Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
I uncovered a lot of things this morning, looking for hints of a post-loss meltdown from the Texas faithful on Saturday night. For example: Texas Monthly was still praising the Mack Brown “firing” and the Charlie Strong hiring two years later, Chris Del Conte’s hiring marked the instant when Texas finally ditched having separate AD’s for men’s and women’s sports, and Fran Fraschilla called Steve Patterson a buffoon on Twitter once but went soft and didn’t call him out by name (let alone tag the guy). What didn’t I uncover? A post-loss meltdown from the Texas faithful.
There’s an angle here where you could call Austin a bad basketball town for not making a fuss after their team got handled by their former head coach, now coach of a team some rank as the best in the country. That’s probably what this is. Austin is probably a bad basketball town. Most Texas media folks only tune in for exactly one basketball game in March. They have no idea the Horns even played Tennessee on Saturday. If the game isn’t part of a bracket they can use to make office conversation for four days, it might as well not exist.
Still, though, the absence of any significant “we really should have kept Rick Barnes” talk online has me perturbed, and Texas beating Baylor on Monday wiped away any chance of this being the moment of the meltdown. We might not get a Texas men’s basketball meltdown this year. This might be a feel-good season. Texas might lose the Big 12 title race by a game, lose in the Big 12 Tournament semifinals, and end their season March 18th in an exciting game that leaves fans saying, “Rodney Terry should get a nice job elsewhere.”
We can’t have this.
We need disaster.
It would take a sick person to find any joy in what transpired involving Chris Beard and his family earlier this year, and while some may call the Nuts a sick person, we are not that specific sick person. We are upset that it happened.
But dammit, if the coach who was supposed to save the program got himself arrested, fired, and thoroughly disgraced, shouldn’t the team fall apart? Shouldn’t there be more drama? Shouldn’t everyone be a whole lot less quiet about this? Rick Barnes might be called a national champion soon. Are you people just going to let that happen??
We deserve a dumpster fire. And I don’t just mean that the Nuts deserve it. All of us, all of us here in Austin, deserve a trash receptacle going up in flames.
I’m just not sure we’re going to get it.
