Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
Well, we’ve reached familiar terrain. The Longhorns are out of the running for the College Football Playoff, their path to the Big 12 championship is slim, and it’s about to turn November in Austin. The town has moved on from Texas football. The team itself soon might do the same.
The theory about Texas’s recent inability to turn talent into on-field success is, summed into one, that players do not focus in Austin. It’s not necessarily something wrong with the players themselves as much as an issue with environment. Austin is a very fun place to attend college. It remains a very fun place to attend college when the Longhorns lose. Until the Longhorns lose, local media puts a surreptitious speaker inside of each player’s ear canal that whispers, “You’re the best! Nobody’s better than you!” on a cadence, day and dusk and night. Once the Longhorns lose, the speaker doesn’t turn on the players. It simply turns off. Everyone goes about their business.
College football teams have a tendency to spiral. Losses, as they say, mount. This tendency fits the narrative best at Texas, where once there’s little left to play for, little playing is done. This week spent idle is a heavy-handed narrative tool, but the effect stands. Texas will have had two seasons this year: pre-Oklahoma State and post-Oklahoma State. We are about to enter the latter, and it does not look pretty.
In other news, Arch Manning will be on campus in January, and I’m sure this will go well this next month of games. A hallmark of the “You’re the best! Nobody’s better than you!” line of thinking is that even when they turn the earpieces off (after the third loss, for those wanting an exact day), they don’t stop believing it’s true. Like a river going underground, they just switch that feeling to the future. Texas is middling? You just wait ‘til Manning gets here. As though a top-recruit quarterback with no college experience is going to be a gamechanger compared to a top-recruit quarterback playing well with some college experience. Quinn Ewers, prepare to be a punching bag.
We’re a little surprised it’s taken this long for that certain Texas breed to place its hope entirely on Manning. Our expectation entering the year was that we’d be in this situation weeks ago, with Texas struggling to make a bowl again. But, here we are. Texas doesn’t have to win these next four weeks. Arch Manning’s on his way. That will solve everything.
