Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
What some might argue is the best program in its sport in the entire country came to Austin to play Texas, and the Longhorns impressed. High-but-wary expectations were exceeded, with the marquee transfer showing he’s more than just a game manager in his big-stage Texas debut. The ceiling is higher than almost anybody thought. The second-year coach has made some big progress.
Forgive us for sharing this diary entry from September, but what fun memories those post-Bama days call to mind. Of course, Alabama didn’t end up being as good as usual, and Texas has since lost plenty of games it shouldn’t, and injury luck made itself known, and the Big 12’s a tough league, and that still-ascendant program from the state’s big population center is larger in the national championship picture, and for some reason teams in the big-money sports here in Austin have a penchant for raising expectations and then slowly lowering them as the season goes on, and whether that’s just a string of bad luck or some systemic big-money-sports problem within the UT ecosystem is undetermined. But man, wasn’t that fun?
We had so much to look forward to in September. If Texas could do that to the sport’s top dog, what could they do to everybody else? Clearly, the program had already come so far since its last coach was run out of town on the heels of moderate successes but nothing nationally splashy at the end of any year, and this was just year two? Texas had found its guy, and with more talent on the way (not that it isn’t always on the way at Texas, but, you know, talent!) the assumption was that even if Texas was not truly back, Texas would soon be back. All the way back. Back to what the fundamentals of financials and tradition and marketability-of-college-town say they should be. We were ready for Texas once again.
Texas might still get there. Maybe next year, maybe the following year, maybe in Arch Manning’s last season before he enters the draft (which is also Texas’s first SEC season, and one where postseason expansion should make it easy to claim national relevance despite not being any better than before). But Texas is a good team with a lot of bad days. They aren’t a team you can believe in to win in the biggest moments. They’re great for a showcase game here and there, and they’ve got heart and grit and plenty more of those intangibles, but it’s just hard. It’s hard to really be an excellent program, and for some reason it appears especially hard to do that here in Austin, even when the ingredients all line up.
Anyway, how’d Texas do against Gonzaga last night in basketball? I was on a plane.
