In your personal history with music, you likely favored one genre above all others. But then you would make the exception if you heard that voice. It could draw you in to where you forgot what genre of music it came from.
Why? Well, the artist could sing any song from any type and pull it off easily.
There are voices. Then there are VOICES. Frank Sinatra was one of those VOICES. Judy Garland was another. Barbara Streisand makes the RJB think of a third.
Then there’s the late Whitney Houston. First off, it’s sad that we even call her the late Whitney Houston. We should be enjoying her to this day. Tragically, we lost her in 2012 when she was 48 because of demons. Hard to believe it’s been eight years.
But what made her so special was her range, ability to carry a note and most importantly, the power. You could listen to a Whitney Houston selection and detect how an ordinary note would become extraordinary. Houston got her voice from her mother Cissy, who is an award-winning Soul and Gospel singer.
Recently, the Guiness Book of World Records recognized Houston as the most awarded female recording artist of all time. She received more than 600 of them.
If you recall, her first two albums in 1985 and 1987 were roaring successes and rapidly climbed to No. 1.
Of all her hits, maybe the one that gained so much attention was from her acting debut in the 1992 romantic thriller flop The Bodyguard. She covered Dolly Parton’s “I will always love you.”
Parton made it a smash when it was No. 1 in 1974 and 1982 when it was used in Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Houston’s cover spent 14 weeks – that’s 27 percent of a calendar year – at No. 1. It’s also revered as one of the top selling singles ever with more than 20 million copies sold.
The final piece to Houston’s career is that she will be posthumously but appropriately inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this coming November.
But for the RJB’s purposes, we’re going to take another track from The Bodyguard that wound up being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. In this one, you should pick up on the power and range. Dionne Warwick’s cousin will be and continues to be missed.
****
Baylor students, who have already been back on campus for days if not week(s), take that different plateau on Monday when classes begin for the 2020 fall semester.
Here we go!
Yes, you’ve already read about how universities across the United States are handling or struggling to handle the phenomenon of the students returning to campus and mixing with the athletes. Really, that’s probably been happening to some extent longer than anyone realizes.
The stories are probably undersold or oversold depending on who you talk to. That means the truth gets caught in the middle and slaughtered.
You’re also reading how several universities like the University of North Carolina, Notre Dame and Michigan State went from a plan of hybrid in-class/online learning to strictly online learning. Why? Well, those university officials had what they considered an outbreak of COVID-19 cases that forced the action or just reversed course.
Personally, I saw it this week when my Crimson Tide got a Come-to-Jesus letter from the University of Alabama on Friday about the way students were conducting themselves and interacting without masks. The university put everybody in a 14-day quarantine with limited to no access to any campus activity. For instance, my Crimson Tide can only go to her sorority house to get her meals in a grab-and-go setting. There are no parties. And if parties are discovered, students are threatened with suspension. You can read about it here.
But for the universities like Baylor and Alabama, who are continuing toward playing football this fall, this is a time where they are all going to collectively hold their breaths and pray whatever test results are released are going to be reasonable.
Baylor head coach Dave Aranda is aware of this. He and his staff have preached to their players for weeks about minimizing their risk of exposure to the virus. That’s really hard to do because college kids like to hang out and socialize. After all, it’s one of the reasons they came to college.
However, if you’re a student athlete and your job is to play football, your discipline is being tested like it never has been. So much is at stake just to get to that Sept. 12 season opener against Louisiana Tech.
Since the athletes started returning in mid-June for the unsupervised workouts, making good decisions has been stressed. When the OTAs began in late July, the emphasis went up a notch.
Now, that campus life looks like campus life again – sort of – the pressure to not blow this escalates.
“We talk about it quite a bit, so we have to keep it in the forefront,’’ Aranda said earlier this week. “We talked just about the path we’re on. I mentioned there’s a verse in Matthew Chapter 7 about the narrow gate as opposed to the broad road. I think our athletic team, college athletics, we’re on that narrow road in terms of our daily appetites, our daily musts are all to play ball.
“The wide road, I showed a LA Freeway at rush hour with all these cars. Other people are living that life and that’s just not the road for us right now. So I think talking about it as much as you can, examples of other people who are in the same fight as we are, I think we have to keep it in the forefront and educate.”
If Aranda is saying this, then his former boss Ed Orgeron is saying it in probably a different way at LSU. Mack Brown is saying it a different way at North Carolina. Skip Holtz is saying it a different way at Louisiana Tech.
These are the programs that are trying to prove that athletics can be played in the middle of a pandemic. Arguing about the nuances of college age kids being in the lowest risk category or anything else really doesn’t matter at this point.
What does matter and perhaps has a greater impact is how the football team keeps itself lower than the lowest risk. There are so many eyes. There is so much pressure.
To be sure, there’s a percentage of people who want this to fail. Those would be the people who are more interested in an agenda rather than finding a solution. But keep your eye on the ball. When UNC and Michigan State announced they were moving to online classes, those poorly written statements offered little to no context as to how their testing procedures worked, when the tests were conducted and so on.
Now, you have seen where some athletics programs have put a pause on their workouts if there was what they considered an alarming. However, they’ve made adjustments and eventually resumed their workouts. Yes, they resumed despite you just reading that a pause was interpreted as canceled by reporters.
With Baylor, I think it’s pretty impressive that since it started to release its test results in mid-June (the total results are from June 1), there have only been 61 positive cases. That’s testing the athletes multiple times.
Now, we’ve seen those numbers trend a little higher in the last couple of weeks. For the week starting Aug. 17, there were nine new cases, 12 active cases, 10 asymptomatic cases and two symptomatic cases. They aren’t alarming. Is there correlation between the uptick and the students returning to campus? Well, it would be easy to presume that. Yet there’s no way to know for sure.
What will be interesting is what these numbers are going to look like on Aug. 24 (today), Aug. 31 and Sept. 7 (Labor Day). Classes are taking place. Players are going to have a normal schedule where there is going to be some in-class instruction. Then everybody is running around doing stuff. The risk is contracting or spreading could be higher. Or it may not.
It’s just really going to depend on how the players conduct themselves over the course of these next three months to deal with it. I definitely believe in the argument – because that’s what it really is – that the players are probably the most well-cared for than the students simply because of their access to tests and treatments.
The path that Baylor and the Big 12 have shown toward having a football season is about as good as it gets. It’s not full proof.
Yet I think the key for any of this is that the Bears have to get to the Sept. 12 opener against Louisiana Tech. If they can get there, then I think we’re going to have a full 10-game season.
I really believe that all of the conferences playing are watching how the NBA, NHL and MLB are conducting their seasons since they returned in July and how they react when there are positive cases.
If you’ve noticed, they haven’t stopped. They’ve kept going. MLB has had its rough patches with games being suspended and re-scheduled when players or staff have tested positive. When there was an issue, games were postponed and re-scheduled.
There was a rocky beginning to the season when there was an outbreak. Then the MLB media feasted on the storyline that the season was going to get canceled…until it wasn’t.
There are enough byes in the season that adjustments can be made. Baylor has three of them, Sept. 19, Oct. 10 and Nov. 21. There is some flexibility to play a game that was postponed. Then you have the Big 12’s ability to move its championship game to as far back as Dec. 19 if need be.
When you see this entry, you will know that we are inside three weeks to the opener at McLane Stadium. The news changes every day. Some good. Some bad. Some hopeful. Some unnerving. But every day that ticks off the calendar with something that isn’t catastrophic is a good thing. Fragility is a word that comes to mind.
Day by day.
****
Speaking of getting things started, that’s what several members of Baylor’s 2021 class are going to do this weekend. The lower classifications of Texas High School football are set to begin this coming Friday.
They are:
Tate Williams, OL, Wall – at Eastland, 7:00 p.m. Friday
Jordan Jinkins, RB, Lindale – at Kaufman, 7:30 p.m. Friday
Note: West Orange-Stark and LB Tyrone Brown won’t play this weekend against Nederland because of the forecasted landfall to the Texas Gulf Coast by Hurricane Marco and Tropical Storm Laura throughout this week. They could hit the gulf coast, primarily Louisiana, within 48 hours of each other. Unbelievable. WOS is too close to that area to downplay the severity.
I’ve spoken with Brown and his family are already making plans to head north and avoid the storm(s).
****
As for the NCAA not counting eligibility for sports that will be played this fall, just keep in mind that Baylor has 11 “seniors” on scholarship including two grad transfers in linebacker William Bradley-King and deep snapper Gunnar Royer.
We’re just in the beginning of wrapping heads and hands around this policy where all of them could return for another season if they choose or if the coaching staff wants them to return. You could also have a few graduated non-seniors who could choose to leave via grad transfer or another way.
Of course, quarterback Charlie Brewer and running backs Trestan Ebner and John Lovett would be spotlighted as those who could return.
Then it goes back to Baylor and the numbers going into its 2021 class. There are already 19 commitments.
There is a financial element that is involved here. Can a budget that’s likely going to take a financial hit be able to house more scholarship athletes than normal…in all sports?
At this point, it would appear that Baylor will honor those. Still, there are many moving parts to this. More issues surrounding this will be discussed. We’ll see how this continues to unfold.
Let’s make it a great week!
Why? Well, the artist could sing any song from any type and pull it off easily.
There are voices. Then there are VOICES. Frank Sinatra was one of those VOICES. Judy Garland was another. Barbara Streisand makes the RJB think of a third.
Then there’s the late Whitney Houston. First off, it’s sad that we even call her the late Whitney Houston. We should be enjoying her to this day. Tragically, we lost her in 2012 when she was 48 because of demons. Hard to believe it’s been eight years.
But what made her so special was her range, ability to carry a note and most importantly, the power. You could listen to a Whitney Houston selection and detect how an ordinary note would become extraordinary. Houston got her voice from her mother Cissy, who is an award-winning Soul and Gospel singer.
Recently, the Guiness Book of World Records recognized Houston as the most awarded female recording artist of all time. She received more than 600 of them.
If you recall, her first two albums in 1985 and 1987 were roaring successes and rapidly climbed to No. 1.
Of all her hits, maybe the one that gained so much attention was from her acting debut in the 1992 romantic thriller flop The Bodyguard. She covered Dolly Parton’s “I will always love you.”
Parton made it a smash when it was No. 1 in 1974 and 1982 when it was used in Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Houston’s cover spent 14 weeks – that’s 27 percent of a calendar year – at No. 1. It’s also revered as one of the top selling singles ever with more than 20 million copies sold.
The final piece to Houston’s career is that she will be posthumously but appropriately inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this coming November.
But for the RJB’s purposes, we’re going to take another track from The Bodyguard that wound up being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. In this one, you should pick up on the power and range. Dionne Warwick’s cousin will be and continues to be missed.
****
Baylor students, who have already been back on campus for days if not week(s), take that different plateau on Monday when classes begin for the 2020 fall semester.
Here we go!
Yes, you’ve already read about how universities across the United States are handling or struggling to handle the phenomenon of the students returning to campus and mixing with the athletes. Really, that’s probably been happening to some extent longer than anyone realizes.
The stories are probably undersold or oversold depending on who you talk to. That means the truth gets caught in the middle and slaughtered.
You’re also reading how several universities like the University of North Carolina, Notre Dame and Michigan State went from a plan of hybrid in-class/online learning to strictly online learning. Why? Well, those university officials had what they considered an outbreak of COVID-19 cases that forced the action or just reversed course.
Personally, I saw it this week when my Crimson Tide got a Come-to-Jesus letter from the University of Alabama on Friday about the way students were conducting themselves and interacting without masks. The university put everybody in a 14-day quarantine with limited to no access to any campus activity. For instance, my Crimson Tide can only go to her sorority house to get her meals in a grab-and-go setting. There are no parties. And if parties are discovered, students are threatened with suspension. You can read about it here.
But for the universities like Baylor and Alabama, who are continuing toward playing football this fall, this is a time where they are all going to collectively hold their breaths and pray whatever test results are released are going to be reasonable.
Baylor head coach Dave Aranda is aware of this. He and his staff have preached to their players for weeks about minimizing their risk of exposure to the virus. That’s really hard to do because college kids like to hang out and socialize. After all, it’s one of the reasons they came to college.
However, if you’re a student athlete and your job is to play football, your discipline is being tested like it never has been. So much is at stake just to get to that Sept. 12 season opener against Louisiana Tech.
Since the athletes started returning in mid-June for the unsupervised workouts, making good decisions has been stressed. When the OTAs began in late July, the emphasis went up a notch.
Now, that campus life looks like campus life again – sort of – the pressure to not blow this escalates.
“We talk about it quite a bit, so we have to keep it in the forefront,’’ Aranda said earlier this week. “We talked just about the path we’re on. I mentioned there’s a verse in Matthew Chapter 7 about the narrow gate as opposed to the broad road. I think our athletic team, college athletics, we’re on that narrow road in terms of our daily appetites, our daily musts are all to play ball.
“The wide road, I showed a LA Freeway at rush hour with all these cars. Other people are living that life and that’s just not the road for us right now. So I think talking about it as much as you can, examples of other people who are in the same fight as we are, I think we have to keep it in the forefront and educate.”
If Aranda is saying this, then his former boss Ed Orgeron is saying it in probably a different way at LSU. Mack Brown is saying it a different way at North Carolina. Skip Holtz is saying it a different way at Louisiana Tech.
These are the programs that are trying to prove that athletics can be played in the middle of a pandemic. Arguing about the nuances of college age kids being in the lowest risk category or anything else really doesn’t matter at this point.
What does matter and perhaps has a greater impact is how the football team keeps itself lower than the lowest risk. There are so many eyes. There is so much pressure.
To be sure, there’s a percentage of people who want this to fail. Those would be the people who are more interested in an agenda rather than finding a solution. But keep your eye on the ball. When UNC and Michigan State announced they were moving to online classes, those poorly written statements offered little to no context as to how their testing procedures worked, when the tests were conducted and so on.
Now, you have seen where some athletics programs have put a pause on their workouts if there was what they considered an alarming. However, they’ve made adjustments and eventually resumed their workouts. Yes, they resumed despite you just reading that a pause was interpreted as canceled by reporters.
With Baylor, I think it’s pretty impressive that since it started to release its test results in mid-June (the total results are from June 1), there have only been 61 positive cases. That’s testing the athletes multiple times.
Now, we’ve seen those numbers trend a little higher in the last couple of weeks. For the week starting Aug. 17, there were nine new cases, 12 active cases, 10 asymptomatic cases and two symptomatic cases. They aren’t alarming. Is there correlation between the uptick and the students returning to campus? Well, it would be easy to presume that. Yet there’s no way to know for sure.
What will be interesting is what these numbers are going to look like on Aug. 24 (today), Aug. 31 and Sept. 7 (Labor Day). Classes are taking place. Players are going to have a normal schedule where there is going to be some in-class instruction. Then everybody is running around doing stuff. The risk is contracting or spreading could be higher. Or it may not.
It’s just really going to depend on how the players conduct themselves over the course of these next three months to deal with it. I definitely believe in the argument – because that’s what it really is – that the players are probably the most well-cared for than the students simply because of their access to tests and treatments.
The path that Baylor and the Big 12 have shown toward having a football season is about as good as it gets. It’s not full proof.
Yet I think the key for any of this is that the Bears have to get to the Sept. 12 opener against Louisiana Tech. If they can get there, then I think we’re going to have a full 10-game season.
I really believe that all of the conferences playing are watching how the NBA, NHL and MLB are conducting their seasons since they returned in July and how they react when there are positive cases.
If you’ve noticed, they haven’t stopped. They’ve kept going. MLB has had its rough patches with games being suspended and re-scheduled when players or staff have tested positive. When there was an issue, games were postponed and re-scheduled.
There was a rocky beginning to the season when there was an outbreak. Then the MLB media feasted on the storyline that the season was going to get canceled…until it wasn’t.
There are enough byes in the season that adjustments can be made. Baylor has three of them, Sept. 19, Oct. 10 and Nov. 21. There is some flexibility to play a game that was postponed. Then you have the Big 12’s ability to move its championship game to as far back as Dec. 19 if need be.
When you see this entry, you will know that we are inside three weeks to the opener at McLane Stadium. The news changes every day. Some good. Some bad. Some hopeful. Some unnerving. But every day that ticks off the calendar with something that isn’t catastrophic is a good thing. Fragility is a word that comes to mind.
Day by day.
****
Speaking of getting things started, that’s what several members of Baylor’s 2021 class are going to do this weekend. The lower classifications of Texas High School football are set to begin this coming Friday.
They are:
Tate Williams, OL, Wall – at Eastland, 7:00 p.m. Friday
Jordan Jinkins, RB, Lindale – at Kaufman, 7:30 p.m. Friday
Note: West Orange-Stark and LB Tyrone Brown won’t play this weekend against Nederland because of the forecasted landfall to the Texas Gulf Coast by Hurricane Marco and Tropical Storm Laura throughout this week. They could hit the gulf coast, primarily Louisiana, within 48 hours of each other. Unbelievable. WOS is too close to that area to downplay the severity.
I’ve spoken with Brown and his family are already making plans to head north and avoid the storm(s).
****
As for the NCAA not counting eligibility for sports that will be played this fall, just keep in mind that Baylor has 11 “seniors” on scholarship including two grad transfers in linebacker William Bradley-King and deep snapper Gunnar Royer.
We’re just in the beginning of wrapping heads and hands around this policy where all of them could return for another season if they choose or if the coaching staff wants them to return. You could also have a few graduated non-seniors who could choose to leave via grad transfer or another way.
Of course, quarterback Charlie Brewer and running backs Trestan Ebner and John Lovett would be spotlighted as those who could return.
Then it goes back to Baylor and the numbers going into its 2021 class. There are already 19 commitments.
There is a financial element that is involved here. Can a budget that’s likely going to take a financial hit be able to house more scholarship athletes than normal…in all sports?
At this point, it would appear that Baylor will honor those. Still, there are many moving parts to this. More issues surrounding this will be discussed. We’ll see how this continues to unfold.
Let’s make it a great week!
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