THINGS MIGHT BE LOOKING UP
ARLINGTON — When things started spinning out of control again, Kevin Sumlin looked up.
That is what coaches tend to do at AT&T Stadium, where one of the largest video screens in the world looms high above them like a shiny anvil, taunting them with high-definition replays of every mistake.
Most years, on the morning after Texas A&M plays Arkansas, Sumlin wakes up with a sore neck from staring skyward so much. But when he looked up Saturday, he did not see impending doom. Even if everyone else did. And even if some still do. After Sumlin’s Aggies rallied for a stirring 50-43 overtime victory over the Razorbacks, a reporter from College Station wanted to know how Sumlin kept calm when his team looked like it was on the verge of another implosion.
“As opposed to you?” Sumlin said, smiling.
It was a joke, but a telling one. Sumlin is well aware that a significant portion of his following expects the worst, and there is little he can do this early in the season to change their minds.
As many coaches before him have discovered, that’s the problem with being told — by an athletic director, by a publicityhungry regent, by anyone, really — that you are on the hot seat. The label becomes self-perpetuating, and often inescapable.
Once you’re on it, you’re never really off of it. And even if it never seeps onto the field or into the locker room, the program gets enveloped by an air of inevitability — that change is coming one way or another, and that days like Saturday are only a temporary reprieve.
The hazard of coaching
Not terribly long ago, Dennis Franchione and Mike Sherman were acquainted with this phenomenon. Charlie Strong learned all about it last year. They all thought they could outrun it, until they didn’t.
This is not to say it is impossible, though, and Saturday the Aggies provided a template for how they can do it:
Unleash Christian Kirk, one of the most electrifying players in the country. Gradually place more and more trust on Kellen Mond, the redshirt freshman quarterback from San Antonio who has the tools and maturity to win games. And keep faith that eventually, the players who have endured A&M collapses — both within games and within seasons — have learned enough to not let them happen again.
When the Aggies trailed 21-7 Saturday, “(Sumlin’s) message was, ‘We’ve been here before,’ ” Kirk said. To hear the players tell it, A&M won simply because it didn’t panic.
And in a newly humbled Southeastern Conference containing only one great team, that might be enough to keep working.
Although the Aggies figure to be significant underdogs against Alabama in a couple of weeks, there is no reason to think they will not have a chance to beat everyone else put on their schedule.
If Sumlin can finish the season 9-3, that would represent irrefutable progress. Of course, that would require the kind of late-season surge his teams have not proved capable of during his tenure at A&M, and he knew better than to make any grand pronouncements about what the Aggies proved Saturday.
When asked what the victory meant for his program as a whole, he answered, “I don’t know.”
Different perspective
“Everybody’s going to try to paint this picture, or paint that picture,” Sumlin said. “What I’m proud of is how these guys believe in each other. … It’s kind of a simplistic view, but I think it works for these guys.”
For now, that belief is enough. For now, it doesn’t matter how many people share it.
Sumlin avoided doom, for a week, at least. He might never outrun the anvil over his head, but he will keep trying.
And after Saturday, he doesn’t need to look up.