After last Tuesday’s regular-season opener in Vanderbilt’s lavishly renovated Memorial Gym, new coach Kevin Stallings spilled a secret: The place had been hit by a tornado on the Thursday evening previous.

Actually, he confessed, the whirlwind had taken human form—his—in response to a lackluster practice performance by his team. After his thunder came the storm: a grueling, full-court scrimmage that lasted three-and-a-half hours.

At practice the next night, Stallings noted with a half-smile, the Commodores played with the fear of God, or someone, in them. It’s impossible yet to forecast with certainty, but it’s a decent bet that there’ll be more tornado sightings—or hearings, anyhow—before the season advances very far. One thing you can already say in Stallings’ favor: Unlike his predecessor, Jan van Breda Kolff, he doesn’t spin for positives after a stinky showing.

In that spirit, perhaps it’s time for an unvarnished assessment. Whether or not Vandy’s players face any more marathon practice sessions, it’s a decent bet that Vandy fans are in for some long nights in the SEC.

Based solely on their three performances so far, you have to think that this team will strain to finish much above .500, even with the aid of one of the fluffiest non-conference schedules in recent memory. And with three Top 20 teams in their division alone, the Commodores realistically will be fighting for fourth or fifth place.

This looks to be a squad of bedeviling paradoxes. Vanderbilt’s lineup features four returning starters—all experienced upperclassman—yet the Commodores may struggle to find scoring from more than a couple of spots.

Their tallest starter, at 6-11, plays like a small forward. And though the ’Dores can field a tall, rugged-looking front line, they have shown little appetite so far for mixing it up inside and have rebounded poorly against three shorter, physically overmatched opponents.

It’s no wonder that Stallings hasn’t been particularly satisfied with his team. He knows that real tornadoes await in the form of Auburn, Florida, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

Just a game

Truth is, hardly anybody in Texas likes Aggies except for Aggies. That’s what made last week at Texas A&M all the more remarkable as an object lesson for football fans around the country.

Most of the media reports focused attention on how the school’s students and former students—who function, like perhaps no other university community in America, as one extended family—rallied together in the aftermath of the bonfire disaster that killed 12 people. That reaction, though moving, was hardly surprising.

What was perhaps more notable, though less frequently noted, was the response of A&M’s rivals, chief among them the equally Shiitic partisans of the University of Texas.

A little backstory is necessary here. The word “rivalry” is not very helpful in understanding the relationship between Texas and Texas A&M. Vanderbilt and Tennessee backers wouldn’t understand. In the South, perhaps only Auburn and Alabama can generate this much bile. More apt exemplars might be the Croats and Serbs. Or the Crips and Bloods. That these people live and work alongside each other after they leave school only stokes their fires of partisanship.

Just as Gerry DiNardo, during his Vandy days, couldn’t bring himself to say “UT,” Aggie fans steadfastly refuse to apply the correct acronym to the University of Texas, always referring to it instead as “TU.” The words to their fight song, “The Aggie War Hymn,” are explicitly directed against the orange-and-white.

Longhorn fans, for their part, gleefully circulate the ubiquitous Aggie jokes, which uphold A&M people as nitwitted evolutionary throwbacks.

Before their annual game, traditionally played on Thanksgiving Day, Aggie ultras try to kidnap the Texas mascot, Bevo. During the game, the cowboy-garbed Silver Spurs, the Longhorns’ officially sanctioned answer to Hell’s Angels, have been known to time the volleys of their end-zone cannon to scare nearby Aggie horses into ejecting their uniformed Aggie riders. The prospect of physical violence always hovers close by when the two schools meet for football. During the week of the big game, treading upon the A&M campus wearing the burnt orange of “TU” would be as advisable as strolling through the South Bronx at 3 a.m.

The Aggies are ready butts for jokes and easy targets for derision because they’re, well, different. Even in a state where individual eccentricities are worn as a badge of honor, Aggies as a group are as exotic as slot machines in a Baptist fellowship hall.

Though the school boasts more than 40,000 students, its image to the world is projected by the Corps, a uniformed cadre of a couple of thousand ROTC cadets. (Until the 1960s, A&M was a small, males-only school, and Corp membership was mandatory.)

Aggie cheers, led by Corps members in white jumpsuits, involve hand signals to the crowd and consist of phrases like “Farmers fight! Rah!”

(Another cheer, “Squeeze, Ags,” commands Corps members to grab their private parts to share the pain of their team on the football field.)

You can begin to appreciate how they came to be called Aggie jokes and not Horned Frog jokes or Red Raider jokes.

But the Aggies cling proudly, defiantly, to their distinctive traditions, such as their annual bonfire, their “yell practice,” their weird cheers, and their jackbooted military band. Tradition means everything at A&M, even though it also means that Aggies will be held up for ridicule or scorn for being unfashionably different.

The everybody-against-the-Aggies attitude that seems to prevail in Texas made the behavior of erstwhile Aggie baiters so dramatic.

In Austin, Texas cancelled its annual Hex A&M rally and turned off the lights in its landmark tower in remembrance of the victims of the bonfire collapse. After attending a memorial service at A&M, UT’s student body president wrote a letter extolling the Aggie spirit.

Among the Longhorn fans at Friday’s game, the tone was unusually muted. No one whooped or rubbed it in when Texas jumped to a 10-point lead. Many Aggie haters of long-standing found themselves unable to be unhappy when A&M rallied late to win, 20-16. Texas’ players remained on the field after the game and stood respectfully during the playing of “The Aggie War Hymn,” a taunting song that begins, “Goodbye to Texas University; so long to the Orange and the White.”

Given the atmosphere that usually prevails between these two teams, that gesture may have been the most astonishing, hopeful thing I’ve seen on a football field all year.

College football today is characterized by trash-talking and swaggering; punishing, extravagant margins of victory designed to impress pollsters; unrelenting pressure from fans; and a general lack of civility. It’s too bad that it took a tragedy to provide a reminder that this is only a game. It’s even worse that, at Alabama, Nebraska, Florida, Florida St., and even A&M and Texas, it soon will be back to business—and I mean business—as usual.

How It Looks From The La-Z-Boy

Titans 20, Ravens 16

For some reason, these two teams always seem to treat spectators to a train wreck: a game that’s buck-tooth ugly, so discordant that it’s like listening to fingernails screeching a chalkboard for three hours. In these gnarly contests, halftime becomes as much a respite for the fans as the players.

Given the Titans’ penchant for aesthetically challenged football this season, you’d be well-advised to limit your viewing on Sunday and keep the food in the kitchen. But if you don’t mind the spectacle of a wrasslin’ match in a hog wallow, come on down.

As usual, it will be nail-biting and gnarly. But with a little luck, the Titans will be 10-2 afterward.