I moved to Texas damn near twenty years ago. I have embraced the food and the music and the aggrandizing self-importance. Very near the top of my favoritie things about Texas is my wife’s TCU Horned Frogs, who (especially at the time) were custom tailored to appeal to my fondness for systemic underdogs. I get a kind of positive joy out of their success that probably goes beyond even what I feel from my own alma mater, which is at least as much about schadenfreude and grievance as it is about nostalgia and community. For me, being a TCU fan is tied into warm and fuzzy feelings of family and personal growth and perseverance, plus we got married on campus.

So all that being said… Riff Ram is, ummm, pretty esoteric (i.e. “goofy AF”) and I can’t quite make myself love it, especially when they/“we” take it so seriously like in the annual Riff Ram videos.