It has been said many times that the Sunday when the two NFL Conference Championship games are played is the best day of football all season. I’m not sure that is always true, but it is often true. Typically those two games are much better than the Super Bowl game. The playoffs in any sport always produce great drama. At some moment during the game or just at the last second of the game you can see it, the faces of winners and losers.
The winners are all smiles. The winners are jumping around with their arms extended and holding up their index finger shouting “We’re number one!” You see high fives, chest bumps, fists bumps, head bumps, and you even see grown men hugging and crying because of the joy of the moment. Coaches, owners, players, trainers, water boys, security personnel…. Anyone and everyone who is a part of the team or organization are in full celebration mode. They are doing exactly what comes natural for a winner. After all, they are the winners!
On the other hand, the losers are not smiling. The losers are not jumping around. ...

One of the things I enjoy doing as I run errands around town is taking a different route to the location to which I am going. I guess traveling down the same old streets just gets a bit boring for me. Plus, I love to see places that I have never seen before. I especially like to drive around in the older parts of town. The historical district and the older neighborhoods with the old craftsman style homes just seem to have more character than the homes on the west side of town.
The other day I happen to be out running an errand and somehow found myself at the corner of Kentucky and Graham. For whatever reason I had never been on that street before. On that day sitting at that intersection I found a visual treasure. As I looked off to the west, in the distance there was an old farm house on top of the next hill. It stands there all by itself not surrounded by anything except trees and sunshine. At the moment I saw the house it was just one of those picturest moments – an...

How many times have you shopped and shopped for just the right gift for one of your children and wrapped it up just right for Christmas morning and then waited for the moment your son or daughter opened the gift to then discover that it needed batteries and they were “not included”? If you are like me, you have done that more than once in your life. I can remember one Christmas where it seemed as if almost everything we purchased for our children needed batteries of some kind. Or the toy came with rechargeable batteries and you would have to wait eight hours while the batteries charged up before you could play with the toy. At some point you learn to just buy several batteries of different sizes for Christmas morning because someone is going to need one or two in order to make that perfect gift operate on Christmas day.
Well this year I am taking a different approach to this problem. This year I am giving people the gift of batteries with a short note attached that says, “Device Not Included”. Then the person can simply go the store of their...

Just the other day while I was watching one of the Thanksgiving Day Football games I saw a commercial that took me back to my childhood. It must not have been a very good commercial because I have no idea what product was being advertised, but it did get my attention. What grabbed my attention was the video of someone playing an old school vibrating football game. If you know what I’m talking about that means at least one thing about you is true, you are old. For those who do not know what I’m talking about this game was pretty simple in design. You have two teams of football guys which you would stand up on a small table top box that had a small football field painted on it. Once you had both teams lined up you simply turned on the switch and the box started vibrating which caused the little men on the table to move around. You had no way of controlling what the men did or where they went and most of the time all the players would just fall over. Now as lame as that sounds...

Orange Traffic Cones are everywhere. As you drive around you see them being used for all kinds of reasons and functions. The city uses them to mark lane closures or detours. The police and the department of public safety use them to warn drivers that a wreck is up ahead and you should move to the next lane. Construction workers use them to mark off an area where workers are so as to keep them safe from on coming traffic. I have often thought that I could park almost anyway if I just had a orange cone to set out beside my truck. As a matter of fact I have joking told my children to not buy a parking sticker for the university, but to rather buy an orange cone and park anywhere they need to park on campus. They of course never did that, but it would have been interesting to see someone try it.

When you think about it, the orange cones in of themselves have no power or control over anyone. A car or truck can easily drive around or over or through a cone. The power...

It did not take long for the word to spread throughout the Abilene Christian University student body, alumni, family and friends that a bus carrying students and faculty had over turned on a two lane high way near Paint Rock, Texas. They were on their way to Medina Children’s home to participate in a Fall Mission Trip. They were on their way to make a difference in the lives of children who were expecting another amazing weekend with the group from ACU. You see, this bus load of students was carrying on a half century tradition of students giving of their time on a weekend to make a difference in the lives of others. There is no telling how many trips have been made down that exact same highway over the years.
This trip even though it was tragic is still amazing to me. It was late Friday and the world changed forever as one student lost her life and many others were injured and taken to various hospitals. The amazing part is what happened next.
Next, the ACU family went into action and reaction. The news spread quickly....

Where does one start in an attempt to explain why the Texas Rangers failed to win the World Series? Yes, where does one begin?..... Well, not that it would have mattered, but it may have matter a little bit, let’s start with having the Home Field Advantage. As you know by now the Home Field advantage for the World Series is determined by the winner of the All Star game played each July. For those who do not know, what this means is simply this, if the National League wins the All Star Game then the winner of the NLCS will have the Home Field Advantage for the World Series. The same would be true if the American League won the All Star Game.
To my limited knowledge this may be the only place in sports where the home field is determined by people who are not playing the actual playoff game. This year (and it may just be that my Rangers were playing) it was especially weird that a team with a worse record had the home field advantage over a team with a superior record. Home Field turned out to be very...