AUSTIN, Texas — Texas, the behemoth of the Big 12, is in a serious funk.
The wealthiest athletic program in the country, the one with its own television network and some of the finest facilities around, has struggled on the field and been embarrassed by recent revelations of coaches having inappropriate relationships with students. Fans are calling for changes on the sideline and in the administration.
Even Red McCombs, the billionaire donor whose name is on the north end of the football stadium, said Texas seems to be stumbling along.
“I think it has been hospitalized,” McCombs said. “But it has been released and we are on the mend. It might take another year, but we are on our way.”
The “getting better” message is echoed by athletic director DeLoss Dodds, who remains steadfast in his support of longtime football and basketball coaches Mack Brown and Rick Barnes.
“It’s patience and doing the right things. Keep people in place who are good at what they do and that’s what we’ve done,” Dodds said. “You go through these times and if you’ve got good people they make it work. Good things will happen ... Continuity is huge. Having a person who does it the right way is huge. Having a person who cares about kids is huge.”
There have been a few bright spots. The volleyball and men’s golf teams won the 2012 national championships.
But lighting the campus tower orange to celebrate those accomplishments does little to offset the frustration brewing over the underachieving football and basketball teams.
The football program has struggled since the first quarter of the 2010 BCS national championship game when Heisman Trophy finalist Colt McCoy was injured on the first drive and Texas went on to lose to Alabama.
Texas is just 22-16 overall and 11-15 in the Big 12 the last three seasons. Consecutive blowout losses to rival Oklahoma fanned the flames of discontent. Brown, who won the 2005 national championship and was chasing two more in 2008-2009, now faces an irritable fan base.
“Football is fine,” Dodds said, calling last season’s 9-4 finish “the end of the world to some folks but it’s not the end of the world. You’ve got to go through some downs to enjoy the ups. Now, we don’t want to have a lot of them. But 9-4 is pretty good, about where I thought we’d be. I think next year looks a lot better ... back to our standards.”
And what is that standard?
“In football, you want to win them all,” Dodds said. “In basketball, you want to go deep in the (NCAA) tournament.”
Pleas for patience wear thin for fans like Marion Trapolino, a Texas graduate who’s had football season tickets for nearly 10 years and donates more than $1,000 annually to the Longhorn Foundation.
“I know how much money the Texas program has, the kind of facilities it has and the quality of recruits we get,” Trapolino said. “There’s something else that’s missing. And the only other thing you can think of is coaching.”
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