the next – almost worse in a way, because there was obvious progress that didn’t translate into results on the field. And when this team limped through the first half of the season, getting blown away by Georgia Tech (thanks for nothing, cuz) and losing three SEC games by a touchdown or less, it began to look like the Dores just couldn’t get over the hump. And then…

Let’s be honest: we probably didn’t deserve to beat Western Kentucky or Georgia. But we certainly didn’t deserve to lose to Cocky AND to GATA AND to UK. So that’s sort of a wash, far as I’m concerned. We shouldn’t have lost to Mizzou but definitely deserved to, we went toe-to-toe with Auburn…and then in these last two games, against two rivals, everything clicked. We didn’t back into it, we didn’t fluke into it, we went out and beat Ole Miss and Tennessee convincingly. Hell, look at the way the UT game went: in the first half we traded punch for punch, went down 31-24 at the half, and then beat them handily in the second half, 21-3. The adjustments were made and they worked and we delivered the goods.

So there it is, in the cold light of morning: Big Six. Lost one of the non-conference games the formula requires, but made up for it with three SEC wins – Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee. The steady improvement continues, and now this team will wind up in a bowl berth on the merits instead of needing to leverage the APR loophole. Vanderbilt heads to its fifth bowl since 2008 under the third different coach to get them there.  In that time, of course, they’ve also won two games in the season (twice) and three and four…but since that 2008 season, we have more bowl years than sub-.500 years.

You look at that…and something has changed. After all, we didn’t break the .500 mark once from 1983 to 2007. Lot of 5 win seasons, the occasional fluke over UT or Bama or Georgia (OK, usually Georgia), but mostly a whole lot of blowout losses and “same old Vandy” head-shaking. Sometime in the last decade, the bar changed. Yes, the Brigadoon era was an anomaly at the time, but if you look at the team from roughly 2004 to that 2008 season, you could see the slow progress. And now, three years on, the movement may not be quick but it appears inexorable…hopefully.

After all, on this pace, we’re looking at the SEC title game in five years, right?