Pirates vs. proto-fascists

The Michael Lewis article about Texas Tech's football coach, mentioned yesterday, is pretty entertaining, but here's a couple of my favorite passages:

Stepping out into Jones SBC Stadium, surrounded by people wearing self-conscious looks of grim determination, Leach was even easier than usual to identify: he was the one guy wandering about, as Meeks has put it, "with this look on his face like he's walking around an airport, lost." True, he had shaved ("It's a good idea to shave for TV games") and shed his flip-flops, his "Hawaii Five-O" baggy shirts and his board shorts for an outfit that looked vaguely coachlike. As his team raced onto the field, he gazed into the stands filled with screaming fans and wondered about the several thousand "cadets" from Texas A.&M. clustered in one end zone. They wear military uniforms and buzz cuts, holler in unison and stand at attention the entire game. "How come they get to pretend they are soldiers?" he asked. "The thing is, they aren't actually in the military. I ought to have Mike's Pirate School. The freshmen, all they get is the bandanna. When you're a senior, you get the sword and skull and crossbones. For homework, we'll work pirate maneuvers and stuff like that."

And later:

Now Texas Tech had a 39-point lead over A.&M. and the ball and was moving forward as rapidly as ever. To minimize its humiliation, the A.&M. offense had been running plays meant to use up time and get the team out of Lubbock. The governor of Texas slipped away early and was on his way back to Austin. The guys dressed up as soldiers in the Aggie end zone had run out of military drills to perform. Up in the sky boxes, the wife of an Aggie assistant coach insulted every female Red Raider in earshot by saying that at least she lived in College Station instead of Lubbock. ("First of all, we just beat them, 56-17," Leach says when told of the incident. "By rights she should now be a Red Raider slave.")