122 minutes ago, Brent Hubbs made a simple request:

“I beg of you all to focus on football on here today…”

Not please.

Not let’s try.

I beg of you.

Kickoff is still hours away and the publisher has already walked into the saloon, looked around at the overturned furniture, and asked everybody to please put the bottles down.

The board spent the morning doing everything except calmly discussing Tennessee-Texas. We have officiating paranoia. We have people reporting people. We have people asking whether other people have been reported. We have the traditional “hope I am wrong” battalion getting into formation. And somewhere beneath all of it, there is apparently a football game scheduled for later today.

Hubbs has seen enough.

Which brings us to the final pregame reading.

Tennessee Oh-Shit Temperature Gauge

CALM — Long abandoned.

CONCERNED — Passed out before breakfast.

NERVOUS — Briefly occupied.

OH SHIT — HUBBS IS NOW BEGGING.

This is no longer ordinary pregame anxiety.

This is crowd control.

The beautiful part is that Hubbs didn’t even have to explain what everyone needed to stop doing. Everybody knew.

When the principal walks into the cafeteria and simply says, “Guys…”, the lunchroom already knows somebody threw the milk carton.

Pregame board intelligence

• Texas is either terrifying or wildly overrated, sometimes in consecutive posts.
• Officiating concerns have reached the preemptive grievance stage.
• The pessimists have begun issuing “I hope I’m wrong” insurance policies.
• Posters are keeping tabs on who has reported whom.
• Football remains somewhere on the agenda.
• Brent Hubbs has requested football.

That last one carries weight.

Because when the man running the place has to specifically ask a college football message board to discuss college football on the morning of a college football game, the gauge has stopped measuring confidence.

It is measuring structural integrity.

Final pregame reading: OH SHIT.

And we haven’t even kicked the damn ball yet.

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Related: Board Has Tennessee Losing by 27. Maybe That’s the Point and Old Coach U, Part II: Keys to the Win and Other Things Texas Should Definitely Read.