UT’S LONG DECLINE
SINCE FATEFUL PLAY IN 2010 ROSE BOWL, UT HAS ENDURED AN 11-YEAR DECLINE.
Longhorns football program is still underperforming despite big money and big talk.
At 7:46 p.m. on Jan. 7, 2010, Alabama defensive lineman Marcel Dareus tackled Texas quarterback Colt McCoy for no gain on the Longhorns’ fifth offensive play of the Bowl Championship Series title game at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.
McCoy, injured on the play, left the field and did not return. Burnt orange heartsmelted. Grownmen questioned the existence of a just and merciful deity.
Alabama went on to a 37-21 victory that began its resurrection as a dominant force in college football. Not since that night in the Arroyo Seco, however, have the Longhorns occupied center stage at season’s end.
While old foes and upstarts have prospered, Texas is in the throes of a decade-long run to nowhere, a product perhaps of faulty talent evaluation, lackluster player development, poor coaching decisions, a blizzard of bad luck, karma, inflated expectations or all of the above.
A 6-3 record this season led to speculation that coach Tom Herman’s job was in jeopardy. Athletic director Chris Del Conte, however, said in a statement Saturday morning that Herman’s job is secure.
“There’s been a lot of speculation about the future of our football coach,” Del Conte wrote. “My policy is towait until theendof the season before evaluating and commenting on our program and coaches. With the close of the regular season, Iwant to reiterate that Tom Herman is our coach.”
Del Conte added that the Longhorns “didn’t meet our expectations” during the COVID-19-impacted season and that “there’s still more work to be done.” The statement concluded, “I’m excited to watch our players and program move forward.”
Del Conte’s statement reinforced the status of Texas football as 2020 draws toward a close: Contrary to the now-infamous proclamation of quarterback Sam Ehlinger after a Sugar Bowl victory two years ago, Texas is not back. With records of 7-6, 10-4, 8-5 and 6-3 in four seasons underHerman, Texas is, at best, lagging.
“Every coach in the last decade,
including Mack Brown, has been plagued by lack of player development, lack of discipline and, the most alarming thing forme, a lack of teamidentity,” said Brian Jones, the former Longhorns linebacker who is a studio analyst for CBS Sports.
“Texas is running on fumes of its past exploits. It hasn’t earned any respect. Forget national championships. We’re not even in the conversation to compete for conference titles.”
Elite teams, Jones said, lose once or twice a year. They don’t
lose three times, as Texas has done this season, or five, as has been the case on three occasions in the last decade, and certainly not six or seven, which happened annually from 2014 through 2017.
Evenworse, some are questioning the premise that Texas has any right to consider itself a top-shelf program in the wake of the halfcentury that has transpired since its heyday under coach Darrell Royal.
“They’re not what you think they are as far as their history,” ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit said
last week. “They’re not.”
While Texas fans bridle at that remark, past glories offer only cold comfort, and current trends offer no comfort at all.
With its regular-season finale at Kansas canceled because of COVID-19, Texas stands at 77-60 from 2010-20 with no Big 12 titles. Over the same period of time, its instate Big 12 Conference opponents, TCU and Baylor, have won 92 and 85games, respectively, and each has won or shared two conference titles.
Texas A&M, which left the Big 12 after the 2011 season, has won 91 games in 11 years. Oklahoma, the standard-bearer of excellence in the Big 12, has won 116 games and seven conference titles.
Not sinceMcCoy have the Longhorns produced an All-America or even all-Big 12 quarterback. Only one offensive lineman, one running back, one interior defensive lineman and one linebacker have won first-team All-America honors since 2010, and fewer than a half-dozen additional players combined among those position groups have won all-conference recognition.
Texas continues to rank among the nation’s best when it comes to Signing Day recruit ratings, but it has lagged between fourth and fifth annually among the 12 Texas FBS schools in five-year achievement ratings calculated by Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, based equally on individual and team performances, for the last six years.
Furthermore, the group that signed in 2016, Texas’ final year under coach Charlie Strong, and wraps up its five-year run this season likelywill be the least successful of the lot in combined team and individual achievements.
“It’s all about talent development,” said Spencer Tillman, the former Oklahoma running back who calls Big 12 games for Fox Sports. “Like Bum Phillips said, it’s about taking your’n and beating his’n or taking his’n and beating your’n.
“You can be good at recruiting and good at relationships, but you’ve got to develop talent, man.”
While the books are closed on Brown, who suffered almost as many losses (21) in his last four years at Texas as he suffered in his first 12 (27), and Strong, who was 16-21 in 2014-16, the jury remains out on Herman, presuming he is allowed to return for a fifth season.
Six players from Herman’s initial 2017 recruiting class were starters this season along with 10 players from his 2018 class. The latter number, if sustained, would represent a return on investment thathas been sorely lacking atTexas over the last decade.
Herman’s defenders and Herman himself also note that the
Longhorns this year ran new schemes installed by new coordinators without time to install systems during the spring because of the COVID-19 shutdown.
Texas also was the proverbial hair’s-breadth distance from an unbeaten season, with two- and three-point losses to TCU and Iowa State, respectively, and a four-overtime loss to Oklahoma.
While Herman still has a chance to turn things around if he remains on the job, that task has been made more difficult because of the degree to which the program slipped in Brown’s final years and in the three years under Strong.
“You can sell kids on coming to your school, but if you aren’t able to develop them for a generation, it’s over,” Tillman said. “That’s the major reason Texas has struggled: that reputation for not developing talent once they get it.”
As athletes at all levels increasingly declare their independence from familiar lines of command and control, the Longhorns under Herman also were roiled this year by controversy regarding “The Eyes of Texas” alma mater and by criticism in some circles of Herman’s coaching style.
ESPN analyst Desmond Howard last week cited what he described as a “gross disconnect” between Texas players and their head coach over what he described as Herman’s “myway or the highway” attitude.
Problems at Texas are hardly new. The current decline began in 2010, a year after the demoralizing loss to Alabama, when Brown suffered his first losing record at Texas at 5-7 after 12 consecutive years with nine or more wins and nine years of double-digit win totals.
While Brown’s 2010 recruiting class was ranked in February as second best in the country, it produced only one player who was selected in the NFL draft. Seven of the 25 transferred; 12 recorded at least two seasons as starters.
A year later, five of the 22 players who signed in February 2011 failed to complete their eligibility because of medical issues, most notably quarterback David Ash, who was felled by multiple concussions in 2014 after splitting time at the position for three years with Case McCoy, Colt McCoy’s younger brother.
While Ehlinger has emerged the past three seasons as a team leader with two 3,000-yard passing seasons, he has never risen above all-conference honorable mention status in a league dominated by Oklahoma’s ongoing line of standouts, from Baker Mayfield to Kyler Murray to Jalen Hurts.
As the years have progressed and player mobility has become a major part of college football, 13 of the players recruited by Strong in 2016, his final year at Texas, transferred before using up their eligibility. Only five started more than a single season.
Texas has not been without top-flight talent, including eight first-team AllAmerica selections during the decade and six NFL draft choices among Strong’s class that enrolled in the fall of 2015.
Linebacker brothers Sam and Emmanuel Acho, defensive lineman Malcom Brown and defensive back DeShon Elliott were major award finalists, and defensive end Jackson Jeffcoat (2013 Hendricks), running back D’Onta Foreman (2016 Doak Walker) and punter Michael Dickson (2017 Ray Guy) were major award winners.
But consistent, across theimprovement of highly recruited players has been lacking, indicating Texas either made questionable decisions in recruiting or that coaches were unable to make players better once they arrived on campus.
“Mack got a lot of commitments of players when they were juniors, and some of them had peaked,” CBS’ Jones said. “… (Strong’s) constant staff overhauls and jettisoning players for breaking house rules set him back.”
One consistent observation by fans of opposing schools in recent years has been the tendency of recruiting services to assign high grades to Texas recruits to a degree critics say provides an inaccurate portrayal of their true quality.
That has been reflected by the five-year reviews conducted each year by Texas Football magazine. Only once this decade has Texas in retrospect had the most successful recruiting group of the 12 Texas FBS schools, and that was the 2015 crop that featured six players who transferred and three who never enrolled but was bolstered by six NFL draft picks.
Another signing day arrives Wednesday, and Texas again is poised to have, on paper, one of the 10 best classes in the country, ranked No. 8, two spots behind the Aggies and four up on the Sooners.
Hope once more will spring eternal. Texas, after all, has turned things around before in similar fashion.
From 1986, the Longhorns’ last year under Fred Akers, through the coaching regimes of David McWilliams and John Mackovic, Texas’ combined record through 1997 was 77-60-2, the same number of wins and losses as its current streak since 2010.
After Mackovic was fired, Brown progressed through eight years to right the ship and light the Tower, the main building at the center of Texas’ campus, with orange lights and the number one to signify a 2005 national championship.
But that was then. For now, even with a bowl awaiting and Herman’s job prospects for 2021 apparently secure, the Tower remains dark, and the clock is ticking.