It’s possible that Austin Romaine is a great professional football player, makes a lot of money more than he ever made as a linebacker at Texas Tech, and maybe gets drafted by an NFL team that isn’t great. Maybe he’ll be known as more than the guy named after a lettuce.
But even if bad luck in the athlete business befalls him and none of those things happen, he still has Saturday left, and if that’s not enough to get him free drinks in Lubbock for a decade, then shame on Lubbock for anything else.
Romaine intercepted a pass from Sam Houston State University quarterback Brett Holloway and returned it 15 yards for a touchdown in the Red Raiders’ 760-7 (okay, 49-14) victory over SHSU on Saturday. Which is obviously not serious. Pick sixes happen all the time. Most Texas citizens could do it in street clothes, or will tell you to.
But seven seconds later, he did it again, on the next play, this time for 31 yards and against another quarterback, original starter Landyn Locke. A pick-12, if you insist. It took a momentarily close game between the haves and the have-nots in the new landscape of college football and transformed it from an alumni-checking, contract-buying out language game into a heartwarming rout in the time it takes you to walk out of the bathroom without washing your hands and ask, “What did I miss?”
Surprisingly, this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Duke’s DeVon Edwards did it against North Carolina State in 2013, and apparently also returned a kickoff 100 yards for a third score. We say “apparently” because some sites list the revenant as Niklas Sade, and frankly, that’s Duke’s problem, not yours. The thing is, Edwards did the other things, so as strange as Romaine’s feat may seem, it’s not unprecedented. But it’s undeniably cool.
The impact this will have on the rest of his life remains to be seen, of course. Football is a series of events characterized by bad luck, more serious injuries and, every once in a while, more money than a person can reasonably eat. Romaine could be one of the three, and maybe all of them. Based on a series of NFL draft sites (we stopped at nine because the gods didn’t want anyone spending that much time on that sordid corner of the Internet grease trap), he’s listed as a linebacker between seventh (Big Board Scouting) and 31st (NFL Draft Buzz), and one site (Walter Football) doesn’t rank him, although its veracity may be questioned since he has LSU at inside linebacker Whit Weeks ranked sixth and eighth, and we bet. he’s not good enough to be both.
But one of the sites (if you care which one, go take a walk in the sun and think kindly of the deranged shut-in who does this sort of thing for a living) also described Romaine with these words: “a descent noisemaker”. Maybe it’s even cooler than his Saturday job, because at the very least he can scare his grandchildren forty years from now when they misbehave by growling loudly, “You don’t want the Downhill Thumper to come upstairs and set you straight, do you?”
After all, there is no power as grandiose and satisfying as threatening not to have Christmas for you from the parent most likely to buy you a ridiculously expensive and potentially dangerous gift. Austin Romaine, you kicked life’s ass and drove it head first into the rose bushes. Well done, you.
Gn headline
