Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
First off, let us acknowledge that Wyoming could do something very funny tonight, and that doesn’t have to mean beating Texas. If Wyoming gets smoked but Texas goes on to close this regular season by losing to Texas Tech, there will be a humor in that as well. More immediately funny? Wyoming wins. More subtly and artfully funny? Texas smokes the Pokes, but come November the transitive property completes a big, depressing circle here in Austin.
With that out of the way:
I can’t figure out Steve Sarkisian. I’m not sure I fully “get” him. He doesn’t have an obvious comparison. His career head coaching record (61–47) is poor by the standards of the places he’s coached. He’s an offensive mastermind who couldn’t cut it in the NFL. He’s a reclaimed coach, reborn under the guidance of Nick Saban, yet he has a strong track record, especially with quarterbacks, which has never really wavered. He comes from the coaching trees of both Saban and Pete Carroll, but he doesn’t really resemble either in his style, a happier warrior than Saban and more a warrior than happy relative to Carroll. He is not old-fashioned, but he’s not out there playing buddy–buddy with his Gen Z players. One interpretation I keep coming back to is that he treats his players like adults.
It was Joe who said this last Friday, the day before the Alabama game, but something we’ve discussed is how professional the football program feels right now in Austin. They’re just kids, but they’re a little older than kids, in reality, and from what little we can tell, they’re being treated less like kids than has ever been the case in this town. For one thing, they’re formally making money, over the table, no duffel bags involved. For another, training and nutrition have undergone a dramatic transformation in the last 25 years, and the transition doesn’t appear to be slowing down. But it’s more than that. Austin is more professional itself, less a college town and less a hippie town than it’s ever been, and Chris Del Conte’s Texas athletic department is more professional than it once was, efficiently tuned and precisely resourced and, in most sports, securely confident.
Back when I lived in Minneapolis and first met Longhorn grads, I was struck by how grown-up they were relative to myself and the other Midwesterners around. I’ve since learned this isn’t uniformly the case across UT, but the school’s had this professional streak for a while. At the moment, it seems to be the ethos of the football team. Maybe this will fade, maybe the college kids will show themselves and this will all devolve into something approaching 2021. But when Archie Manning committed to Texas, it was an expression of faith in the seriousness of what Del Conte and Sarkisian were building. So far, that faith is looking like wisdom. It’s almost boring. I think that’s by design.
