Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
Remember when Casey Thompson replaced Hudson Card at quarterback following the loss to Arkansas, saving the Texas Longhorns’ season?
What a year we have had.
The latest chapter in the 2021 Texas Football saga was written yesterday, when a video leaked of defensive line coach Bo Davis chewing out players on the team bus for laughing as they drove away from Iowa State, having been annihilated by the Cyclones. The video raised some eyebrows—the prevalent response was support for Davis, and it didn’t seem to me that Davis crossed any lines in the video, though lines do definitely exist with that sort of thing. What was really striking about the video was not Davis. It was that the video existed in the first place. It was that a player had taken it, then let it get out of his hands.
We don’t know how directly this happened. It wasn’t like the player shared the video from his personal Twitter account. Because of this, we don’t fully know the player’s intent with it. The assumption, though, is that the player did not like the yelling. Players don’t really record coaches yelling if they agree with the coach’s message.
This, then, is the perception of the problem with Texas’s football program. A day after a wide receiver entered the transfer portal on the heels of a reported shouting match at a recent practice, a player thought he and/or his buddies should be allowed to laugh on the team bus after getting stomped. The players, it seems, don’t like getting yelled at. Or at least, some of them don’t.
There’s a theory, in Longhorns circles, that the reason Texas can’t live up to its talent on the football field is that Austin is too comfortable. The logic goes that the players are given the cultural benefits of playing college sports for a premier program without being tagged with the pressure that goes along with that, and that this, combined with there being plenty of opportunities to have plenty of fun in this town, leaves players not quite as motivated and focused, on the average, as their peers up in Norman or over in Tuscaloosa. If the players stink, the people around them don’t care, and they especially don’t care about an additional loss once the conference is out of reach. There’s a high standard of success here in Austin. There’s also a high tolerance for failure.
This theory has some flaws. Pete Carroll had plenty of success at USC a decade and a half ago. Mack Brown had plenty of success at Texas. But at the same time…there’s clearly something wrong at Texas. It might be scheme. It might be development. It might be culture.
The bigger message of the Pete Carroll example isn’t that you don’t need a motivated culture. It’s that you can get a motivated culture in multiple ways. Texas hasn’t found their way.
