The Circus That Is Texas Football

After last week’s epic FUBAR of a coaching search, you might have thought that Texas football had hit a new low. Now reports are coming out that the disaster may have been by design and that coach Charlie Strong’s days in Austin may be numbered.

Do you ever miss the good ole days of Longhorns Inc.? You know, when then Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds and head coach Mack Brown had Texas humming like a fine tuned machine? You can say what you want about those days, but you can’t argue that DeLoss wouldn’t have bungled the offensive coordinator search the way Texas dropped it last week.

What if that was all by design?

Reports are leaking out from behind the paywalls that Texas brass intentionally left Charlie Strong out on a limb last week and that their lack of support is evidence that it is not a matter of if, but when, Strong gets the boot.

According to these reports, AD Mike Perrin left Austin for New York to attend Ricky Williams’ Hall Of Fame induction as opposed to being there to help Strong land his chosen offensive coordinator, Sonny Cumbie of TCU. Cumbie balked at the job when no one in Austin would give him assurances that Strong would return in 2017.

That same lack of support almost wrecked his attempted hire of Tulsa’s Sterlin Gilbert, forcing school president Greg Fenves, Perrin and Strong to make an emergency flight to Tulsa to change Gilbert’s mind. The mere fact that the president, AD and head coach had to beg a guy to leave Tulsa for Texas was embarrassing by itself.

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Perrin and Fenves were both solid and outspoken in support for Strong during the difficult regular season, even as reports swirled that Strong might bolt for Miami. Was all of that support just an act? It might have been.

What doesn’t make sense is why. Although Strong had his supporters, I doubt that there would have been too many second guessers after Texas suffered through a 5-7 season that included losses of 38-3, 50-7 and 24-0. I personally made the decision that Strong was in over his head after the Beatdown in Cowtown, when Strong’s players were tweeting at halftime and publicly sniping afterward.

That realization made it impossible for me to enjoy Strong’s signature moment, his team’s stunning victory over Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. That win felt empty then and it still does.

If the powers that be at Texas don’t feel that Strong is the man, they should have done the right thing and fired Strong immediately after the Texas Tech loss guaranteed a losing season. They could have named an interim coach for the meaningless finale at Baylor and started their coaching search immediately. That would have been the right thing to do.

We have forgotten how good things were under Mack Brown until the losing started and desperation set in. Courtesy of bleacherreport.com

If Texas leadership is instead setting up Strong to fail in 2016 so that they can fire him next year, then they are not only sacrificing next season but the are also betraying a good man who deserves better. Strong may not be the right man for the job, but no one has ever questioned his morals, his integrity or his honesty. He deserves better than having his bosses plotting his ouster while paying lip service to supporting him.

If Texas is indeed gambling on Strong’s failure, they run the risk of repeating one of the worst mistakes of recent Longhorn history, their failure to fire David McWilliams in 1989.

Quick history lesson. After taking over from the fired Fred Akers, McWilliams’ first team wins seven games, including the Bluebonnet Bowl. After that, they go 4-7 and 5-6 including several humiliating defeats. They end the 1989 season by losing 50-7 to Baylor in their home finale and 21-10 to Texas A&M.

At this point, Texas could have and should have cut bait. Instead, they give McWilliams one more year. He catches lightning in a bottle, going 10-2 with a SWC championship, a Cotton Bowl berth and a#3 ranking in the final regular season poll. McWilliams is rewarded with a contract extension. The next year, the team slips back to 5-6, McWilliams is fired and it will take successor John Mackovic three more seasons to get Texas back to a bowl. When Mackovic finally accomplishes that task, it ends a streak of 6 out of 8 seasons without a bowl game for Texas.

Texas Longhorns /

Texas Longhorns

So here we are again. Instead of just doing the deed and moving on, Texas is going to gamble that Strong will fall on his face so they can replace him. Are they willing to let the program continue to suffer just to they can claim that they gave Strong a fair chance? According to reports, the only reason he wasn’t fire this is because “Texas doesn’t fire guys after two years”. What’s the difference. He is either your guy or he’s not. If you don’t think he’s the guy, make a move, don’t wait around and hope he proves you right. That’s insane.

We would all like to think that our chosen school wouldn’t do something so underhanded, but this sort of thing happens all of the time. Unfortunately, the days of Longhorns Inc and it’s architects are long gone and in the new world of Texas football, class and integrity have been replaced by the bottom line.

It is possible that this is all just more bad PR from a program that couldn’t put a positive shine on a diamond at this point, but there seems to be enough evidence to support the theory that Texas is setting up their head coach to fail. Often when to comes to rumors of this sort, there is fire where there is smoke. If you’re Charlie Strong, how do you go on, knowing that your bosses may already be plotting your removal?

One thing is for certain, chaos and dysfunction now rule the day in Austin. That’s a sad state of affairs for a program that not so long ago was the poster child for how to build and run a program. It didn’t take long to fall this far, but the climb back up could be a very long one.

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