On Munchie Legaux

The good news about having a blog that you run by yourself is that you can write about whatever you want. Sure, Bloguin would probably prefer if I didn't use their network to spew hateful propaganda, besides that, no one tells me what to write. If I wanted to, I could probably not write about the Bearcats and make this blog something completely different. I won't do that because it would be rather pointless. But, I could if I wanted to. Everything that I've put on the site has been something that I've written. It's been some idea of something I came up with. Those things might not be original subjects, but that's a discussion for another time. 

Munchie Legaux was officially named the starting quarterback for the Bearcats Tuesday. While he practices his craft, once he is on the field, he can do whatever he wants. The coordinators call the plays. Munchie gets to run them any way he wishes. Sure, the coaches and his teammates want him to run the plays in the way that they have practiced. But if Munchie takes off and runs 75 yards for a TD, no one will bat an eye at the fact that he did what he wanted. He could call an audible and run a completely different play if he so chose. He could tell Anthony McClung to go deep and throw him bombs every play. He would get a stern talking to on the sideline and could get benched, but the fact remains, he could do anything he wanted to on the field. Just like how I could write whatever I wanted here. 

I parallel Munchie Legaux and myself not because we have awesome names, or that we both went to UC, or that we both have our hair in very long braids. I do it because this upcoming season is full of possibility. This year has been a very hard year for me personally. My dad died back in April. Like when anyone that you love goes away, it's been a hard adjustment period. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't think about him in some way. There will probably never be a day in my life in which I don't think about him in any way. I had never known anyone who had died. I've known of people who had died. My grandma and great grandma were the only people I actually knew who passed away. Since I grew up in Cincinnati and they lived in Louisville, I didn't really know them at all. So when my dad starting getting worse, it was a flood of emotion. Life happens pretty fast, and him going happened pretty fast. The final days were agonizingly long, but they weren't long enough. It was a Tuesday night at about 3 in the morning when I went to bed. I had stayed up until like 6:30 the day before with my dad. I needed to go to sleep. I knew I was going to go to sleep and my dad would be dead when I woke up. Sure enough, at 6 am my brother saw that he wasn't breathing. Everyone fell asleep. Including my dad for the last time. I don't really know why this is easier to talk about here than to someone in person. Probably because I don't actually have to say the words. It was about 10 days from when my dad went into Hospice until the funeral. Every day seemed so long then, but it's all a blur now. Time does that.

If you followed along with the blog, you would have noticed that May, June and even July were pretty light months. If you look in the archives, you would see most of the stuff I wrote about was kind of generic. I did a lot of copying of lists and other things like that. There was nothing really substantial. The load was going to be a little lighter because I took a trip to Florida for the first time in a couple of years. But there was another reason for the site going kind of dark. I really didn't know what to say. It wasn't that there was a lack of news, it was that I didn't know what my voice was anymore. If you look at writing as a vain that you draw inspiration from, I couldn't hit mine with the needle. I don't know if it shows because I haven't read a lot of that stuff again, but I was not very enthusiastic about what I was doing. For the first time since I started the blogspot site, writing felt like a chore. I had a lot on my mind and this site was an annoyance. I never thought about leaving it behind, but I did consider hanging it up for a while. I don't think anyone would have blamed me. 

One of the hardest thing to do the past 4 months is get things back into a routine. When things fall apart, you have to pick up the pieces of your life. It took me a while to do that. There are still days, and there are going to be for everyone not just me, when it feels like everything sucks and you just don't wanna deal with anything. You need to be pulled up by your boot straps and go on with your life. It's not easy. This is also when your friends and family come in handy. One of the things that has helped me, as incredibly dorky as this is going to sound, has been the countdown list. It's given me a task every day. Sometimes multiple tasks in a day when I skip a day. Speaking of that, get ready for an onslaught of those the next couple of days. Writing is a muscle. You have to work it out or the muscle atrophies. I didn't really know what I was doing at first, which is why the Jonathan Ruffin post is fucking god awful and I'm not linking to it, but lately I feel that the entries have gotten better. They have certainly gotten a reaction from a number of people. I can't say how cool it was for Lenny Stokes to say nice words or Mardy Gilyard to complain about being 9th. I'm just a fan like all of you. To see people I respected on the field say nice things, or at least notice them, is a trip. That's not really the point of this paragraph. The point is, that the countdown has really helped me start to find my groove again. Last year was the best year of the blog. It was in terms of page views and all the crap no one cares about, but also in writing. I had fun writing about all the exciting things that were happening last year. It must have impressed someone since I got asked to write for Run the Floor. Which I haven't done in a while. I should get on that. 

What that paragraph did a terrible job at getting across was that I'm very enthusiastic about things for the first time in months. This has been a long summer. I have neglected football coverage for the sake of the countdown, don't worry because a football rampage is coming next week, and some of that was because I was not very enthusiastic about the upcoming season. UC has been picked in the middle of the league. That's not very exciting. You want to be picked first or last. If you are first, you can write "Oh yeah, here comes the pain, bitch." If it's last, you can say "Oh yeah, here come the underdogs, bitch. 8th place, my ass." It's hard to muster much of a reaction about being picked 4th.

In the aftermath of the Munchie post today, I started getting excited. Munchie Legaux is a very talented player. He was recruited by multiple name schools. I remember Colorado being one of them. He played receiver. He plays quaterback. He can run, he can throw, he can pretty much do anything offensively. We don't know if he can block, but if he could, he could absolutely do everything offensively. If Jordan Luallen wasn't moving to receiver, this would make everything about Munchie more special. But Luallen is not a great passer, so Munchie wins that battle. The battle of one sentence. That sounds like a Ben Folds Five song. Munchie is the best athlete that UC has had at QB in a while. There are a lot of doubts about the skill players on the team, which there should be because they lost great players. I'm optimistic that Munchie can fill the shoes of Zach Collaros. He doesn't have to throw for 3,000 yards, Collaros didn't last year. He doesn't have to throw 30 TDs, Collaros never did. If he threw 14 INTs, that's what Collaros did 2 years ago. That is not a good example because that team was not very good.

We got a small glimpse of what Munchie could do last season. He clearly wasn't ready to be thrown into the fire. It was his first full year at QB. He was playing in some very intense and important games. He was really bad against Rutgers. He was solid against Syracuse. He played well at times against UConn. There were certainly training wheels on him last season. The offense was built around what Pead and Collaros could do. Munchie didn't have the same skill set as Collaros. Now the offense is going to be built around him. He's got some very talented receivers in McClung and Chisum and Thompkins. There are a plethora of running backs. Expectations for Munchie are kind of non existent. He's supposed to lead a middling team is what the experts are predicting. That's not saying much at all. The thing about expectations is, we can have them ourselves. Our expectations for this season for Munchie Legaux are anything we want them to be. I am not settling for middling in my expectations. No, mine are high. I believe that Munchie can lead the team to a better finish than 4th. I believe he is going to have a season that gets him put on one of the All Big East teams. I believe he's going to take UC to a bowl game, and god dammit he's going to win that bowl game. Fuck the Belk Bowl, I'm thinking about the Orange Bowl. Just because the media doesn't want to believe in the Bearcats doesn't mean we don't have to. Congrats to Louisville for being the bandwagon team. Ask Dave Ragone how the bandwagon was a few years back. This is going to be a great year. I know it will be because it's Munchie Legaux's year. And he won't let us down. 

Go Bearcats. Beat Pitt.