Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.
It’s Early Signing Day, and the chorus is singing the praises of Steve Sarkisian for doing what nearly every Texas football coach has done: Sign a top-five recruiting class. It’s an accomplishment, and an important accomplishment—if Texas is this bad with top-five talent, imagine how bad they could be.
We’re not here to talk about signing day, though. We’re hear to talk about the University of Texas.
The other one.
An other one?
Another part of the UT system?
We’re here to talk about UTSA.
A dream of some, ourselves included, is to see the collegiate landscape change enough through sports and sports alone that a state’s flagship institution changes. We’re looking to see a day when people call, as an example, UAB the University of Alabama and refer to what we now know of as Alabama as UAT, or Alabama-Tuscaloosa. It could happen, right? If a school keeps winning enough, they could take over the state name? I don’t know how this works. It can’t be impossible, though.
In Texas, the clear threat—distant, unlikely, but the only one out there—is UTSA. The Roadrunners finished the season 12-1. The Roadrunners nabbed an AAC invite in conference realignment. The Roadrunners are having a moment, and the Longhorns are having the opposite kind of moment, and we’re not saying, but we’re asking: What would it actually take?
Our best guess, even as optimists on this, is that it would take upwards of fifty years. Texas would need to be not only bad, but entirely irrelevant. As long as conferences are set up the way they are and Texas is in the SEC, Texas is safe. If the NCAA breaks down, though, and the SEC swells enough that membership becomes semi-meaningless? Texas becoming actually irrelevant is a possibility. People don’t just need to lose hope in Texas football. They need to stop thinking about Texas football altogether. This needs to be like Jacksonville University basketball, which made the “national championship” (we’ll humor you all and speak your language on this) in 1970 but, right now, is completely unthought of. Texas needs to be ancient history.
Similarly, demographics probably need to keep changing. The meat of this is: UTSA has stronger ties to the state of Texas’s Hispanic population than UT-Austin does. As that population grows, it’s conceivable that UTSA could overtake UT-Austin in market share (“could,” not “will”). Beyond this, UTSA would probably need some sway in the state government, where demographics could again help.
Finally, UTSA needs to keep winning. It needs to become a legitimate, consistent power. In the next wave of realignment, it needs to climb beyond the AAC, and if the next wave of realignment features a break between high-majors and mid-majors, it needs to get itself on the high-major side of the line.
This is a dream, not a forecast. But you’re thinking about it. I hope someone at UT-Austin is too.
