Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our mostly weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
Last night, down 5-0 after three innings of play, the Texas Longhorns softball team came back to win 6-5, advancing to the best-of-three national championship series, where they’ll play dynastic archrival Oklahoma.
On Sunday, having already battled back from a mediocre first two months of the year to receive the 9th seed nationally, the Texas Longhorns baseball team firmly did away with Air Force at home, scoring five in the top of the first en route to a 10-1 victory off of which they’ll cruise over to East Carolina for their Super Regional this weekend.
It’s far from likely that either team will close it out and win a College World Series. It’s likeliest that between Texas’s 19 varsity sports (we’ll count indoor and outdoor track separately), only four will win national championships this year, and that between the nine spring varsity sports, only a measly third will bring home the NCAA hardware.
The overall strength of Texas’s athletic department is ridiculous, especially in the spring. It’s ridiculous, and it’s impressive, and it can lead you down a whole rabbit hole of asking whether Texas really cares about football, and down a whole parallel rabbit hole of comparing Texas and football to the United States and international men’s soccer. Instead, though, let’s talk about the baseball and softball comebacks. Specifically, let’s talk about the swagger on display in each.
Something often said of high-prestige athletes and high-prestige teams is that they know who they are. The Yankees can go a decade without making the World Series, but they’re still The New York Yankees. When Alabama’s football team steps on the field, it knows it’s Alabama, and so does everyone else in the stadium. There’s a reason everyone still watches Tiger Woods every time he competes in a major. I wonder if this sort of thing goes on with Texas in the sports that aren’t football and men’s basketball. I wonder if there’s a confidence thing happening.
Out of 36 possible national titles in the last two years in the sports in which the Longhorns compete, Texas has won seven. We can’t stress enough how remarkable this is. To be fair, it’s remarkable even for Texas: The Longhorns didn’t win a single national championship in the shortened 2019-20 academic/athletic year, and they only won eight during the preceding decade, almost all in men’s swimming & diving. Before that, there was a three-year drought. Texas has not always been dominant as an athletic department at large.
Right now, though, Texas is dominant at large. Five of the 19 programs have won a title in the last two years. Of those that haven’t, at least three (women’s volleyball, softball, baseball) have come close or are currently close. And so I really do wonder: Does Texas only know it’s Texas when the lights are a little less bright?
