Matthew McConaughey is, above all else, a Texas Longhorns fan. Ok, that’s not true — he wears a lot of different hats — but the man’s wardrobe includes a lot of burnt orange to celebrate his alma mater. He’s spent some time in Austin as a professor and is a fixture on the sidelines of Longhorn sporting events.
All if this is important context for why the video on the top of this post exists. As Chris Deville of Stereogum noted, McConaughey has done a lot of stuff recently around the phrase “bless the mood,” a reference to the university’s recently-opened basketball arena, the Moody Center. (Do you get it?)
The newest example of this is a video he released to his YouTube account on Wednesday called “Bless the Mood,” which appears to double as a hype video for the 2022-23 Longhorns basketball season. There’s some rapping or singing or some blend of the two by the Oscar winner, and there are a lot of highlights of Texas basketball players doing the stuff you normally expect in one of these things.
Anyway, for how silly this all is, perhaps its release provided the Longhorns a spark on Wednesday night when they played host to the Gonzaga Bulldogs. While the Zags entered the game ranked No. 2 in the country, 11th-ranked Texas ran them out of the building in a 93-74 win.