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The only thing Scooby the Chihuahua — make no mistake, a performing artist in every sense of the term — didn’t do on Tuesday night at halftime of TCU’s letdown of a game against Texas was proclaim over the public address system, “Yo quiero Taco Bell.”
Everything else was to perfection.
And that’s were perfection ended, particularly in the case of our Horned Frogs, who entered the game hotter than a habanero but cooled off as if the bluest norther came raging through town. The Longhorns did as they pleased while appearing fresher and stronger than a seemingly listless TCU team, which failed to respond to a boisterous home crowd at Schollmaier Arena on campus.
A TCU-record 8,412, including 3,594 students who arrived with exuberance and, at times, a lowbrow vocabulary (one chant in particular had a very direct carnal word followed by “Texas”), were on hand.
The line of students trying to get in stretched back around the Baugh indoor football stadium and once inside, they squeezed into every available seat or watched from a portal where the overflow gathered to catch a peek. What they all saw, student, alum, or otherwise, was TCU falling 73-50 to its Big 12 rival.
The Longhorns played probably as complete a game as they’ve attempted this season in the Big 12. The Longhorns outrebounded the Frogs by 10 and shot 48.5% compared to TCU’s 31%. Loose balls, too, inevitably fell into the wrong — that is, Texas — hands.
Free throws proved to be anything but free. TCU missed nine of 21 attempts. The Frogs shot 2 for 16 from 3-point range.
TCU had entered having won three of its last four, including a 15-point victory over then-No. 15 Iowa State on the road.
However, in the Big 12, as highly rated a conference as there is in the country — Baylor and Kansas are Nos. 4-5, Texas Tech, a team nobody really wants to fool with right now, is 13, and Iowa State is still in the Top 15 — you can be a rooster one day and a feather duster the next.
Coach Jamie Dixon told the assembled media afterward that there was a long list of things that went wrong, but “you guys need to get home.” As in, we could be there awhile if he started to get into it.
“We were slow reacting, lacking physicality, and impatient offensively,” Dixon said. “It’s a bad combination against a very patient team. We didn’t block out and when we did we got pushed out of the way. We just didn’t get it done in anyway.”
Disappointed Frogs star Mike Miles called the loss “embarrassing.”
There was, though, one very, very bright spot for the home crowd.
Scooby, the acrobatic Chihuahua who performs at basketball halftimes across the country with his master Christian Stoinev, a fifth-generation circus performer. Stoinev has a hand balancing act that perhaps not even Bart Conner would attempt. The act is called "Christian and Scooby."
Midway through the act, out hops Scooby for the real show. Scooby stands on Stoinev’s back and/or feet as the Stoinev goes through his routine.
Scooby also knows how to mug for the crowd by standing on his back feet and waving his front paws. The climatic move of the routine was Scooby balancing himself on a basketball and moving from that ball to another without losing his balance. Here is the show at an Arizona game.
It was unfortunately the only real treat for a great crowd.
For the basketball guys, it was just one of those nights.
They’ll be back on the right side of things sooner rather than later.
