With the money, facilities and the recruiting base that are there for Texas why are they getting the crap beat out of them by traditional and hated rival Oklahoma? 63-21 is a serious smack-down.
You tell me. Is Oklahoma that good?
Mods. Please move to the Game Room. Sorry.
(puts down rusty razor blade about to be used to slash wrists)
Well, that’s it. Who knows? Is it a mental thing? I’m never that guy, but today I thought to myself, “It’s time for Mack to go.” We’ve been walloped by o.u. before, but typically when they had all-world athletes like Demarco Murray or Roy Williams. This was a good, but not great team. And they bitchslapped us up and down the field.
We’ve got Olympic speed on offense. One of the most efficient QBs in the nation, a trio of RBs that any school would kill to have… yes, the LBs and DBs are suspect but overall the D was shaping up to be a “bend don’t break” sort of unit.
This is probably one of the top 5 worst Texas performances I’ve seen, and I’ve been watching since I was a kid in the mid '80s. And it appears to me to be mostly mental.
The knock against Mack’s teams has always been that they’re soft. Physically and mentally. I think I understand what that means. This team could have been beaten by o.u. by 2 TDs - that’s reasonable. But 63-21 is you basically bending over and lubing up. The last TD was scored as time expired, so it’s really 63-14, with one of those TDs coming on a pick 6.
Texas for the past decade has slapped around teams with inferior talent. But the weak sisters in the state and Big XII have started taking revenge - we’ve lost to Baylor and Tech (partly because they’ve had NFL quality recruits as of late). Everybody hates Texas, so we get everyone’s best shot. I think we’re too arrogant, too complacent, too cozy, and too believing of our own hype.
I think it’s time for a regime change.
Hippy,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. When I first saw the pictures of the locker room and facilities at UT I thought, “How cannot these guys recruit every top player.” They should be in the top three or four every year.
http://www.mackbrown-texasfootball.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/longhorn-locker-room.html
http://www.mackbrown-texasfootball.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/players-lounge.html
But you are probably right. They just may be soft. Usually that comes down to the coaching. Sounds like the program needs a huge ass-kick. It looks like they are doing less with more. I like programs that do more with less.
R. P., I have a former student who’s an athletic adviser for the men’s athletic program - I’ve toured the facility, the lounges, even the study area (where they have every book on the shelf for every class that any UT athlete takes)… it is opulent. In fact, one of my students who is a sport management doctoral researcher took us over to the Stark Museum - the conference room looked like something off a Hollywood set when they are trying to convey that it’s the Richest Company in the World.
But I think the problem is this: Mack Brown has been known as Coach February for an age. But without question, compare the recruiting classes four years later. Carroll’s classes pan out. Saban’s guys pan out. Mack’s team come up short. The only deodorant, really, was three years of the greatest college football player of all time, followed with the most accurate and grittiest QB to wear the burnt orange - Vince Young and Colt McCoy, respectively.
They’ve taken to having schollys awarded to juniors and not really participating in the recruitment game. So a kid gets an offer in his junior year… he’s got nothing left to prove, no last opportunity to impress the coaches. And it means that the staff has no pressure to beat o.u. to sway the kids on the fence to put their lot in with Texas. Basically you’ve got fanboys (talented ones, mind you) coming to campus, who live like gods… and in the old days, could line up on Saturday and kick the teeth out of Iowa State, Kansas, or Baylor… but guess what? All of those teams are better because of the revenue sharing in the Big 12. They have better athletes - not better than Texas’ but good enough to get the best of us in an alley fight.
Aggies have a stereotype of UT students - they call us “tea sips,” meaning we sit on the veranda sipping tea and not getting our hands dirty. Milquetoasts, if you will. Guess what? That’s exactly who our football team is. 
The other day, Grantland put up an article written by Dan Jenkins that was from Sports Illustrated about a weekend of football. Ir is certainly worth a read for any UT fan.
Hippy, I have to admire your candor. I think they should hire you as the AD.
This came up on the Miami board I look at, and the phrase that came up several times was, as noted above, doing less with more. I agree it comes down to coaching and recruiting and have heard many times about the UT recruiting process that HH mentioned above. Ironically, in the Nebraska thread here, I mentioned coaching being the most important thing and gave Mack Brown as an example for his late 90s UNC teams. Those teams had a ton of talent and gave FSU a real run. I can’t imagine Brown coming anywhere close to that success these days if he were to return to UNC.
Now, remembering the woeful days of David McWilliams and John Mackovic, I’m not inclined to be TOO hard on Mack Brown. The man did a great job in restoring the program ro prominence and attracting in-state talent that the Longhorns hadn’t been getting.
The problem is, Mack doesn’t seem to do much with the talent he attracts. When he attracts the best of the best (and he often does), he wins. But players just don’t seem to improve or develop much under his watch. Even when Texas players are drafted high by NFL teams (again, that happens a lot), the players are often described as “raw” or “a project.” And THAT is mind-blowing. After four years at a major NCAA program, a star player shouldn’t still be a project.
Mack, like Rick Barnes, is VERY good at bringing great players to Texas… but he doesn’t seem to have the knack for getting the best out of them or for developing them.
True. I still think Mack’s a swell guy. He should be recognized for what he’s done for Texas and restoring the University to prominence, especially among the high school coaches. But you nailed it. He and Barnes have the same issue. Great recruiters, but those kids don’t get any better. Which is why a o.u. team with 3 and 4 star guys who didn’t get an offer from Texas can kick the living shit out of 3 or 4 years of the top 5 recruiting classes in the nation.
The problem is pervasive. Look at NFL rosters - you’ll see LSU, Bama, USC, Michigan players everywhere. The only missing school that perennially has top 10 finishes and is an elite program is Texas. The two positions where Texas players excel are DB and K, pretty much, and some OL/DL. Yes, we have a little bit of power in the RBs - Williams (when he was sane, did a lot of damage), Charles, Benson, Holmes. But most skill guys (QBs, WRs) wash out of the NFL.
Our inside sales guy is a UT alum, I asked him for some help with a math problem:
How many times will 21 go into 63?
The answer? One!
The TU defense was awful in this game, but bigger picture is poor Qb play. Yes, Ash has been very efficient this season feasting on porous defenses. Once they had to play a team with a mediocre D they fall apart.
I agree with you that Mack Brown takes 5 star recruits and does absolutely nothing with them. However I think the bigger problem is Texas Highschool football in general. They have morphed into a Offense (particularly the “spread”) only football ideology where more emphasis is placed on dinking & dunking the football allowing a Qb to be very efficient without having to do much. When these kids have to play a team with an actual defense (which isn’t often in the Big XII) they IMHO are clueless on how to attack.
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I disagree. Ash wasn’t the reason this game was lost. A significant proportion of Harsin’s offense is screens, short hitches, etc. Texas has enormous talent at RB to take the pressure off. What I saw, more disturbingly, was a complete defensive meltdown. It was as if they thought it was flag football.
The other issue, of course, is that half of the o.u. roster comes from Texas. So by this logic, they should suck too. It’s down to coaching, and removing that sense of entitlement that players have simply because they wear the burnt orange and white.
I’m skeptical that high school coaches outside of Texas are choosing to lose to bigger and more physical opponents for the sake of improving their defensive players for power football at the next level. Texas’ problem isn’t that it’s state’s high school football can’t play defense, it’s that the current coaching staff can’t coach them well. Muschamp put together one of the best defenses in the county four years ago when he was at Texas with pretty much all Texas kids. Currently, Oklahoma does just fine on defense with Texas high school grads.
To say that Texas is losing because they don’t have the defensive talent in state doesn’t make any sense. The schools that Texas is getting beat by every year all have less defensive resources. They all recruit mostly Texas kids too, usually the ones that Texas didn’t want. Texas started losing in 2010 and 2011 because the coaches couldn’t move anywhere on the offense, the defense was actually pretty good if you take into account Gilbert was throwing picks in Texas territory 4 or 5 times a game. The defense is, of course, a the huge issue now, but its more of a recent symptom of a deeper problem than the source.
While I was speaking about this game, I guess it should have been phrased as more of an indictment of the program over the last few seasons.
Well they were playing a team with 95% of their players from Texas soooo…
Seriously though, I think both of these teams would be crushed by any one of the top 5-6 teams in the SEC, but not because of a talent disparity. They would lose a majority of these games because the other team will just wear them down physically. Take OU’s roster of players from Texas, a majority of them are at the skilled positions, and not at the interior DL, OL, or LB. I stand by what I said earlier, it starts on the high-school level where Texas and states in the SE (Georgia, Florida, S.C., Alabama etc.) are at two ends of the spectrum, philosophically speaking.
I’m not saying they don’t have the defensive talent, Texas has the richest football talent in the country (on both sides of the ball), and produces more D-1 talent then any other state. I’m saying that at the high-school level the defensive side takes a backseat to the offense. And the best players are moved to the skilled positions creating a talent gap on one side of the ball. To the point I made earlier, when the offense is pampered like it is, IMHO the defensive nastiness that is required to go up against the Alabama’s of the world isn’t there.
I just thought it would be worth pointing out that voters in the Coaches’ Poll (e.g. graduate assistants or team dentists or something) feel that the Longhorns’ win over Kansas merits a 2-point bump in their poll. #24 last week, #22 this week. A few more last-second squeakers against 1-win teams like that, and maybe they’ll make the top 10!
I think Hippy Hollow has it right- Vince Young and Colt McCoy are the deodorant for the program; in the past, when it started to smell (Chris Simms, Chance Mock), they managed to whip out either Major Applewhite (underrated, IMO) or Vince Young, and save the day. After Young, they rolled straight into Colt McCoy.
Now that none of Garrett Gilbert, David Ash or little McCoy have panned out to be worth a crap, the rest of the problems with UT are coming to light. Those problems have always been there- look at how awful they tended to be under Simms (before putting Applewhite in during the 2nd half.
And, I don’t think the top 3-4 SEC teams would “crush” UT; they’re certainly not crushing A&M, who was typically a decent opponent for UT before our departure for the SEC.
Not losing has a lot more to do with moving up in the rankings than winning does. In this case, both Ohio and Michigan lost and subsequently dropped from above Texas to off the rankings.