Road to Game Day: Dallas Not All That It's Cracked Up to Be ... At Least Not Yet

Words by Keith Arnold, who is touring the country with his brother Phil as they invade a different college campus each Saturday during the football season. They’ll be reporting back in this space with their various adventures. You can also keep tabs on their vagabonding over at RoadtoGameDay.com. This weekend, they're in Dallas for the Oklahoma-Texas game.

When we started this journey, I didn’t have a grasp on certain things. Good hotels really do have better pillows. And eating McDonald’s for breakfast and lunch makes your jeans a little snug, but you’ve got a much better chance at winning Monopoly (started October 7). One of the things I definitely didn’t grasp was just how big Texas is. I bet if I asked most people what city was farther away from Dallas -- St. Paul or Los Angeles -- most people would guess LA. Rationale (mine, at least) being both are considered in the Southwest, and Minnesota seems like its on a completely opposite side of the country. Well, after doing relay races across Texas for the past month, we were happy to find out that Dallas is 500 miles closer to St. Paul than it is to LA. Take that, Carmen San Diego.

We arrived in Dallas yesterday afternoon after taking the relatively easy 1,000-mile drive from our parents house in Minnesota. One of the few perks of this economic beatdown that’s going on is that oil prices have started to drop. Starting in Minnesota, we filled up four times with sub-three dollar gas. After spending the night in a one-star dump in Oklahoma City, we had around 200 miles to Dallas, and gas stations with prices around $2.75. We couldn’t wait until Texas -- home of all things oil and gas -- to see what gas would cost there.

Whoops.

Filling up in Dallas for $3.40 a gallon felt like losing your wallet to a blackjack dealer. How can a state that supplies the fuel in this country, and is run by Republicans who allege to hate taxes, have gas that costs almost 70 cents more than a place 45 miles away? Couple that with the fact that every road in this city seems to have a toll attached, and our early impressions of Dallas aren’t good. They even charge you to drive into the airport, where just looping in to pick up my buddy cost us two bucks.

I might have had unrealistic expectations for Dallas. It doesn’t help that I’m smack in the middle of Boys will be Boys, the incredible book by Jeff Pearlman about the Cowboys dynasty under Jimmy Johnson. While this isn’t a book review, let me just say you should run and get it. If the internet and camera phones were around when Michael Irvin, Emmitt Smith and Charles Haley were playing, these guys would be in jail. I can’t believe that Ricky Jean-Frenchy of LSU can say he’s going to take out Tim Tebow and it’s a story for three days on ESPN and Pacman Jones’ non-scuffle scuffle at a hotel is breaking news, but Mike Irvin and the other Cowboys could spend weekends working their way through dozens of hookers and drugs at a strip joint in Dallas and no one even thought about an E:60 episode.

But back to the reason we’re in Dallas in the first place: The game this weekend between Texas and Oklahoma, which should be a good one. I’m not sure the Longhorns can hang with Oklahoma, but I haven’t officially trusted a Bob Stoops team since they got embarrassed at the Orange Bowl by USC a few years ago. We had no idea that the Cotton Bowl is on the Texas State Fairgrounds, and the state fair, like all things in Texas, is really big. So we’re off to do Dallasy stuff today, like look for the 2nd gunman on the grassy knoll, and blonde chicks with lovely “enhancements”. Kinda like the ladies pictured in the upper right. We hear they’re everywhere around here.

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.