Orange Crush 
Augie Garrido, Baseball Coach, The University of Texas 
The Eyes of Texas Are Upon Him
Even though University of Texas head coach MACK BROWN is coming off a Rose Bowl victory and has assembled one of his most talented teams yet, five Straight losses to Oklahoma have the Orangebloods in a panic. Will the world’s nicest guy ever finish first?
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“When I hear Stoops,” says my UT alum friend, “I hear enthusiasm. OU has cockiness and arrogance. It’s real. Right now, OU expects to win. We hope to.” Stoops’s players know their coach is 12-3 against top ten teams. They know he’ll take risks when he has to. Dean Blevins, a former Sooners quarterback and the sports director for KWTV in Oklahoma City, says, “Stoops knows that the key thing is, the players have to trust him. They have to believe in him, especially at crunch time. The players will see a coach’s body language and know his track record at crunch time. No excuses, an aggressive approach, and firm decisions. Stoops is the anti-politician.”
Brown, meanwhile, has a woeful record against top ten teams. Critics say that’s because he plays it safe. Last year’s 12—0 shutout, the first suffered by UT in 24 years, was a blueprint for fans’ frustrations: a timid team, so nervous about making mistakes that it didn’t go for it. The offensive game plan, used to great effect in September against the University of North Texas and Rice, was simple: Give the ball to Benson and throw short passes, mostly to the tight ends. It was also predictable. Young wasn’t throwing the ball downfield, so OU, which had a porous defense that was later torched by the University of Southern California in the national championship game, was able to put as many as nine men at the line, stuffing Benson and harassing and confusing Young to his worst game ever; he looked, some observers thought, as if he hadn’t had any coaching. The receivers were too young and green to depend on, said Brown and offensive coordinator Davis later, though there had been plenty of practices and games against lesser teams to get them some experience. When Benson won the Doak Walker award in February, he said publicly what many Horns fans have said privately about the OU game. “The coaches coach more of not to lose instead of trying to win,” he said, adding that they need to “come up with a good game plan.”
UT fans blame Davis, even though, in several of his years at UT, the offense has set yardage and scoring records. The coordinator is 54 and looks like a friendly banker, with a soft face and bifocals. He is, Brown says, an easy target: “Every school of this magnitude has an offensive coordinator who ninety percent of the fans are mad at. Every time a team loses, fans want the offensive coordinator fired. It’s pretty predictable. The reason Greg has drawn so much criticism is we haven’t scored points against OU. We haven’t beaten OU.” Brown, as the head coach, knows he must ultimately take responsibility for the offense. And the losing streak. “No doubt about it, the five losses to OU have been the negative thing we’ve done. The seed of any criticism of us comes from that game, and that’s fair. It’s the only thing keeping us from winning the national championship.”
It’s also costing them top recruits. In the stands at the 2003 65—13 horror was a kid from Palestine named Adrian Peterson, the best high school running back in the country, a Longhorns fan who had a poster of Ricky Williams in his bedroom. He hadn’t been sure where he was going to college, but this game made up his mind. He chose OU, he said later, because the Sooners did a better job of developing players. He added, “One thing that has always bothered me about Texas is they can’t win the big game. I like the odds with Oklahoma for winning a national championship.” In last year’s Red River Shootout, the Sooners freshman ran for an astounding 225 yards. Grand Prairie’s Rhett Bomar, the best high school quarterback prospect in the country, also chose OU in the wake of the 2003 game. When he signed, he said how, in one meeting with Brown, the coach “wouldn’t stop hugging me. He was such a nice guy. But in the end that stuff didn’t make too much difference.” What did matter was that OU and Bob Stoops seemed to be more serious about winning. Blevins says, “The perception of OU fans is that if Bob and Mack brushed against each other in a hallway, Bob would turn around with his fists up and Mack would turn around and say, ‘Excuse me.’ Mack is the kind of guy you meet and think within two minutes, ‘What a great guy.’ But sometimes you can be too nice.”
Every October, before the OU game, stories appear in the press and on talk radio about how Brown is on the hot seat, that he or Davis will be fired if UT loses again. And every year OU wins and nothing happens. Boosters like Jamail, brass like Dodds, and patriarchs like Royal say that the program is in the best shape it’s ever been. It’s winning, the blue-chippers are coming, the fans are back and so is the money. According to Dodds, before Brown’s debut season, UT had rented half of its 14 luxury suites; now there are 66 (at up to $88,000 a year each), and there are two hundred names on the waiting list. Boosters gave $6.6 million to the Longhorn Foundation in 1997; last year they gave $18 million, and most of that came from die-hard football fans. “Mack is not on the hot seat and he’s never going to be on it,” says Dodds. “I have a tendency to dwell on the kids he has and the program he runs.” Yes, it’s important to beat OU, the optimists say, but the game has always run in cycles; many point to Nebraska’s Tom Osborne, who lost to OU for five straight years, then turned everything around and went on to win three national championships in the nineties.
Jamail just laughs at the idea of a hot seat: “He’s on such a hot seat we gave him a raise.” The $26 million contract was approved before the Rose Bowl victory, without Brown’s ever even winning the Big 12, and shows how much the UT bigwigs love him and, maybe, how little it matters whether the Horns win a championship under Brown. If Brown goes 10-1 for the next ten years, I asked Dodds, and that “one” is OU, is that just the way it is?
“That’s just the way it is,” he said.
AT AROUND SIX-THIRTY, the tailgaters began wandering over to the stadium for the spring game. All of a sudden it felt like fall. Forty thousand fans, mostly in orange, cheered as the players, in full uniforms, blasted through a cloud of dry ice. The Longhorns cheerleaders led the crowd in “Texas Fight!” and in the bleachers, five shirtless men stood next to one another, with the letters T, E, X , A, and S painted on their chests, bellowing in the cool 55-degree air. Boosters sat in their luxury suites up high. Lettermen such as Derrick Johnson, a first-round pick in the recent NFL draft, stood in the grass behind the end zone.
In the hour-long scrimmage, Young threw some beautiful passes, tailback Ramonce Taylor ran back a kick for a touchdown, and tight end David Thomas made a spectacular leaping catch and somersault. The crowd roared. Brown stayed on the field for most of the game, the only coach out there (everyone else watched from the sidelines), standing about twenty feet behind Young. While Davis and his staff sent in plays and Gene Chizik and his people sent in adjustments and schemes, the head coach clapped, shouted encouragement, and blew his whistle. Sometimes he gave his players advice man-to-man, such as when he approached wide receiver Limas Sweed, talking to him and rolling his hands forward like a paddle wheel. He patted Young on the butt and once put his arm around his waist as they listened to something being shouted from the sideline. At the end, he gathered his players, said a few words, and they turned to face the crowd, holding up hook ’em signs as the band struck up the opening bars of the orangebloods’ peculiar anthem: “The eyes of Texas are upon you/All the livelong day./The eyes of Texas are upon you/You cannot get away.”
A few days before the game, Brown admitted that he didn’t realize when he was hired in 1997 just how intense the scrutiny would be. He didn’t realize that “every day” really meant every day. It took time, he said, but he learned to deal with it. His skin got thicker. He realized it wasn’t about him; it was about the office he occupied. All he could do was his best, and when in doubt, he’d do what he felt was right, no matter how long it took to figure that out. If Brown has a mantra, he told me, it’s this: “Stay fair to yourself.” When I asked what he meant by that, he finally dropped the familiar quotes, anecdotes, and lines that sounded like they’d been used hundreds of times in front of thousands of boosters. “I didn’t know for a long time who I was,” he said, “and I didn’t know that I didn’t know who I was, but I was very uncomfortable at times because I kept fighting this something to prove to myself and everybody else I could do whatever this was. I wasn’t sure I could do it. I still don’t know for sure where all that comes from. If I sat down with a psychiatrist, he might say, ‘Your dad jumped you as a Little League baseball player, so you had to prove it to him.’ I don’t know.”
He paused, unsure for a moment where to turn. Then, quickly, he said, “But over the last—probably since we’ve been at Texas, really, I’ve been having more fun than I’ve ever had in my life.”
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