Hee-Haw!!!!!!!!!!

Along with College Football, I love playing poker. In every poker game, there is always that one guy that is known as the donkey. The donkey is the donator; the guy who plays every hand and makes bets and calls that should never be made, and he consistently loses. But as everyone knows, the donkey can get lucky on any given hand or session. For the most part the other players like the donkey because of the financial value he brings to any game, plus they tend to be the most sociable and care free person at the table, which makes for good company.

That being said, I have felt like the donkey in our College Football pool the last three weeks - a big one at that, with big ears. Last week I came in dead last, picking only 6 games right out of 17. I can’t help myself from donating each week and looking like an all-star ass with my lousy picks. Hee Haw! I have been extremely humbled and slightly embarrassed by my performance thus far this year. I know no one cares how I do really, except for maybe Spence, who relishes my misery when picking terribly. But the days of my obnoxious trash talking and swagger are long gone…. Well, unless I can right the ship. My results this year make me wonder how I won twice last year. I keep telling myself that it’s early, and better weeks are to come - especially with the conference play kicking off here shortly. Yet like all my brothers in the pool, a sense of urgency is starting to build as each passing week makes it less likely that I can win a share of the prize pool. Many of you might be thinking, "quit thinking about it, loser, and just have fun," but as many of you know, I’m just slightly competitive. The only thing that drives me more than competition is greed. I hate when people say "I do it for fun," or, "it’s all good, there’s next week!" Well let me tell you, every single person in our pool enters to win not one week, but multiple weeks, so they can lay claim to the Benjamin’s. Like I tell my athletes, winning is fun!

The last couple of days I’ve had some deep conversations in my mind about how to pick these games because any other way has to be better than what I’ve done lately. I came up with a couple of options so here they are:

1. Have my wife pick – She knows nothing about the teams except for maybe MU, OU, and Boise because I talk about them non-stop as if they were a part of our family. If she screws up I can partially blame her for losing our precious money that covers our pool every year. But then again if I hadn’t spent the money on the pool she’d be telling me about how she got a great deal on some new Capri pants.

2. Randomly ask my students throughout the week – It’s clear my students would just pick the team that they’ve heard about the most or have some weird attachment to. Honestly they would probably enjoy picking for me. Might be a way to build positive student-teacher relationship and community in the classroom. But I don’t think the school would look too kindly in using students to help with my gambling.

3. Make picks but then do the opposite – I could just go down the sheet make my picks and then switch everything, I mean if I had done that last week I would have been one off from tying the great Coach Cearley.

If any of you have suggestions you should share them with me no matter how ridiculous they may be. But regardless I will be watching the games with great interest this week like I do every week because I have a great deal of pride and I would like to improve from my horrendous week. It is early and we have 11 weeks but time is running out. Regardless if I win this year I still love the excitement of picking games. Who knows like in poker maybe I’ll be the donkey that gets lucky this week.