How did it happen?

F

Fetoid

25+ Posts
At present, it seems that both UT and OU have taken their rightful places among the football elite. But when I first moved to Austin, and what is now Big 12 football came to my attention, neither one of the these teams was a shell of their former selves. I have seen coaching changes transform both into MNC winners and $$ makers for their schools.

But here's the thing. They had been this before. Back when I was a whipper snapper in the East, thinking Clemson was the pinnacle of college football, these two programs were bashing heads, kickin' as*, taking names.Well, at least at the twighlight of their heyday. By they time I got to Austin, both of these formerly mighty programs had fallen into significant disarray. A joke.

I have spent a lot of time reading this and other boards, and learned volumes for which I am grateful. But I still can't fathom how two massive programs, side by side, can go from national dominance to such suckakge, relatatively simulataneously.

How did anyone, with the ridiculous amount of players, students, alum, oil $, traditions, allow this to occur to 2, much less 1 of these programs?

Please enlighten me. Thanks.
 
I remember sitting on my grandpas knee among all the burnt orange ties and big old yellow solid gold Rolex oysters & bevo cuff links. Scotch on one knee, me on the other. Sitting in a theatre watching grainy footage of Kiki DeAyala, Tony Degrate, TCU getting disciplined 52-17 or something. My grandmother hollering at the Governor and former secretary of the treasury to "use a coaster". I won't overstep that memory. Having lunch with Barry Switzer and those evil Oklahoma oilmen with their deformed bottom lips full of chaw, sipping on coca colas, and never spitting. Talking football. Don't know how they did it. 5 guys would reserve a table for 10 and use the extra 5 for hat stands. They were a big bunch and I miss them terribly.

I have no enlightenment to share except to say that towards the end my granddad didn't know that Coach Royal wasn't on the sideline anymore and his OU pal thought John Blake was a player. Old timers get old as they do. They ruled the land for quite a long time, and maybe when they went away we all suffered for it. It cut both ways I guess. Life is a lot different now that my generation has a voice.
 
You can thank reform... Monitoring of scholoarships. Under the table deals.. Ncaa watchdogs.. It's called evening the playing field.. You see it in college as well as in the pro's now...
 
You can blame the wild SWC in the 80's, aggy's rampant cheating and Switzer's shenanigans as the main factor in both schools fall. Though some would argue without Switzers cheating OU wouldnt have been where it was, it is certain he brought them up and then down. Many of Texas' wounds were self inflicted by a fan base in the 80's that worked actively to undermine Fred Akers. You wouldnt believe the number of Texas fans who were actively cheering for Texas to lose so Akers would get fired without realizing the lasting damage they were doing. Read the book Bleeding Orange and you will get a good taste of how bad it got in the 80's at Texas.
 
A lot of the issues were definitely self-inflicted. Sure, A&M, SMU and TCU ushered in a new level of cheating in the SWC, but there was also a lot of complacency and entitlement at Texas. You could hear it in some of Akers' comments through that period, you could definitely see it in the fans' lack of enthusiasm and negativity, and I think it showed up as the recruiting well gradually dwindled.

There was some bad luck as well. Freshman rb Edwin Simmons comes on the scene, shows he's going to be the next dominant college RB and blows his knee out. The offense never really recovers, and Akers is never able to really establish a passing game to offset that. Combine that with a gameplan that makes what we're doing on offense now look like rocket science, and you get rough times. (I used to hear stories about how coaches would spend all week getting a game plan together and prepping how they wanted to attack a defense, only to have that plan wrecked by halftime because they just wouldn't stick with it.)

By the time Akers left in '86, there was no longer any real talent gap between the rest of the conference. That's when I arrived at UT, and let me tell you, it was not pretty watching the Horns "get lucky" to beat North texas at home.
 
LSU was down too in that era, which is even weirder.

The short answer is recruiting. When I was in high school, 1984-88, it seemed like at least half of Texas blue chips left the state. Thurman Thomas went to Okie State from Willowridge, Rodney Hampton went to Georgia from Kashmere, Ty and Koy Detmer went to BYU from El Paso, Alfred Williams and a bunch of other H-Town studs wen to Colorado from Houston...UCLA, Florida State and Miami were cherry-picking, Arky poached a few from NE Texas and on and on.

The cheating didn't help, but I also think that the football culture down here stayed too conservative for too long. We lagged behind the rest of the country in switching to pass-happy offenses by a couple of decades. Almost every team I played against in high school was still running the option, and that continued for years after I hung up the pads.
 
Great responses and I think all of them had a hand in the demise of the SWC and UT in the late '80's early '90's.

To sum it up and take from all of the above posts:

The men described above who were extremely rich, successful and arrogant thought they had the winning formula, and did not change it for decades. They were so arrogant they thought they could buy any player and buy their way out of trouble. Those men are a good way to describe the atmosphere in Texas, from UT down to the high schools. Fattened from their success, completely comfortable taking two chairs for every one person, telling each other the how great their football is and proving it by beating an instate doormat.

Frogstyle, I really do like the image you shared. It reminds me of growing up in FW in the early '80's. Good stuff. I want to be one of those old men!

We're Texas...but let's not take it for granted.
 
It all comes down to the head coaches attitude and recruiting- and both have to be excellent. Big programs like UT and OU occassionally get the "with all we have to offer anyone could win 10-11 games a year here". It just doesn't work that way.

As to a "level playing field" I disagree. In any era there are teams/programs that rise up but the traditional powers are still there. OU, UT, OSU, USC, Florida, Michigan etc.
 
I wont sugar coat it.Our thug players.The Cocaine,the shooting guns out of the Bud Wilkinson house(Players dorm)the rape,our QB stealing Barry Switzers trophies.We got what we deserved, It was painful medicine but we took it.all of that went down in 89' and we got hit hard with probation and damn near the Death penalty.That pretty much took care of the next 6 years,Bad hires at the head coaching position did the rest.
 
It's well documented that the UT teams in the early 90s would stay out past curfew hanging in the parking garage listening to PM Dawn, BBD, Heavy D and the Boys and Boys II Men until the wee hours. When it came time to play the game, they were too hip-hopped out to remember the plays.
 
It also didn't help that there was a rather stupid and conscious (sp?) effort by UT administration to de-emphasize football after DKR's reign.
 
This is the kind of stuff we obviously need to be wary of letting occur again. Those who don't learn from the past...etc etc

Having started paying attention to college football in the mid-late 80's, and moving to Texas in the early 90's, I really had heard very little about Texas football until I got to Austin, obviously due it being such a down time. This has really helped fill in some gaps for me. Good stuff. Unfortunate, but good.
 
Well, I am glad you brought it back up.

That scar was starting to heal nicely, thank you for ripping it back open {/freshman at Texas in 1984}
 
The Perfect Storn..

Other SWC members blatantly cheating in the area where it matters most... high school recruiting.... SMU... aggy... notorious. Other SWC schools investigated for cheating as well.

Televisions influence (with the attendant corporate pressures) was changing the face of college football. No longer could schools only appear 5 times in the span of 2 years.

Naive arrogance of Texas alums combined with a short sighted view of the future of college football. With college football becoming a nationally televised sport and with many more schools being shown, high school kids had many more options. We thought, "We're Texas, we don't need to change." David McWilliams epitomizes this. No one will dispute that McWilliams was a good man, but the only thing he had going for him was "he was a Texas man."

By the time we recognized the mistakes and acknowledged the game had changed, we were so far behind the 8 ball. Mackovic was a gesture to expanding beyond the state's borders.. but again, he was the wrong choice. He sent the message that Texas was growing up but at the same time,he could not embrace nor foster the roots of the Texas program... Texas talent.

Mack happened to be the right man at the right time. He re-energized and re-established ties with Texas high school coaches but had the ability to convey an image of Texas that was and is nationally appealing.

Donations and money have flowed into the department, Mack was instrumental in changing the way in which recruiting is done (early commitments) and Texas is ahead of the curve instead of playing catch up.
 
okie thought Gary Gibbs, a good assistant to the bootlegger's boy, could step up. He's still a good assistant, for the Saints, but was just adequate for okie as head coach. John Blake was brought back because of his ties to okie, and his pro experience with the Cowboys. All of that didn't mean he was head coaching material...he was a disaster, mostly.

Texas thought Fred Akers was the right choice to replace Coach Royal when he, in essence, burned out. Akers did win three quarters of his games as head coach, but he didn't endear himself to the right power brokers, and I'll always believe the CB loss to Georgia that cost us a championship was what ultimately did him in.

Two more misguided hires after Akers, while aggy made some hay, courtesy of Fed-Ex, and Texas was mostly irrelevant until Mack came aboard. If he hasn't been the rebirth of Darrell Royal since, he's not far off, and did have the good sense to bring Coach Royal back into the inner circle.

That's kinda the Cliff's notes version of what happened to Texas and blow-u...it's a cycle every powerful program goes through. Ask Nebraska fan what it feels like right now.
 
National recruiting was a big factor. This enabled private schools and "bubble" schools like UH to become competitive. Airline travel, tv coverage and illegal payments enticed some blue-chippers to leave Texas and others for out of state to join these programs.
 
Coach Akers had a great record at UT and when he had the talent he could coach. But we just couldn't get the talent needed to keep challenging for the NC.
 
Drake,
To their great credit the OU Athletic Department realized the Schnellenberger mistake and cut those losses very quickly. If Howard had stayed another year, he might have been able to completely destroy the football program. As for John Blake, he was a Switzer guy and he was available. The man could recruit very well, but he certainly was not head coach material.

You are correct - the longstanding winning traditions at both Texas and Oklahoma are very strong, and temporary dips in the won-lost record tend to be temporary in the long run. It will be interesting to see what happens when our current coaches move on - do you want to be the guy who follows Bob Stoops, or do you want to be the guy that follows the guy that follows Bob Stoops?
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Interesting parallel situation currently ongoing at Nebraska - bad to be the guy that follows Dr. Tom, much better to be the guy that turns it around later.

HornHuskerDad
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