College Football Booster Flubs
A look back at the power struggles behind the scenes at UT and A&M and one ongoing today
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it….This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.” — George Santayana, “Life Of Reason”
There is no real threshold as to when a big-time college football coach is on the hot seat, but after that most dreadful of Big 12 sins — a loss…to Kansas… at home! — you can officially declare coach Steve Sarkisian’s chair uncomfortably warm.
This, in the nationally well-respected coach’s very first season on the Longhorn sidelines, and that he is dealing with a roster that is almost completely trash. There are only a smattering of players he and not predecessor Tom Herman recruited to the team. One of whom — freshman WR sensation Xavier Worthy — is already one of the two best players on the entire team. The other being RB Bijan Robinson, one of the only Longhorns who would find themselves in a starting role for a top ten team. The talent level of the rest of them is no better or worse than their record shows them to be.
The mob won’t accept this. They believe what the recruiting services said about our guys our of high school and point to the alleged wealth of talent Tom Herman reeled in with the nationally-third-ranked class of 2019 and wonder why with all of these “athaletes” at his disposal, Sark’s Horns are drowning and possibly headed for the worst season the 40 has seen since John Mackovic’s dismal 4-7 swansong back in 1997.
Well, for one thing not that many of those athletes are still on the team. Some of it is rotten luck — two of the ten most highly regarded players were discovered to have career-ending heart and/or pulmonary conditions. The best player in the class flip-flopped back to USC, which had been his first choice.
But the rest speaks to failures by Herman and his staff. In all, in what should be the year they come into their own on the field, that third-rank class has produced a total of three starters, with fourth — Roschon Johnson — you might call an honorary starter. All the rest have either transferred to other schools, quit football, or were either wildly overrated in high school or not driven to get better at the college level. In other words, Herman’s staff was awful at either evaluating talent or developing it.
It’s an even worse talent shortage than the terrible roster Charlie Strong inherited from Mack Brown. In short, the Texas Longhorns do not have many young men who are particularly good at football at this level.
And yet the howling mob of hooplehead fans somehow believe that Sark and his assistants should be able to “coach up” this JV squad to an elite level, and if they can’t well, by God, will find someone who can.
Now I don’t think there’s a chance Sark is fired after this season so long as he stays off the sauce. (Sarkisian’s career was briefly derailed by a serious alcohol problem six or eight years ago. Disgustingly, anonymous Sark haters on the web are openly longing for him to fall off the wagon, and even worse, some have started a whisper campaign that he already has.)
But the thing is, barring an avalanche of talented players coming in through the transfer portal, I don’t see any way this team gets much better next year. The need two or three linemen on either side of the ball. They need faster linebackers. Outside of Worthy, the rest of the receivers (including the tight ends) or average at best.
And so the howls of the mob will be deafening by mid-season. Sark will have to respond by firing some assistants. Then the players will have to adjust to new schemes and coaching personalities. Recruiting will suffer, and Sark will find himself on the firm-packed soon-to-be fired Death March trail. Now it is eminently possible that he could save his bacon in year three, but it is far from guaranteed that he will make it that far.
And if the idiot boosters and dumbest of our fans demand that, the Horns will be back to square one. And remember, by this time, they will be facing tougher competition in the SEC.
A few years ago, amid the calls for Charlie Strong’s head midway through his second year as UT’s coach, ESPN announcer Kirk Herbstreit infamously pronounced UT’s program a dysfunctional “cesspool.” He seemed visibly shaken as he declared it so, and despite much badgering, he refused to say much more, sort of saying without saying that racism might play a part. He wondered aloud why anybody would want to coach in this environment.
Some writers seem to believe there is something new about all this. That it’s a product of our instant gratification age. Those people lack historical perspective.
Take the case of UT coach Blair Cherry.
In perhaps the smoothest transition of power in UT football history, retiring coach Dana X. Bible handed the reins to Cherry, his longtime right-hand man. Bible withstood two hideous season at the beginning of his stint in Austin — a combined 1937-’38 record of 3-14-1 — to build up the Longhorns to unprecedented levels of success: first ten-win season, first bowl appearance, two Cotton Bowl wins and another tie, and five top 20 rankings. At the time, this was enough to make him the greatest coach in Longhorn football history and helped punch his ticket to the College Football Hall of Fame.
And if anything Cherry improved on what Bible left behind. Led on the field by future NFL Hall of Famer Bobby Layne, Cherry’s first squad was the second ten-game-winner in program history, capping off a stellar season with a 27-7 shellacking of Alabama in the 1948 Sugar Bowl. Despite suffering three losses and a tie in 1948, Cherry’s Horns were invited to the Orange Bowl, where they defeated Georgia.
The next year was his least successful, albeit won with a winning record at 6-4.
The team rebounded bigtime in 1950, steamrolling through the SWC with a 6-0 record and losing only to Bud Wilkinson’s Oklahoma Sooners 14-13. A Cotton Bowl invite ensued, and while the Horns fell to Tennessee, they finished the season ranked third nationally, their highest ranking in history up to that point, a high-water mark that would stand until Darrell Royal hit number 3 in 1961 and then finally won the Horns’ first National Championship two years later.
But despite that most glorious season in Texas football history, Cherry had had enough. He was suffering from insomnia and ulcers. In mid-season, he had announced he would be resigning at the end of the year, and he kept to his word and never coached again.
Cherry took the unusual step of unburdening himself to the media. In a controversial Saturday Evening Post article called “Why I Quit Coaching,” Cherry lambasted the poisonous atmosphere and unrealistic expectations of the fans, boosters and media in Eisenhower-era Austin. Even then (1947-51), with no skins on the wall, anything short of a National Championship was deemed unacceptable.
Cherry said he was bombarded with hate mail and late night phone calls. Some of the attacks sound extremely familiar to those you see on blogs and message boards right now: "The team is overmanned with material but undercoached,” is one you see a thousand variations on today.
A well-known Austin MD called the Cherry home at 3 in the morning and vaguely threatened Mrs. Cherry over her husband’s alleged failings. In response to some hate mail penned by another physician, Cherry responded "You sound like a doctor who never lost a patient." Evidently the doctor's next letter was entirely unprintable but left Cherry grumbling that his haters could dish it out but not take it.
Point being, our unrealistic expectations go way back, years before the Horns ever won so much as a single National Championship, and even in the Stone Age of snail mail, tangible newspapers, and the primacy of radio, Horn boosters and fans had ways to make their whipping boys miserable.
In other words, a cesspool, and way back in the early '50s.
Way back in 2008, now-dormant UT sports blog Barking Carnival used the Cherry resignation to illuminate what had been going at Texas A&M for decades: In 1947, they forced out Homer Norton, the only coach who ever won it all there.
Laughably, and all-too-familiarly for Aggie and Horn fans alike, they had convinced themselves that an NCAA legend was waiting in the wings — in this case, that would be Robert Neyland -- the Nick Saban of his day. After failing to pry him out of Knoxville, where today stands a 100,000-seat stadium named in his honor, they ended up with a former Rice assistant who went 8-22-2 in his three years.
Per Barking Carnival
There, you have it all. Upset Ag alums pull a coup, spend too much money buying the coach out, and have unreasonable expectations of who would want the job. That describes about every coaching change at TAMU we've seen.
The blog’s “TaylorTroom” rattled off most of those moves: Emory Ballard, whose OC backstabbed him by persuading Houston Aggie boosters that his pro-set I formation was superior to Ballard's wishbone, thereby stealing Ballard's job, and then failing hard.
Bum Bright led the charge in removing Wilson and ushering in the cash-for-players Jackie Sherill days. That fell apart via an NCAA investigation, and the Aggies finally made a smart hire in RC Slocum, who despite racking up the winningest record in program history, would also find himself toppled in booster coup. Which resulted in turn in the Dennis Franchione era. Booster skullduggery laid Franchione low too — one or a consortium of them leaked to the media that Franchione had a sideline selling an “insider” newsletter to well-heeled boosters.
And so Franchione was out, and this time Aggie delusion held that Steve Spurrier was itching to move to College Station and coach in the middle of that weird cult.
And so on through Mike Sherman and Kevin Sumlin and now Jimbo Fisher. At last the Aggies have what it believes is its preeccioussss — a proven National Championship coach — but despite their high preseason ranking and the big win over Bama, this is shaping up to be nothing more than a slightly above average Aggie season.
The article concluded by pointing out how distinct all this Aggie booster meddling was from the purportedly orderly way UT operated — with an athletic director keeping the boosters at bay and making his own informed decisions. I think he was seriously had his Burnt Orange glasses on when he wrote that — in 2008 — and even more so if he thinks that of today. It is uncannily similar to the last decade of UT football’s coaching hires.
Recall that Mack Brown did not go gently into that good night when his number was up, and per persistent and pervasive rumors, the Horns Big Money Donors only gave him the heave-ho because, just as the Aggies believed they had Neyland in their grasp, the Horns thought they would replacing Brown with Nick Saban, the Robert Neyland of his time, and a man whose statue graces his home field’s grounds.
But such was not to be and the Horns wound up with Charlie Strong whose hiring was greeted with outright hostility by at least one powerful booster — San Antonio car dealership mogul Red McCombs, who declared Strong unworthy of the headset and better suited to be a mere “position coach, or maybe a coordinator.” This in spite of the facts that Strong was widely regarded as one of the finest defensive minds in college football (based on a decade of stifling D’s under his leadership in the SEC) and had run up a 37-15 record as head coach at Louisville, including a 23-3 mark in his last two seasons.
At any rate, as Strong’s losses piled up early in his second season on the sidelines, a shadowy cabal of “Houston boosters” latched on to Tom Herman as the Chosen One.
There really wasn’t a coaching search in this instance — it seemed like the boosters and fans were absolutely certain that Tom Herman and only Tom Herman could turn this stagnant program around, even as red flag after red flag emerged the longer Herman and the Horns negotiated behind the scenes. There was an almost explicit atmosphere of “How soon can we fire Charlie Strong and hire Tom Herman without looking racist about it” and it turned out that would be three years capped off by another loss….to Kansas. [Italics because that’s the way Longhorn fans invariably say it.)
To be in the middle of it, via the message boards, was to see a classic case of groupthink and mass delusion and to find oneself very much a voice crying in the wilderness.
And as it happened, Herman proved a false Messiah. His recruiting was terrible. Lauded as an offensive genius and quarterback whisperer, his offense came to resemble backyard ball, with a big overgrown kid at QB running over smaller players and only occasionally making big plays with his arm. Recruiting was slipping — no longer was he compiling classes thought to be much better than they would end up. Through his tenure, Herman’s bizarre demeanor and off-putting personality with players and donors alike soured everybody on him and so in spite of his turning in four winning, if disappointing, seasons Herman was shown the door.
Because apparently some big donors believed the then-retired Urban Meyer was in play. Which he apparently was not, because today the Longhorns coach is Steve Sarkisian. Probably for another year or two, during which he will be expected to win with players all over the field who would struggle to hold their own at Sam Houston State or a Louisiana directional school.
It’s a blood from a stone proposition. A VW Bug can’t beat a Ferrari in a race, but at Texas, it’s expected to? Why? Because “We’re Texas!” That’s why, and logic be damned. Those five letters on those burnt orange jerseys should be enough to win all on their own, nobody the talents or lack thereof of those wearing them.
Or as Cherry summed it up, “There is too much emphasis on winning without regard to the facts.”