Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.
It’s hard to like Texas. The Longhorns, I mean. There’s something about a people legitimately offended by the “Horns Down” gesture I can’t get past. I love the school, I love the people from the school, I love Bevo, but that authentic offense taken at Horns Down…it’s the neuticles again, just communicated differently.
I think this was part of Nick Saban’s confusion yesterday when a reporter asked him if his players were aware that “Horns Down” earns you a penalty. It doesn’t, really, it’s the taunting that earns you the penalty, same as if a player finger-wags in his opponent’s face or gestures towards his crotch or gives a fan the bird. But the story that the Big 12, long on its way to a violent scorning by Texas’s hand, took it upon itself to make a silly little hand gesture worth fifteen yards in an effort to protect the fragile dignity of a seven-win program? That’s too good to pass up. Who cares about facts when you can ask Nick Saban about Horns Down?
To someone like Saban, the very concept that Horns Down would be offensive is likely foreign. Who, I imagine Saban wondering, has so little pride that they’re upset when someone turns their hand upside down? I imagine Saban is confused by a lot of things in college football, kind of like the smartest kid in math class not fathoming how someone doesn’t understand simplifying equations.
I can’t get past Horns Down, and I can’t get past the neuticles, and I guess kind of like my beef with certain Minneapolitans I can’t get past this concept of someone demanding that you bow to them because without your bow they can’t believe themselves worthy of respect.
The problem is that Texas really is worthy of respect. One of the best state schools in the country, the flagship institution of a mighty culture, a quintessential American university set in an adolescent’s dreamscape: The University of Texas is a jewel. It has its SEC elements (and that isn’t to say those are a bad thing, but they can tend towards the annoying and they’re not original), but it also has a gritty streak. The ten-percent rule (in Texas, if you finish in the top ten percent of your high school class you can attend UT) makes the place attainable for any kid in the state who works hard enough, who does their homework, and those kids are present throughout Austin, kids who’ve busted their asses and are busting their asses still and have earned their pride in the Forty Acres not because of what the Forty Acres represents at large, but because of what it signifies they’ve accomplished. The number of first-generation college students at Texas is nearly double that up at Michigan, a comparable institution academically and athletically. These kids don’t get Instagram sponsorships for their gameday outfits, but they’re just as much Longhorns as the DG’s.
One of my favorite days in these four years I’ve lived in this city was the day Sam Ehlinger nearly beat Joe Burrow and LSU while the sky turned as orange as the players’ shirts. Coming away from that weekend, I looked at future schedules for the next time an echo of that magic might be heard. This was the weekend. This was the next time Texas might visit glory upon itself.
This weekend doesn’t carry the anticipation 2019’s carried, with LSU. For one thing, Alabama isn’t LSU. They have little to prove. They’re less willing to plunge themselves into Dirty Sixth. They aren’t a convenient drive away from Austin. Nick Saban doesn’t know about Horns Down, and Alabama fans are more content to watch a game at home. They don’t bring atmosphere with them the way LSU did.
For another, though, Texas isn’t what Texas was. In 2019, Texas was coming off a Sugar Bowl toppling of Georgia. Ehlinger was a believable Heisman candidate, his claim to the Texas quarterback position paralleling the divine right of kings. Tom Herman had the program on the rise, and Austin had jumped the shark that much less (our collective shark-jumping accelerated dramatically with the rise in work-from-home, and we were pretty high in the air before Tom Hanks got sick). This year’s Texas? They stomped Louisiana-Monroe last week, and all anyone could really say was that ULM looked pitiful out there. The stadium will be full, but the sky will be blue, not orange, and 95 degrees on the way up—with the sun high—is a lot different from 95 degrees on the way down, the kickoff temperature in 2019. Alabama has a way of taking the air out of a stadium. There will be atmosphere at 11:00 AM. The question is whether there’ll still be any at 11:30.
My response to my incomprehension of the Horns Down-offended mass has often been to find humor in Texas’s pitfalls. A coach’s girlfriend’s pet monkey bit a child’s hand? Texas let Kansas score 49 points in regulation? Texas blew a three-score lead against Oklahoma then blew a similar one the next week? Glorious stuff. Concurrently, I like Nick Saban. I’m bummed it was Alabama who got him, but I like Nick Saban (I’d like him better at a school deserving respect, though I acknowledge power corrupts, and even a school as lovable as Oregon State would probably make me gag if it were blessed with a decade and a half under college football’s overlord). His scandals are minimal, he seems to hold little interest in doing anything but winning football games, and it appears that he loves his players without making a marketing bit out of that love.
And yet, I can’t help but pull for Texas tomorrow. I can’t help but hope the Horns beat ‘em. I can’t help but imagine Bijan Robinson breaking into the open field, then breaking into the open field again, then getting Bama to bite hard on play action before Quinn Ewers connects with Agiye Hall over the top and makes one hundred thousand Texans believe. I want Texas to surprise itself. I want Texas to surprise everyone else. I want the fourth quarter to roll around and find the newly enclosed south endzone shaking in rapture.
It’s hard not to love Texas. What it can be is just too good. Horns Down and those who proposed neuticles and the sports radio hosts saying kids need to win to express an opinion about racism can all shove it. But this weekend, Hook ‘Em. Hook ‘Em anyway.
