TEXAS-SIZED MESS
Why do Lone Star State teams struggle so much on the gridiron?
Several years ago, a free afternoon during a work-related trip to North Carolina called for an obvious mission: Seek out the finest examples of the barbecue the locals hailed as the world’s best, and gorge accordingly. § But upon completion of this task, which unfortunately involved the ingestion of sad piles of shredded pork doused in a sauce consisting primarily of vinegar, one question lingered over the entire experience. § How can a state love something so much and yet still be so bad at it? § Year by year, and week by week, the people of Texas are finding out.
We build football stadiums like they are rocket ships in a space race, with LED lighting and bleachers stretching halfway to the moon. Almost all of our highest-paid state employees are football coaches, and we obsess over the sport so much that we have turned our two biggest athletic departments into the wealthiest in the country.
Here, the addiction to college football is hereditary, passed from one generation to the next like brown eyes or high cholesterol. We make celebrities of our most promising players before their proms, and our richest businessmen keep pouring millions of dollars into their favorite programs until well after their retirement dinners.
And somehow, we still stink at it.
More people are noticing this now, but it is not exactly a new phenomenon. Aside from a couple of isolated hot streaks here and there, our programs have been largely mediocre over the past five decades with only one national championship in the past 47 years.
That’s the same number as Utah, and one fewer than South Carolina. We make fun of Florida every chance we get, but those weirdos have 11 titles from three different programs during that stretch.
Still, for years we’ve been able to squint hard enough to believe we not only were competitive, but that we were the cradle of the sport’s greatness. We bragged about how many scholarships our high-school players earned, and we always seemed to have at least one university capable of winning it all.
We had SMU’s Pony Express in the 1980s, Texas A&M’s Wrecking Crew in the 1990s, Texas’ long streak of Top 10 finishes in the 2000s, and even in recent years found upstart contenders at Baylor and TCU.
But each of those powerhouses crumbled, some more dramatically than others, and now we are living in a dire, bleak era. Last year, not a single program in the state finished the season ranked in the Top 25.
And after the first week of 2017? The misery is only getting worse.
In the span of 36 hours over Labor Day weekend, the state’s three most highprofile programs engaged in a round of humiliating oneupsmanship you had to see to believe.
It started with the Longhorns, whose laughably unjustified national ranking was exposed for the sham it was during an all-too-familiar embarrassment at the hands of Maryland, an 18-point underdog. Tom Herman’s team could not block and could not tackle, but thanks to a couple of old Southwest Conference rivals, its shame would soon be overshadowed.
Baylor, who only three years ago was a play away from the College Football Playoff, spent its opener with a new coach losing to Liberty, a Football Championship Subdivision school that never had beaten an opponent from a Power Five conference. Presumably, the Bears would have had a better chance against Pursuit of Happiness.
And then, of course, this weekend of despair culminated with A&M’s collapse at UCLA, where they blew a 34-point lead in the final 18 minutes and had a university regent on Facebook calling for coach Kevin Sumlin’s job before the team even made it to the plane.
On the bright side, Texas Tech and TCU both handled overmatched opponents in their openers, and neither UTSA nor Houston lost, as their game was postponed.
But as the state braces for what looks like another autumn of failing to reach our mythical standards, there really was only one source of solace.
We at least know how to smoke a brisket.