Well, no need to torment myself watching the UT/OU game, I thought. No chance the Longhorns win playing the way they have this year, I thought.
The only sure thing about this UT team is that they’ll do the opposite of what I expect them to.
New defensive coordinator Greg Robinson has completely turned that unit around. And Mack Brown just might keep his job.
Legendary running back Earl Campbell says that it’s time for Mack Brown to step down.
“Nobody likes to get fired or leave a job, but things happen,” Campbell said. “I’d go on record and say ‘yes I think it’s time….[it’s] very hard because Coach Brown is a very good man,” Campbell said. “I just hope he doesn’t stay…he’s done some great things. The program, he brought it back, and we don’t need it to get run down where somebody has to start all over again.”
So how many years of grace does winning a National Championship give you? At Auburn, they fired Gene Chizik two years after winning a national championship (which also happened to be their first). That seems more than a little injudicious. Tennessee gave Phil Fulmer ten years after winning a National Championship. (And neither’s successor has set the world on fire.)
I was not among those calling Mack brown to resign when the team went 5-7 in 2010. Knee-jerk reactions to transient adversity are seldom warranted. But Brown has had several years to right the ship of one of the most institutionally powerful teams in Division 1 football, and has not managed to do so. Ultimately, Alamo and Holiday bowl wins are not enough for a man getting paid $5 million a year.
Maybe it’s time for a change.
November 16 next year, there will be a UT home football game (against OSU) and a Formula One race in Austin on the same weekend.
What could possibly go wrong?
The biggest winner? Hotel and motel owners in Bastrop.
If you plan on attending either of these events, you might want to make your reservations now…
In arrests of college football players, that is. SI and CBS news listed the arrest records for every team in the preseason top 25, and the two Texas teams in the list did comparatively well. Texas came in third-to-last, with only two players charged, while TCU came in dead last with none at all. Oklahoma came in tied for seventh with nine players arrested, and Pittsburgh ranked first (which is to say last) with a whopping 22 players charged.
The usual caveats (arrest is not conviction, innocent until proven guilty, yada yada yada) apply, but this is one ranking Texas football fans are happy to see their teams rank last in.
(“Texas leads the way” shtick blatantly stolen from Bill Crider.)
Numerous sources are reporting this morning that Nebraska is jumping from the Big 12 to the Big 10. (Nigel Tufnel: “Why do that? The Big 12 is two bigger!”) So now the Big 10 will have 12 members, and the Big 12 will have 11. Assuming, of course, that six of them don’t go off to the Pac-10, which would make it the PAC-16.
Of course the move is all about money. (Though I wonder how much having the Longhorns own the Cornhuskers in football contributed to the decision. Going back through the records, I was surprised to see that Nebraska has beaten Texas at football only once throughout the entire existence of the Big 12, and even that year (1999) they were only .500 against the Longhorns, having lost to them in the conference schedule before beating them in the Big 12 Championship game.)
But if it’s is all about money, why stop there? Every conference has its Little Sisters of the Poor for marquee programs to beat up on every year, be it Baylor or Vanderbilt. Why not create a real national power conference, consisting of all football powerhouses? Call it SuperConference America. (I was thinking about SuperConference USA, but that’s too close to Conference USA, about which there’s nothing super, and it’s best not to tarnish the brand before you’re even out of the gate.)
An eight team conference would look like this:
Alabama
Florida
LSU
Oklahoma
Ohio State
Penn State
Texas
USC
Every team there has a huge following and a strong football tradition, and every team there except Penn State has won a National Championship in the last decade.
Want to make it a sixteen team conference and add a Conference (and de facto National) Championship game? Add:
Florida State
Miami
Michigan
Nebraska
Notre Dame
Tennessee
Virginia Tech
one more team (BYU and Washington are two possibilities, if only for regional balance in the west)
Now you have a conference that includes every team that’s ever played for a National Championship in the BCS/BCA era, and every AP champion back to 1991.
Can you imagine the TV ratings of those powerhouse schools playing each other every week? I suspect SuperConference America would earn more than all the other football conferences combined; every week would feature multiple games between powerhouse teams. It would be great for fans and great for the schools included. (And schools left out? Well, no one is really worry about them in the current conference realignment, so why should we?)
Academics? Other sports? Rivalry games?
Yeah, let’s pretend those matter. This is all about money, and great football. But none of those schools are slouches in the academics department. As for other sports, just like Notre Dame plays in the Big East for everything else, the teams in SuperConference America could retain their existing conference affiliations for other sports. And 7 games against SuperConference America foes still leaves space on the schedule for the Longhorns to beat up on the Aggies, for Florida and Alabama to pretend Georgia matters, etc.
This scheme is a sure-fire money maker. No one is going to miss seeing Texas play Baylor when they can see them play Alabama every year. And the only thing anybody has to give up (except for a few wins every year from playing real football teams rather than conference patsies) is the pretense that college football conferences are about anything other than money.
With Longhorn safety Earl Thomas declaring for the NFL, and Pete Carroll decamping for the Seahawks, I thought I would post one short bit about why Longhorns fans love Mack Brown. (In addition to the whole “won a national Championship and constantly wins 10 games a year” thing.) Here’s what he said about Thomas’ decision:
“We appreciate everything Earl has done for Texas and want to wish him all of the best. He has been a great player for us and more importantly a tremendous person, student and representative of our program. We thank him, support him and look forward to following his career in the NFL.”
It may seem a touch biolerplate, but it’s a very thankful, very gracious statement. I’m sure more than one recruit’s mother or father will read that and go: “Gee, Mack Brown is such a nice guy. I feel safe entrusting my son to him.” And Brown does seem to manage his program in pretty a classy manner.
You would think this would be pretty standard for a college coach, or at least successful ones. But you’d be wrong. Contrast, for example, with then-USC coach Pete Carroll said when Mark Sanchez announced he was coming out early for the 2009 NFL Draft:
“We don’t see this decision the same. … Mark is going against the grain on this decision. He knows that. He knows that coming out early is a tremendous challenge for a quarterback. And the statistics don’t back up that it’s easy to be successful the way he’s going about it. We know that, he knows that. … I don’t agree with the assessment of the decision.”
That’s not quite rude, but it is pretty tone-deaf to talk that way about one of your best players. As for who was right, well, Sanchez has had his ups and downs, but given he’s $28 million richer and is starting for an NFL playoff team, you have to give him the edge.
I also found
(And no, I didn’t blog about UT’s loss to Alabama in the National Championship Game. When Colt McCoy got knocked out, it was obvious that UT’s chances of winning were going to be pretty slim, and I couldn’t bear to watch any more after that ill-fated shovel pass snafu that ended the first half. If McCoy had been healthy, the outcome might well have been different, but give the Crimson Tide credit: Their job was to beat the team that was actually on the field, and they did that in convincing fashion, so congrats to them for a well-earned National Championship.)
Texas barely wins on a (literally) last second field goal.
Either Nebraska has the best defense in the country (very possible), or UT will have real problems in the national championship game against Alabama unless Colt McCoy can regain some of last year’s poise.
Texas-Nebraska is an obvious mismatch.
Going into the Big 12 Championship, one team is a reigning powerhouse with a future Hall of Fame coach not far removed from a National Championship that views the game as a stepping stone for a chance to play a powerful Florida team for another national championship. The other is a former powerhouse, fallen on hard times but on the rebound with a new coach. But everyone agrees the game will be a speedbump on the powerhouse’s way to playing in another National Championship game..
Sound familiar? It should, because it describes not only the 2009 Big 12 Championship, but also the very first Big 12 Championship in 1996. There Nebraska was the reigning powerhouse, far more dominant in the 1990s (three National Championships in the 1990s under Tom Osborne) than Texas, which has just a single National Championship under Mack Brown. (Not that we’re complaining, mind you. We’re very happy to have both it and Mack Brown.) And the Nebraska team UT will be facing Saturday has a better record (9-3) than the Longhorn team going into the 1996 game (7-4). (As an added irony, the Texas win knocked Mack Brown’s North Carolina team out of a BCS bowl.. )
All that said, Texas is still (and should be) the prohibitive favorite. Neither Cody Green nor Zac Lee seems to be as crafty or nervy a quarterback as James Brown was for Texas. And Colt McCoy is probably the best college quarterback in the country right now.
Still, the Longhorns shouldn’t get cocky. If a team coached by John Mackovic can upset a defending National Champion, anything can happen.
Texas survives a shootout against A&M. Rivalry games are frequently closer than the betting line, but Will Muschamp can’t be pleased with a 6-5 (now 6-6) team lighting up his defense for more than 500 yards. Give the Ags credit: they weren’t given a chance going in, but they made a very close game of it. They have some players, especially Jerrod Johnson at QB. But A&M simply gave Colt McCoy too much time to work his magic, and Marquis Goodwin’s 95-yard kickoff return broke the Aggie’s back.
This was only one game, but Texas can’t expect to win a National Championship with defense like that. They have to do a better job against a more dangerous Nebraska team in the Big XII Championship, and then hope they don’t face another mobile quarterback in the National Championship. (Gee, I wonder who that might be?)
On the other hand, Colt McCoy only had a middling good night for him, and the Horns still put up 49 points.
You’ve got to hand it to the Aggies. They’re a young, aggressive team with some real players among their Freshmen and Sophmores. Next year they could be pretty dangerous, especially with Colt going off to whichever NFL team is smart enough to draft him. (God help him if it’s the Raiders.)
The Big XII South could be very interesting next year…
I have been known to watch football upon occasion. (I know, rooting for laundry.) Like most sports fans, I root for my hometown team, in this case Houston, and my alma mater team, the Texas Longhorns. (Who are doing very well indeed behind Colt McCoy this year. Thanks for asking.)
Of course the team I used to root for, the Houston Oilers, doesn’t exist anymore. The Oilers were a hard-nose, blue-collar team whose misfortune it was to have their heyday (late 70s/early-80s) during the reign of another hard-nose, blue-collar team in their division, the Pittsburg Steelers, who would win four Superbowls while the Oilers won squat. And the reason the Oilers never won anything, or made it to the Superbowl is (at least we bitter ex-Oilers fans like to think) due to owner Bud Adams.
After firing the winningest coach in team history and trading football legend Earl Campbell to New Orleans for a sack of doorknobs, Bud wasn’t done tormenting Houston football fans. After getting Houston taxpayers to pony up $67 million for upgrades to the Astrodome, Adams turned around and said that wasn’t enough, and Houston had to build a new football stadium for him. Houston told him where he could stick it. So Adams took his team (and carpetbag) away to Tennessee, where they became the Titans. (Or, as we in Texas like to call them, the Tennessee Traitors). The Titans promptly got to the Superbowl…and lost. The old Bud Adams magic was still alive!
In fact, I wrote a little song to celebrate the occasion:
Come listen to a story about a man named Bud
Orneriest football owner ever chewed a wad of cud
His Houston Oilers were as bad as they could be
So he loaded up the team and moved out to Tennessee
Nashville that is. Country music. Grand Ole Opry.
In their Houston days the Oilers were a disgrace
When they weren’t breakin’ hearts they just stunk up the place
To con the Nashville rubes, Bud had to change his game
So he sucked in his pride, and gave them a new name.
Titans, that is. Evil giants. Greek myth.
Well come Y2K, and they’re in the title game.
Reverting back to form, the Ex-Oilers come up lame.
Hey Bud, the Superbowl just ain’t where you oughta be!
Next season they’ll be back to mediocrity.
Don’t come back now, ya hear?
Not long after this, Houston gets an expansion franchise, the Houston Texans, who proceed to suck much of the decade. (They’re in the same division as the Indianapolis Colts, the Jacksonville jaguars and, yes, the Titans.) However, after ditching the inconsistent David Carr for Matt Schaub, and firing Dom Capers and putting Gary Kubiak in his place as coach, the Texans have been on the upswing. Meanwhile, the Titans went from having the best record in 2008 to starting the season with six straight losses in 2009.
Which brings up to the present, when the Texans will be playing the Titans on Monday Night Football. This is by no means a slam dunk (pardon the mixed-sport metaphors) for the Texans, since the Titans have won three straight after putting former Longhorn Vince Young in as quarterback. (“Hey, our team is winless and we have an inhumanly gifted quarterback sitting on the bench. Do you think we should play him?”)
It should be a great game…and another chance to humiliate Bud Adams. (Once he gets over the sting of that $250,000 fine for, ah, digital manipulation.)
And Nashville? Bud is YOUR problem now. No backsies…