Charlie Strong has been fighting an uphill battle since the moment he was hired as head coach at Texas. Boosters and the press questioned his ability to coach the Longhorns, despite going a combined 23-3 in his last two years at Louisville.
What did the Texas fans think would happen?
Strong has been left to suffocate under a mountain of obstacles that aren’t his creation, and it certainly doesn’t help that the athletic director who hired him is no longer there. Strong is stuck.
Everything came to a head Saturday in Fort Worth when TCU ran roughshod over the Horns for 60 minutes. Reports of players tweeting during halftime, including retweeting a tweet about transferring to Texas A&M, were the main talking points after the loss.
A decisive loss this weekend against Oklahoma might be enough to get Strong fired, despite having millions of dollars left on his contract. That’s not a guarantee or even a likelihood, but a 35-point bloodbath could create enough “noise in the system,” as the saying goes, to lead to a rash decision. All the doubters at Texas will be happy and they’ll work to find someone who “fits the Texas model.”
But who?
If Texas fires Strong after this season, or before this season ends, what’s the motivation for anyone to come and take the job? Texas seems delusional with its expectations. There is certainly ample talent available, but if no one is allowed to put his coaching stamp on the program, it won’t matter. Mike Krzyzewski didn’t win 20 games until his fourth year at Duke. Tom Landry didn’t have a winning season with the Dallas Cowboys until year seven. Coaches need time. Strong isn’t getting it.
It’s either a national championship or nothing for Texas. They’re going to get a whole lot of nothing with that mentality. The same thing is happening at Nebraska right now. Bo Pelini, by any measure one of the most consistently good coaches in the country, was run out of town because he wasn’t good enough. Under Mike Riley, the Cornhuskers are currently off to their worst start since 1959.
Darrell K. Royal isn’t walking into the locker room in Austin again. Baylor and TCU are now the power brokers in Texas, a statement that would have been ludicrous to even think about just a decade ago.
Texas doesn’t seem to want to evolve. You either adapt or you perish in college football, because the game is always changing. Texas seems content to live in its past.
Charlie Strong is certainly on the hot seat. Getting fired wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for him. He’d be owed millions from Texas and would be able to get a coaching job at a place with realistic expectations that will utilize him to the fullest, and Texas would be stuck at square one with a roster full of blue chippers but no direction.
However, while that scenario would leave him with a lot more money and a lot more sanity in the short run — who among us wouldn’t want that combination in life? — the greatest competitors want to finish what they started, and this is a point that has to be underlined at Texas.
Mack Brown, as successful as he was at 40 Acres, drifted through four consecutive seasons near the end of his tenure without coming particularly close to a Big 12 title or any of the achievements Texas reasonably expects from its football program. From 2010 through 2013, the Longhorns never won more than eight games in the regular season. At Colorado State, that’s really good. At South Florida or Kent State, it would be a taste of heaven.
At Texas, it’s plainly unacceptable.
For four straight years, the Longhorns fell short of expectations. Clearly, something not only went wrong after the 2010 BCS National Championship Game appearance (and loss) against Alabama. Something remained wrong.
In many ways, the notion of firing Charlie Strong — which is absurd on the surface — gains weight only if you think the mess at Texas is Strong’s doing more than it’s Mack Brown’s fault. Early in Strong’s second season, though, the process of cleaning up the program is still taking place. In year two, the new regime is still trying to re-organize what the old one left behind in disarray.
Sure, this doesn’t absolve Strong of responsibility for the missteps he has made. Shawn Watson didn’t work out as the primary play caller, and Joe Wickline has brought Texas a lot of legal hassles and complications… not quality offensive-line coaching. If there’s one thing Texas needs more than anything else, it’s elite offensive line play (followed closely by a top quarterback), and the offensive side of Strong’s staff has not been able to develop players in one and a half seasons. That’s all true.
However, are we going to quickly lose sight of the fact that Steve Patterson — recently and necessarily pushed out as athletic director for a lot of good reasons — proved to be a one-man tornado who swept through Austin and damaged everything he touched? Mack Brown had DeLoss Dodds, who was comfortably 16 years into his job when he hired Brown before the 1998 season.
Dodds, one should note, was hardly perfect in hiring coaches. David McWilliams and John Mackovic did not stick — neither man was able to sustain high-quality performance beyond one season (1990 for McWilliams, 1995 for Mackovic). Dodds, you see, needed time to learn how to do HIS job. He did not preside over a period of uninterrupted football success. Texas drifted for quite awhile before finding its stride under Brown.
Instructively, though, McWilliams and Mackovic were both given ample time — five seasons — to sink or swim in Austin. The program didn’t die — it lived long enough to see Brown come aboard and rejuvenate it for more than a decade.
Texas football also lived long enough to see Brown get four bites at the apple in the attempt to sustain what he started. Brown rightly received a chance to repair what had been damaged in that chaotic 2010 season, the one from which he never truly recovered.
If Texas is going to oust Charlie Strong during or after a second season, it will have a hard time justifying the contention that Strong did more to hurt the program than Mack Brown did, for one thing. Moreover, the move wouldn’t be consistent with the program’s recent history of giving its coaches a legitimate chance to solve problems.
Most of all, though, a second-season firing of Charlie Strong would be a show of supreme impatience. Strong was asked to fix one very big mess, under the watch of a terrible athletic director who has since been kicked out. Strong was asked to walk into a dysfunctional environment not of his creation.
That’s not something which can be fixed in two seasons… unless, of course, Texas has unrealistic expectations about the length of time that’s needed to repair a broken program, and equally unrealistic expectations about the man it thinks it can hire as Strong’s replacement.
