The results are in.
Texas is a basketball school.
On this, rules are clear: after one of your prominent sports wins a national championship, the traditionally most-important sport gets one chance to match it if they want to keep the crown. After Saturday, it doesn’t look like Texas football is winning a title this year. So while I like Texas, and they’re good neighbors, and their students are nice rideshare passengers, and I certainly don’t mean this as an insult, I have to say it: Texas is now a basketball school.
They could make me eat their words. They could storm back from Saturday’s loss, beat Oklahoma, catch a few breaks, beat Oklahoma again, make the playoff, and take down Clemson and/or Alabama/LSU/Georgia/Auburn/one of those Big Ten schools/probably no one from the Pac-12/maybe Notre Dame if my roommate’s lucky (editor’s note: our colleague Joe has Texas’ national championship probability at 0.1%). But by that point, the men’s basketball team might be on its way to a second straight NIT title, and those are strong headwinds facing the footballers.
It’s obvious how Texas got to this point. They hired a coach used to contending in the Colonial Athletic Association and the Atlantic-10. That’s what you do if you want to win national championships in Madison Square Garden every March. It took a few years to get the formula right, but after narrowly overshooting in 2016 and 2018, they threaded the needle perfectly this spring, not just making college basketball’s best postseason tournament, but making it as the best team in the field. And to their credit, they took care of business once they were there.
National championships, of course, aren’t the only thing making a school a [insert sport] school. Those teams also have to be the focus of the town. And as an Austin resident, I’ve got data supporting the claim that the city is behind the basketball team more closely than they’re behind the football team: Specifically, only five or six of my friends here have attended a football game at Texas, but on one evening alone in March, over a thousand of my friends joined me to watch Texas hoops book a ticket to the NIT Final Four, with many directing me towards Denny’s after the game. More clearly, I gave a lot of Lyft rides to people who came from out of town to attend Saturday’s football game. I’ve never given a passenger a ride to a Texas basketball game, presumably because attendance for those doesn’t have to come from out of town.
I wish the best to Tom Herman. I like Sam Ehlinger. I wouldn’t mind Texas returning to power on the gridiron. But the fact of the matter is, right now, Texas is a basketball school.
