How Do We Turn This Ship Around?

[ViperHorn]

we should not have fired Herman after last year. Not that he really deserved another year but the time was not right. We fired him anyway, over politics, and took a chance on a rehab project.

You can argue over the hiring of Sark, but Herman was an invasive cancer that had to go.

 

[Vol Horn 4 Life]

I say we let the Titanic sink and build a new ship.

 

[Chinstrap]

I am in my early 30s and not an old fart. I have an undergraduate and graduate degree from UT. As a child, college kid, grad student and young adult, I attended nearly every home game from the early 90s with Mackovic up through the 2018 season with Tom Herman. I have attended many OU games, many bowl games (Virginia Tech Sugar Bowl, both rose bowls, the alabama natty, etc). I have gone to many road games including the last A&M & Nebraska games. Even after dropping season tickets, I went to the okie state, ou, kansas state and alamo bowl games in 2019, the alamo bowl in 2020 and the louisiana and texas tech games this year (i was going to go to the kansas state game friday but it isnt worth the $4 tickets).

In 2020, I started attending UTSA games despite never having attended the school. I went all in on UTSA season tickets for 2021 with family and friends and it was the best football decision I ever made.

I say all this to preface where I am coming from:
Through terrible californian university leadership and just changes to the city of Austin, the UT football program and experience has grown stale. Some factors, like the loss of tailgating due to population boom and redevelopment of downtown were unavoidable I guess. However, UT barely has a tailgate scene now and still had a good one JUST 10 YEARS AGO! The city of austin situation also has caused getting to and from the games in traffic to be hell. Then presidents like Bill Powers and Greg Fenves and ADs like Patterson, Perrin and Del Conte "Pac12ed" and over commercialized our game day experience. They fired mack brown. They brought in a "legacy hire", then 2 California head coaches and valued those things over winning. They filled our athletic department with staff not from UT, or Texas or even football schools. Most of our athletic department staff does not get it or even care about Texas athletics. They jacked up ticket prices and made everything expensive. They quietly removed the six flags of texas from our stadium and anything else culturally unique and gave us rocket man. They encouraged woke politics with the team to the level of stupidity of protesting the school song and dividing the team and fanbase. The texas exes stopped being a place for alumni to gather and instead became a public club anyone could buy a ticket to get into, especially opposing fans. The whole horrible state fair knockoff in front of the stadium is a hinderance to getting in the stadium. Mack Brown put a winning product on the field and did not need that nonsense to fill the stadium. The athletic department also ran off long time season ticket holders by making it cheaper to just buy single game tickets than season tickets. They focussed instead on getting random newly imported Austinites instead of longtime longhorns to fill the seats. These imports tend to be terrible, not knowledgeable fans to sit next to at games. They want to be the university of california at AUSTIN, not the university of TEXAS. NOW they are going to the SEC in hopes of the filling the stadium with OPPOSING SEC fans! On top of all of this, I do not know any Longhorns that ever actually wanted to join the SEC and we've made yet another move to chase $ at the expense of our fanbase.

So how does UT fix it?

1. First off, football aside, our university is run by corrupt, greedy, incompetent individuals. Texans, whether they went to UT or not, need to demand that the Legislature replace these people with Texans who will put first the mission of AFFORDABLY educating the best and brightest high school graduates this state has to offer.

2. Next, there are plenty of longhorn alumni that get it and take pride in the school that need to be hired to fill the athletic department. When we hire non-longhorns, at least hire someone from a blue blood football school or a texan.

3. Sark is not a good coach and not the answer. He may be worse than Strong and is at this point. However, he can still do this program some good. He needs to run off every herman malcontent and try to put an end to the terrible, loser culture that Charlie Strong brought to our program and Herman fostered to new heights. Sark will be fired, but I hope he at least eradicates the entitled, loser culture by running off the malcontents before he goes.

4. UT has to hire the best football coach for the job. Not the most diverse or most californian. Right now, having watched Traylor for two seasons, that man in 1-2 years is going to be Jeff Traylor. He's a damn good football coach in the vein of Darrell Royal or Mack Brown. What he has done and his staff of Barry Lunney and Longhorn great Rodrique Wright is the exact opposite of the BS Ive seen under Strong, Herman and Sark. That UTSA-UAB game yesterday was the most fun Ive had at a football game since Mack Brown and gave me my first feelings of when I attended the 04 and 05 rose bowls since the 2011 A&M game! I want that again for UT, the school I actually graduated from.

I just hope UT hires Traylor when the time comes... otherwise it is hopeless and I'll keep merrily meepmeeping.

You make a lot of really good points as to the leadership, culture changes (some of them the population mix of a growing Austin. When I was a kid you couldn’t swing a dead cat around in a room full of people without hitting a diehard UT fan.) and failure to utilize staffing that bleeds orange. These issues have been a downward spiral for many years. But the decline in football started with the failure to transition Mack out of the job, and then the hiring of Strong because bad leadership got caught with their pants down with nobody to hire. Mack, the great coach that he had been, was burned out and owed it to himself and the University to transition out. If not, good management would have made it happen. But the limp D- - ks we had screwed the pooch. It’s called succession planing in the business world, where your job depends on it. (See Stoops to Riley.)

I think Sark gets us moving in the right direction by replacing some personnel problems, and if he is not trending right in a few years, we should have a qualified list of candidates, and should start building the list now. One thing for sure, recruiting will not improve by calling for his head and threatening to fire him now. This is not a quick turnaround.

 

[horninchicago]

I think it all went downhill with the "Head Coach In Waiting" thing.

Full left rudder. Turn it around.

 

[Detective Shilala]

Hindsight bs. You probably loved Sark's hire before the season and now that things have gone bad you have turned back. Pathetic.

I don’t know how you could possibly have surmised that from anything I have said in the past. In fact can read my posts from that time frame and see I was afraid Sarkisian was a panic hire and seemed like a lateral move.
Don’t let that stop you from assuming things though

 

[nashhorn]

Chinstrap you made me think of when that place on 6th street, not there anymore darn I can’t remember name, Longhorn Saloon or something they used to stop and play the ‘Eyes’ every hour or so and Everyone would sing. Good times.

 

[X Misn Tx]

• I think we need better OL, not all new

Texas Report Card: PFF grades from the West Virginia loss
our highest rated offensive players on PFF were OL...

1. Andrej Karic (LT): 81.5
2. Jake Majors (C): 74.0

• i think we need upgrades everywhere on defense.

if we're only going to rush 3-4 guys, we need guys who are sack monsters. sure, everyone wants those, but in our scheme we just gotta.

• our QBs can't cut it

• we need at least one receiver with stickum on his hands.

 

[FWHORN]

RECRUITING

That is all.

 

[ProdigalHorn]

The question of whether Herman would or would not have performed better misses the point to me. Because I think a bunch of what you're seeing this year is what would have been hidden by another year with Tom. We would have gotten another year of seven or eight wins (probably eight), everyone would have been "comfortable" and able to do what they've been doing with little change. And that would have been the path forward. The attitudes that have shown themselves this year when adversity really hit have always been there - the requirements of a new staff and different levels of expectation have brought a bunch of things out that needed to be flushed if we ever want to get out of the middle of the bell curve in this program. Recruiting would have continued to be a bunch of highly recruited guys who don't necessarily fill the needs of the roster. Attrition would have kept churning. We'd keep hearing the same "this is a really young roster" every year like we have.

Something had to change. Maybe this is the root canal we needed.

In terms of how it gets fixed... I do know that it doesn't get fixed firing another head coach after two years, starting over and bringing in another flash hire. The program needs consistency and it needs player development and it needs consistent teaching on skills and schemes. We can beat our chests all day about how "we're Texas and we should be able to win right now," but that's why we're in this position.

It's probably oversimplistic to say that any one thing is the issue. I think it's pretty clear that we have a DC who is determined to run HIS scheme and hope that his players will buy in and/or figure out how to play it. he either doesn't have the personnel to run it (which I think is pretty evident) or doesn't have assistants capable of teaching it. (Based on the way this team plays zone and fails at run fits consistently, that has to be part of the issue too unless you have guys who are flat-out refusing to do what they're told to do.)

The offensive issues are a lot easier to fix, and they start with a functional two-deep at offensive line. When you can't pull a lineman for making a drive-killing mistake because you don't have anyone else to plug in that's competent, you can't play winning football consistently. An upgrade on the line, one more playmaker at receiver and some seriously psychological counseling for the QB room (seriously... I get Casey is playing with a bad thumb, but I don't buy that's the issue right now) and this team is where we thought it should be this year on offense.

I expect that we'll see PK fire some assistants (not Bo Davis) and bring in his own guys. (No, I'm not saying PK is the guy and I'm confident in him, but he didn't just become an incompetent coach once he arrived here. He's had success and he gets to at least put the people in place that he believes will make his system work.) I expect you'll see improvement on offense with a better line (that has actually shown signs of improvement, sort of...) and I'm hoping that Card might just be able to snap out of his funk after the last game. With a competent defense (and yes, that may be a couple of years away,) I have no doubt Sark can field an offense that will make us competitive for championships within two years.

The process is not going to be pretty. It will be better next year, but many will be saying that "seven wins isn't enough, it's the same old stuff, fire him and start over." But we're going to have to live through that if we ever want to get this thing back where it ought to be.

 

[dukesteer]

but many will be saying that "seven wins isn't enough

Good assessment.

While I will be one of those claiming that “seven wins isn’t enough,” at least for me seven should get him to Year 3. That is, unless we are blown out by anyone other than Alabama. Blowouts = reassessment.

To me showing “real progress” would be “at least” nine wins, and 8 will be my Mendoza line. (8 in the regular season.)

Using this year and 5-7 or 4-8 is an accommodation or starting point that I am not willing to concede.

 

[ProdigalHorn]

Using this year and 5-7 or 4-8 is an accommodation or starting point that I am not willing to concede.

I think that's probably fair. We'll see how realistic it is, because I'm concerned that this rebuilding project is a lot deeper than we would like. A lot of it to me will depend on how/why we lost. The reality is that the Big XII (at least to my eyes) is much better than anyone gave it credit this year. Texas played a stretch of teams in a row this year that I don't think many people thought would be as tough as it may prove to be.

For me I think it will be about how they handle adversity, do they improve, are they making the same mistakes that they made this year, does the defense still look lost, etc... I don't know what that looks like in wins and losses but I don't think any of us are going to be OK with a 7-win season next year. That's minimum progress IMO.

 

[IvanDiabloHorn]

Great post Htown77.
Especially regarding the people running the athletics department and the University.
If I wanted to live in California, I would move there. Same for Yankee states most of hires are coming from in the Athletic department.
I will add they take the Longhorn generations of fans for granted.

The problem started last year when the feckless President and Athletic Director totally mishandled the mutiny of malcontents and a child coach.
Until what happened last year is dealt with properly, this team is toast.

Sark was the head coach at two power schools and went 46-35. Past performance for the most part is a great predictor of future performance. He didn’t get better, he got worse.
Sark is mediocre and at best is a placeholder that can be used to accomplish a player cleanup getting rid of the malcontents. He will of course need the help of a feckless administration which will probably not happen, but we are opining about what is needed to turn it around.
I would say next year should be his last year as head coach, again in order to turn this around.

I bought season tickets to UTSA and bought individual Texas tickets to games I wanted to go to.

If you want to see a real football coach, watch Traylor. He doesn’t have great talent, but he can damn sure coach.
I opine to turn this around, let Sark clean up the malcontents, recruit above average talent and hire Traylor for the 2023 season.

I also agree with Htown on the sterile environment. I remember tailgating under the pecan trees behind Louie’s, then going to the Exes center to meet more friends.

Sad to see our own exes center contracted out.