Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns from right here in Austin.
Did I curse Texas? I’m not sure why you would ask that. Is it because I titled this column the way I did? Is it because I tweeted something Saturday before the Longhorns/Zags game saying I’d cursed Texas? Is it because I’m a petty betch and also a loyal betch and you think I’ve got some curses up my betchy little graphic t-shirt sleeves?
I didn’t like the way Texas ran Shaka Smart out of town. I’ve made that widely known. Shaka Smart was nice to me once. He was mean to me zero times. I will defend him until that ratio changes to something other than infinity (or, you know, [insert necessary caveats here]). My stance was and remains that Texas folks could’ve been frustrated by the team not living up to its talent under Shaka Smart, and would’ve had some validity there, but instead decided to boil down their entire evaluations of the guy to three single games, all close, all bizarre, over the course of six years. This isn’t just Texas. College basketball coaching decisions everywhere are way too focused on a fluky, dramatic single-elimination tournament (and not focused enough on a storied, noble single-elimination tournament, which I’ll note Shaka Smart won). But Texas did it to a coach I loved, and, well, they lost to Kansas last night.
My favorite reaction to this was whoever runs that SB Nation Twitter account saying Texas’s best chance is to learn how to be a football school in the SEC. It was a twist off the idea we talked about last week, that Austin’s not interested enough in football for there to be pressure on the players, and that Austin’s got enough fun things to do that the players can go do plenty of other fun things when the football isn’t going well. The brilliant new thing about this twist is the idea that by getting into the SEC, Austin would look at Tuscaloosa, or Baton Rouge, or Athens, and say, “We want that.” Really? I know you would want that, Mister Longhorn Man. But the rest of us? We moved to Austin. We didn’t move to Starkville.
Nothing against Starkville, but Texas is vastly outnumbered within its own city by people who will continue to refuse to care about college football. Even in Atlanta, so much of the population comes from the Southeast that there’s a baseline obsession. But in Austin? We came from Illinois and California. We don’t care, guys. We just don’t care.
This is the secret Texas people don’t seem to have been told. The Longhorns aren’t playing the same game as Auburn or Florida, trying to climb back to prominence from within the football world. They’re playing the USC/Miami game, trying to create a good football team in the social media era in a legitimately big, fun city. That, at the moment, appears difficult to pull off.
