Dallas was a real hot part of the field back then. A lot of big programs have fields running through it. Texas, TCU, Baylor, Nebraska has one that comes all the way down. They called it “Powerball.” Footballs were just bouncing around all over. Of course, since Southern only had 11 players in the area, they were usually squeezed out of the action.
One day, though.
One day, those 11 wake up one morning and see they’ve moved up on the scoreboard. Someone’s trying to carry a football through their field. Who knows where, you know, but Mama goes up to a rooftop to see if there’s anything to see.
And sure enough, she sees a TCU team stomping their way. Not even trying to be quiet about it, the way you might if you’re on another team’s field. There were about 70 of ‘em. And they just thought they were all that, you know?
Southern didn’t like that. So they said, hell, let’s make ‘em work for it at least. Let’s line ‘em up and make ‘em play some football if they’re gonna just parade through our field like this.
When they do, TCU’s all crabby about it. They’re annoyed. So they line up in a, excuse me but I’m gonna curse here, they line up in a “fuck-you” formation.
They line up in what they call the phalanx. The idea is that the whole team just marches forward and bulldozes everybody, slowly but surely. And the quarterback just kinda strolls along behind em.
Yeah, I’m looking up the replay. This is gross.
It’s some real knucklehead stuff. It’s basically what you do if you wanna completely disrespect somebody. If you’re a big team who runs into a little team and you just wanna make ‘em feel like dirt for even trying to challenge you.
And it went about as you’d guess. Southern put ten players on the line, but it didn’t matter. They just got trampled. Mama said it was so slow, it was like watching road getting paved.
But you know, there’s a saying. Every coach says it now. “Count your opponent.” No matter what, no matter how outmatched they are, count your opponent.
And this is why they say that.
