2014 Longhorn Football Prospectus: Thinking Texas Football

By Paul Wadlington

Welcome to the second annual 2014 Longhorn Football Prospectus: Thinking Texas Football.

This book is a Texas football preview, a season companion and reference guide, and a resource for the entire football season. Our goal is to present a rational, insightful and entertaining assessment of an exciting new era of Longhorn Football. We also want to dive into Texas’ opponents and the Big 12 Conference as a whole, while imparting a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of the game that will help you enjoy game day, and our Longhorns, all the more.

We wrote this guide because we believe it fills an important, underserved niche in the market. Like many passionate football fans reading regional or national publications, we realized that we knew more about our team and conference than the “experts.” And most of their previews might better be termed “historicals” - as they are written in April for June publication. We targeted an August release to include the most recent developments: transfers, injuries, off-season intelligence, and staff hires.

Local media vary widely in talent and intellectual curiosity and even the best of them are constrained by the need to fit formulae into a 800 word column, catering to sports section readers that their editors believe operate at a 8th grade reading level. Thinking Texas Football, in deference to its name, is written for an intelligent football layperson. We won’t insult you by writing down to the lowest common denominator nor will we try to overawe you with technical babble.

The internet has several fantastic resources - public and pay - but they (where we write included) serve a reactive news cycle and rarely have the chance to be comprehensive and develop deeper themes. It’s the difference between books and newspapers. We like both.

Our best ambition is to provide you with different tools - while plainly communicating an awareness of our own biases and blind spots - so that we can drive a conversation that mutually enriches our shared passion.

If you like it, tell a friend. If you really like it, buy several and send it to all of your friends. We hope they’ll appreciate it as much as we do.

Hook ‘em!
- Paul, Jason, Scott

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Wadlington
• Release date: Jul 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311635723

Paul Wadlington

Texas graduate and long-time corporate monkey turned media entrepreneur and writer. Currently living in San Francisco, CA.

Book preview

Welcome to the second annual 2014 Longhorn Football Prospectus: Thinking Texas Football.

This book is a Texas football preview, a season companion and reference guide, and a resource for the entire football season. Our goal is to present a rational, insightful and entertaining assessment of an exciting new era of Longhorn Football. We also want to dive into Texas’ opponents and the Big 12 Conference as a whole, while imparting a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of the game that will help you enjoy game day, and our Longhorns, all the more.

We wrote this guide because we believe it fills an important, underserved niche in the market. Like many passionate football fans reading regional or national publications, we realized that we knew more about our team and conference than the experts. And most of their previews might better be termed historicals - as they are written in April for June publication. We targeted an August release to include the most recent developments: transfers, injuries, off-season intelligence, and staff hires.

Local media vary widely in talent and intellectual curiosity and even the best of them are constrained by the need to fit formulae into a 800 word column, catering to sports section readers that their editors believe operate at a 8th grade reading level. Thinking Texas Football, in deference to its name, is written for an intelligent football layperson. We won’t insult you by writing down to the lowest common denominator nor will we try to overawe you with technical babble.

The internet has several fantastic resources - public and pay - but they (where we write included) serve a reactive news cycle and rarely have the chance to be comprehensive and develop deeper themes. It’s the difference between books and newspapers. We like both.

Our best ambition is to provide you with different tools - while plainly communicating an awareness of our own biases and blind spots - so that we can drive a conversation that mutually enriches our shared passion.

If you like it, tell a friend. If you really like it, buy several and send it to all of your friends. We hope they’ll appreciate it as much as we do.  

Hook ‘em!

- Paul, Jason, Scott

Charlie Strong’s Future at Texas

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The Optimist’s View

Texas coaching hires, like most presidential elections, are an exercise in oversteering from the previous regime. The merits and charms of the previous office holder begin to wear on the electorate, new weaknesses reveal themselves and former supporters eventually offer a sharp rebuke to the very attributes they treasured just a few years before. Over the last 60 years, Texas has oversteered more sharply than a sleepy drunk on an icy road who feels the lights of an eighteen wheeler burning his dumb, droopy eyelids open; bawling as he spins the wheel wildly, his buttocks clenched fiercely on rich Corinthian leather. That’s a kind description of UT’s traditional hiring process. In the drought between Akers to Brown, we’d have had better success throwing darts at a phone book.

With apologies to DX Bible and his predecessors, modern Texas football began when a youthful, energetic, disciplined and relatively unknown 32 year old Darrell Royal replaced the middle-aged, laid back Ed Price in 1956 (Coach Price was most notable for holding practices in which gorgeous coeds flirted and picnicked with bored players on a grassy rise near the sideline); the legendary Royal left 20 years later with his handpicked successor ignored, replaced by the outsider Fred Akers who brought a polished image, popular psychology theories and a recruiting trail vigor that UT administrators coveted. After much success and an ugly rough patch, Akers was eventually overthrown by the Royalist faction and former player and DKR defensive coordinator David McWilliams, who preferred old boots to dress shoes and spoke in a reassuring Texas drawl, was brought home to restore Texas pride. When that failed the predictable oversteer was to an icy outsider named John Mackovic who preferred pinots to points prevention. Finally, Texas got it right with Mack Brown - the outsider who became the ultimate insider, who healed the wounds of the Royal divide, brought together warring factions, worked the recruiting trail like a maestro, talked buzzards off of meat wagons and kicked quite a bit of ass. Sadly, his bitter denouement ended with staff self-satisfaction, yes-men run amok and more time spent making internet enemies lists and being the symbolic mayor of Burnt Orange than coaching up his players.

The latest oversteer is a Fast and The Furious style spin-out, but instead of featuring Vin Diesel slathered in arm butter, it has yielded the University of Texas’ first black head football coach, Charlie Strong. A sure sign of progress is that while we all acknowledge the important historical implications of his hire, his race gets mostly a shrug of indifference. Can he coach?

Yeah. He can coach. I’ll spare you the resume. If you bought this preview, you don’t need it. Strong’s sensational rebuild at Louisville and his decade of elite defensive coordination speak for themselves. If other programs were too slow in snapping up a winner, that’s on them. Not Charlie. He’s an elite talent identifier, recruiter, developer and implementer who hires no-nonsense, experienced football coaches, let’s them do their jobs, and has zero interest in any activity that doesn’t yield character formation in his players or wins on the football field. Texans may like a little sizzle, but they still want the steak. Strong is all steak. Rare.

Strong is at Texas to coach football. Period. As for the talking heads and the deluded fans that believe the head coach at Texas must be the ultimate politician, that was simply Mack Brown’s genius in attempting to define the job by his strengths, making him seem even more indispensable and his departure that much more unthinkable. Mack Brown Texas Football? Not quite. Texas Football is bigger than any one man. Fortunately, those of us with access to memory, history books, or can read the name on our stadium understand that the Texas legend most similar to Charlie Strong was the greatest coach in Longhorn history, Darrell Royal. Royal didn’t have much time for nonsense, either.  Every few years, the gridiron gods smile on Texas and provide us with the right man at the right time.  This is the oversteer our steers need.

The Longhorns’ greatest enemy has never been an on-field opponent - it’s complacency.  When Texas is focused and on-point, it’s a fearsome juggernaut.  Charlie Strong is about as complacent as a starving wolverine standing on a deer carcass circled by coyotes.  It’s real simple.  He’s going to recruit good, hard-nosed players, deploy them intelligently, coach the hell out of them at their position, hold them accountable as students and athletes, put them in simple but flexible schemes that free them to play the game they love and let opponents learn that a game against Texas is a legalized street fight and they’re coming in armed with pillows. Games aren’t won by press conference domination or ring-kissing billionaires. So Charlie failed his Toastmasters class and doesn’t want to hear rich alumni babble about their golf game? Makes us like him even more.

As for the 2014 season - we’ll probably win 10 games, but who cares if we don’t?  Maybe we experience growing pains.  Perhaps Ash’s health doesn’t hold or we’re racked with injuries.  Perhaps the new system takes time to yield wins.  It doesn’t matter.  Football isn’t that hard when you take care of the foundation.  Good habits are inevitable.  Cream rises to the top.  This is a decade hire, not a one year hire.  If your attention span only functions in milliseconds, go follow Kim Kardashian on Twitter and watch Skip Bayless.  When we’re playing for the national championship four years from now, remember those doubts you had and chuckle at how hard you tried to make it all seem.  This is Texas.  We just hired a kick-ass football coach with a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood.  

The rest is inevitable.

The Pessimist’s View

Oversteering is, without question, a fact of life in just about every regime change.  Oversteering makes for a fine explanation of how Texas managed to find itself wandering the college football wilderness for the better part of twenty years.  And oversteering might have even been the culprit behind Texas’ repeated failures to make a championship hire despite our myriad advantages.  All those built-in bonuses of being capital-T Texas that are so numerous and so obvious that everyone has to acknowledge them…except for all those top recruits who seemed to miss the memo from roughly 1984-1997.  It’s a sobering thought, that – the idea that the kind of elite talent that is any championship program’s lifeblood could gaze towards our hallowed 40 Acres, see the history and legacy and wonders contained therein and say, Nah – I’m good.

You know what makes it especially sobering?  The fact that it’s happening again.

The Optimists are calling on all those recruits to behold the majesty of Charlie Strong, Real Football Coach, and be overcome with awe.  But are those recruits supposed to be more impressed than Texas’ own power base?  Dissension and factionalism among the good ol’ boys and money men may have unduly hindered Texas’ fortunes during those wilderness years.  But all you have to do is hear Red McCombs – yeah, the guy with the whole blessed BUSINESS SCHOOL named after him – allow as to how Charlie Strong might make a good coordinator to remind you that that dissension and factionalism and good old fashioned petulance are alive and well. McCombs may have quickly taken a Public Relations 101 tack to walk those comments back, but you’re taking a graduate-level Mythology course if you think that they weren’t spurred by a grievance both deeply held and likely shared by some other members of the Billionaire Boys’ Club.

For some of those guys, the grievance is simply that Mack is no longer around to warm their box seats with his bonhomie. For others, it’s that their pet candidate didn’t get the gig. If you want to denounce the Mackolytes, be my guest - plenty of Mack’s coaching qualities begged to be oversteered away from, and when it comes to developing talent that’s all well and good.  When it comes to getting talent in the door in the first place, though, right now Texas needs a better sales job than even the one Mack managed on arrival.

When Mack got off the plane in ’98, Texas was down…but the surrounding landscape was all but barren of elite teams for a thousand miles in any direction, and for all of 1997’s woes Texas had still bagged two conference titles in the past three seasons.  By contrast, Charlie Strong is walking into a hornet’s nest of resurgent conference foes, an entrenched SEC presence in the state and a program that’s grown stale.  You’ll never get any objection from the Burnt Orange faithful when you hold up DKR as an exemplar of all that’s great and good about coaching, and we can all cheer the echoes of DKR that we see in Strong.  But like it or not, we’re (at least) thirty years past the point where square jaws, shirt sleeves and single-bar facemasks were the currency of game-changing, difference-making recruits.  In 2014, the currency that those guys trade in is swag.

We can all find it refreshing that Charlie Strong’s race just kind of is, in the same way that Kevin Sumlin at A&M is thought of as a coach first and a black coach later (if at all.)  But the biggest factor in the recruiting landscape today isn’t a black coach…instead, it was college football’s biggest black swan event in the past thirty seasons.  Namely, a three-star recruit who was half a safety and half a criminal becoming history’s first freshman Heisman winner - in the same season that our in-state rival moved to a conference that ESPN just so happens to have a billion-dollar incentive to hype.  While a goose might lay a golden egg, this black swan deposited a bank vault’s worth of swag on the Ags.  Kevin Sumlin is currently swimming in that swag.  Rolling in it.  Sliding pantsless down piles of it like Scrooge McDuck.  And oh, by the way, he’s also scattering it throughout the state to lure the lion’s share of top talent on both sides of the ball.

If you’re scoring at home: the Ags have the swag, Baylor and Oklahoma State are blowing out bulbs on the scoreboard on a weekly basis and the SEC now considers it open season on Texas high