Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.
As we await the the final Learfield Directors’ Cup standings (which will show us which schools are the biggest threats to Texas’s local and national dominance of college athletics), let’s talk about how Texas is doing.
There’s a disparity present in Longhorn athletics. On one side, Texas is the best overall athletic department in the country. The results, revenue, and mystique are all there. Texas is a titan nationally, causing intimidation to more athletes than any other school. On the other side, Texas is disappointing where it matters most.
It would be one thing here if Texas were like Stanford, content with its academic heft and its wide-ranging athletic success. It’d be another thing, close to that, if Texas were like Notre Dame, happy with its direction as a school and so much better in football than was recently the case that some patience has been regained. But Texas is not Stanford, and Texas is not Notre Dame. Football matters more than all other college sports, and football matters more at Texas than it does at any other school. Should Alabama suddenly stink at football, it would be easier for Alabama fans to move on to basketball and baseball than is currently the case at Texas. This is kind of what’s happened at Florida. Ask a Florida student how popular gymnastics is. Texas can’t do this. Texas is the football state. Texas is the football school in the football state.
Making matters worse, Texas’s drought from good-enough-to-be-excited-about success in men’s basketball, by Texas’s impression, continues to grow. Texas feels like it should be better at men’s basketball than it is, and that’s consequential to the vibe, which is what we’re really evaluating here. (On that note, how many years will it be before a president refers to the State of the Union as a “vibe check?” I don’t think it’ll ever happen. I think the word will fall out of fashion before it would really make sense in that usage, and I don’t think Kamala Harris is winning in ’24.) There’s legitimate and reasonable excitement about women’s volleyball. There’s inside-baseball pride in the tennis and golf situations. But those don’t share men’s basketball’s importance for Texas fans, and baseball suffered the weight of high expectations this year, currently undergoing the kind of transformation you normally see from programs that were bounced as a two-seed in a Regional.
The task then, for Texas, is to build up the sports it cares about most while continuing its success in the sports it cares about less. If this can’t happen, the question is whether Texas will forfeit the wellbeing of its overall athletic department to try to make things work at the top. There’s a lot of risk with that approach. In the meantime, the best Longhorns can do is hope the leadership that’s built this broad, deep force across all athletics can do the same on the upper fringe. The pressure remains very much “on.”
