Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
Well, the season’s over. Kind of.
The local college football team exited summer with mid-sized expectations, hoping mostly to make progress. An early impressive result changed perspectives, but a stroke of bad luck quickly dashed the hope, and the team proceeded to win a lot of games it should have won and lose a few it shouldn’t have lost. They had a big opportunity to make some national noise against a peripheral rival late in the year, but the boys came up short. Now, it’s all about finding out how badly the sponsor of the bowl game makes the faithful wince.
Put otherwise, Texas had a very normal college football season. Plenty of teams had something like this exact football season, and plenty others had it last year, and plenty more will have it next year. Plenty of these plenty fit into all three boats, good teams who make bowls and don’t do much that’s louder. Iowa comes to mind. Oklahoma State. Mississippi, maybe. N.C. State.
Texas has not occupied this sphere for long, and it hasn’t been too many wins that’s keeping the Longhorns out. This 8-4 season was a good one for the University of Texas, and not just because of the progress it represented. In only one of the last ten seasons now have the Longhorns finished with more than eight wins. An 8-4 mark against the schedule Texas played is, for recent Texas, good. Which is bad. Talking purely from a competitive standpoint, Texas isn’t striding alongside Iowa. It’s rising to meet it. That’s bad.
In recent seasons, this inconvenience was overshadowed by off-field shenanigans. “Ok, cool. Hook Em!” The pet monkey. Conference realignment. In a roundabout way, this illustrated Texas’s staying power. Competitively, no, Texas hasn’t been there. But the storylines? Captivating. Recently, when it’s come to the Texas Longhorns, we haven’t been able to look away.
Which makes this year all the odder. This year, it’s been very easy to look away. This year has been an exceedingly conventional one by the standards of competent FBS programs, and with that, Texas has gone quietly about its business over the final six games of the campaign. Fans still tune in, of course, but aside from the scare the Horns gave Alabama, Texas hasn’t been a character in the national narrative.
Next year, the hype will be there again. Arch Manning is coming to town. The Texans go to Tuscaloosa the Saturday after Labor Day. Noise will be noisy, and it will continue as such. But if Texas doesn’t continue to make progress and Steve Sarkisian successfully shuts down the nonsense…well, Texas will never be Iowa. But Florida? We didn’t think about them much this year.
