Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly (for the most part) column on the Texas Longhorns.
Ladies and gentlemen…
We got him.
Quinn Ewers is going to, at long last, be a Texas Longhorn. The Southlake Carroll product headlines are calling the best recruit since Vince Young and people who’ve looked at his picture are unsure whether to call a guy out of a movie about old Austin or a guy failing in his attempt to look like a guy out of a movie about old Austin is coming to Austin. He pulled off the ol’ razzle-dazzle, leaving high school to enroll early at Ohio State, where he made upwards of a million dollars in NIL deals (Texas doesn’t let high schoolers make money off their name, image, or likeness because the free market isn’t in vogue right now among members of a certain cult), didn’t play a snap, and will now come back to Texas with the scourge of Tom Herman exiled to…is Tom Herman helping coach the Bears? Everything really does add up in the end.
It is, of course, a big “get” for the Horns, and for Steve Sarkisian, who many have already anointed the winner of the offseason, evidently ignoring the fact Louisiana has yet to get too annoyed with Brian Kelly and throw him into a swamp. It could mean big things. Huge things. If Ewers is worth three or four wins—a lot, but hey, he’s a big deal—Texas could conceivably get up to an eight or a nine-win season. 8-5 or 9-4? That’s a great year, guys. That got Matt Campbell a lot of money up in Ames, though to be fair, Ames cares about football.
So yes, the first message here is that Texas is indubitably, undisputedly back. Start reorganizing the trophy case, Ewers is going to fill it. Start filling your wallet, Ewers is going to empty it. The second message is that TCU evidently thought Ewers wasn’t the “best fit,” similarly to how me and significant ad revenue on this blog aren’t the best fit. The third message is that there was a guy at my high school seven years before me named Quinn Ewert who was a great athlete. But it’s the fourth that we’re going to focus on right now.
The fourth message is…Texas has recruited well before, guys. Really well, in fact. The problem has decidedly not been recruiting. In Herman’s three full years, his recruiting classes ranked third, third, and eighth, by 247. The Longhorns’ 247 average recruiting score those three years tops that of every program in the country not named Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, or Clemson. Would cracking that list be nice? Yes. Will it make the difference? We have no reason to think it will. We’ve already seen it not make the difference. That or we’ve seen it make the difference, and the alternative is much worse than we have fathomed.
Texas is back. That is true. Just not in the way you might think.
