Expecting Excitement and Ending Up Empty Handed

If you’re wondering what the hell is going on in Bobcatland, you’re either not watching our show every week or being wrapped into an expectation vortex.

When I was an extremely young TV producer —I’m 27 now, but this was back when I was young, beautiful and 23— I had an Executive Producer named Miranda. I still love this lady to this day; she’s wonderful and is one of the main reasons KIII in the Coastal Bend is so strong.

On tough days, she would tell me, “Jakob, close your rundown, walk away and lower your expectations for the day.”

I wish it was as easy to do that for sports as it is in local journalism sometimes.

When one of our teams does good, we expect them to continue down that path. A couple of weeks ago, the baseball team took down #1 Texas A&M and now we’re 8-7, what gives?

My advice: Go watch softball if you want to see a team win consistently, they sit at 15-6 headed into Sun Belt play this weekend.

Let me shift to basketball very briefly because both team’s seasons just ended.

Most fans and journalists had very few expectations for a men’s team who was one game above .500 on the year and a women’s team that was one game below.

If either team went on a run in the Sun Belt Conference tournament, it would have been a miracle and also pretty much the cherry on top of a lackluster year.

I think because of what G.J. did with football, people think basketball, specifically the men’s team, and baseball, with extremely positive momentum, should be in a better spot than we are.

But you still gotta play the games.

I ran into this last year, actually when I wrote this fire feature about Lincoln Pare mid-season for Dave Campbell’s.

I had written the piece right after the homecoming game where we beat Southern Miss 58-3. But Craven told me they wanted to hold it for a week to get more eyeballs on it.

Here comes Georgia Southern looking to play season spoiler for and smacks us in the face the next week at home 52-44 for the Panthers. The article came out, thankfully the next Monday, so at least it was not a whole loss.

All this to say, if you’re frustrated with teams losing when they should be winning, welcome to the club. It’s such a Texas State-ism I hope we break some day soon.

Our teams get so hot and then seemingly combust into flames.

I’m such an embarrassingly huge baseball fan boy, I want those guys to win all the time, but unless they can dominate the Sun Belt, which is hard to do, it also might be time to lower our expectations as well.

The spring is all about blossoming into who you are:

-For football, we all hope the guys the team has recruited show up and continue to add to this beautiful thing we’re seeing in the fall.

-In basketball, you win or go home in March.

-With the arms baseball has, the team looks like they have the potential to be a top half team of the league, how close to the top they fall depends wholly on them and soon, league play.

-Softball is proving why they’re one of the best teams in the Southwest.

If you want to see a team win consistently, go watch some softball.

Thanks for Squarin’

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