Had this conversation a year ago with my pastor/lead writer for Inside Texas Bill Frisbee about the same thing. Our sports over the past 5-10 years or so:

Our football team is a top 10 powerhouse
Our Mens/Womens Swimming are top 10 powerhouses
Womens Soccer top 25 mostly
Womens V ball top 10 power
Mens Track / cross country top 10 power
Womens track / cross country, spotty, but can won a NC a couple years ago
Mens B Ball top 25 power
Womens B Ball, spotty
Mens Baseball, top 10 power
Womens Softball, spotty
Mens and Womens Tennis, top 25 always
Mens and Womens golf, eh

Wow, no other school has a lineup like that, especially one where almost all their sports are headlined by great coaches who arent going anywhere in the forseeable future. This truely is a golden age….. appreciate it fellow horns…. Mens Swimming bout to add another National Championship to the resume! Hook em

Intriguing question and I probably need to understand better your definition of “Golden Age” to more accurately respond. Is it more ideals driven or success oriented?

I always felt like the term “Golden Age” referred to the first time everything comes together and sets the ideal standard for what is possible and most desired. In regards to UT Athletics, I’d have to give the nod to the 1940’s as the “Golden Age of Longhorns Sports.”

Bare with me because I’m too hungover and it’s way too early on Saturday for numbers, but I believe UT had it rolling in all the big collegiate sports of the time – Football, Baseball, Track, and to some extent, Basketball – throughout the early part of the Post WWII era. By the late 1950’s, I think football took center stage and while the other sports were still decent, they paled in comparison and just didn’t get the same amount of attention or resources that football did. I believe the prevailing thought at the time was that it would be of more beneficial to the overall athletics department and image of the school to put their resrouces towards being the best at one high profile sport (football) rather than be above average in the rest. And I can’t argue with that considering we’d just come out of the Great Depression and that model was and has been quite successful in putting several schools on the map in their chosen sports. Though if you didn’t put all your eggs into football or basketball back then, I’d say you’re probably still struggling for attention today.

Fast Forward to the Ots…Deloss has built an absolute juggernaut of an athletics program by leveraging the profits from the football program to raise the level of a select number of other sports programs. I say select because we’re still not trying to be the best in all NCAA sports (no soccer, wrestling, lacrosse, hockey, etc.) Focussing is still key to our strategy, but because of greater resources, it can be on more sports.

Back to the original question of whether or not this is the “Golden Age of UT Sports?” If your definition is overall success, I’d say yes because the overall output over the past ten years is unprecedented.

However, if your definitioin of “Golden Age” is more ideals driven, I’d say it was the 1940’s because of the relative purity and newness of the overall success. I’m not saying they didn’t need money and resources back then to be good, but now it’s an abosolute prerequiste to have the finest facilities and a war chest of financial backing to truly compete for an extended period of time. So if I was to refer the last ten or so years of UT sports as anything, I’d probably call it the “Platinum Age.” It’s golden all right, just more expensive and harder to acquire.

In thinking about PB’s question regarding how long this "Golden Era" will last, the only way I could think to respond is to start by asking why the athletics program (namely football because it drives and pays for everything) ever got so down in the first place in the 1980’s. I think the comments above about Coaching are dead on and once Brown and Barnes leave (and more importantly, Deloss), I think all bets are off. But in addition to or as a copmliment to coaching, I think the name of the game is still recruiting.

Below are the three main factors I feel determine long term success of a college athletics program and not surprisingly they all directly effect RECRUITING:

Coaching/Innovation – As long as our coaching staffs are pushing the envelope on the latest offensive tactics (i.e. the spread in football) and thinking of ways to capture the attention and interest of the best recruits, we’ll be in good shape. (Nebraska has hit a dry spell because they didn’t adapt and stayed loyal to the running game too long).

Expansion – We laugh at the size of the our latest Jumbotron and don’t even blink anymore when we hear word that the football stadium is adding 15,000 more seats. But it’s no accident that this latest Golden Era of success has come with a ton of expansion. There is definitely an arms race going on in college sports and it’s why the first question prospective coaching hires ask Athletic Directors is: "how are you planning to build, rennovate, expand the current facilities? (Look at what Baylor is doing right now).

NCAA Regulation – I need to be careful how I phrase this because I’m talking way out of my depth here and a lot of what I’m about to say is pure conjecture…but I believe one of the primary reasons UT football hit a dry spell in the mid to late 1980’s as well as early 90’s is other schools in our conference (namely A&M under Jackie Sherill) became really good at cheating to get recruits or at least better at cheating than UT was (nobody in the SWC in the 80’s was clean). Now an Aggie would respond to that by saying, "you arrogant UT ass, it had more to do with Coaches Sherril and Slocum being better than coaches Akers and McWilliams," and there is a lot of truth to that. But you’ve still got to get the recruits or it doesn’t matter how good the coach is. (Don’t quote me on this, but I think the scandal starting to erupt over UCONN basketball recruiting infractions is just the tip of the iceberg…if you’ve ever been to Storrs, CT, you’d know what I was talking about.)

Back to the question at hand…as long as the NCAA remains hyper-vigilant about recruiting and the current playing field (fair or not) remains the same with coaching coupled with facilities determining what school a recruit selects more so than pay-offs (or Big Red Sports Cars), I think we’ll be in good shape.

Why does athletic excellence have to be cyclical? Is there some negative feedback mechanism that brings down good programs? There certainly doesn’t seem to be one that elevates bad programs like the cap and free agency do in the NFL.

In my view, success is systemic and, yes, we owe much to Deloss Dodds in that regard. Another factor is the appeal of Austin and the University itself. In the Dodds plan, we should always have the best coaches and the best facilities. Only a hiring mistake or a criminal violation could upset that. The only real threat is more opponents taking the same approach and competing for talent.

BTW: I think Michigan probably also belongs on the list of elites. They absolutely own college hockey.

…it’s pretty clear that to experience a “golden age” at a school, you need both A+ funding and an A+ ability to hire good coaches. You need the money to build the facilities and pay big-time coaches, but no matter how much money you have, clearly you have to possess an ability to hire coaches that are a) really good at their jobs, b) able to focus on long-term goals and take no shortcuts, and c) able to keep their noses (mostly) clean and not get the program into long-term trouble. Without the right coaches, the money doesn’t matter.

At Missouri, we’re in a position to find out how much you can succeed with A-level coaches and only B-level money. We’ve won more combined football and basketball games this year than we ever have before, and the 18 months since Rock M Nation’s creation have been arguably (or, really, unarguably) the most successful 18 months the Missouri athletic department as a whole has ever seen. (Personally, I credit RMN for Mizzou’s success, ahem, but that’s just me.) Funding is currently at least a slight issue, and we’ll never have Texas-sized money, but there’s no question that both Gary Pinkel and Mike Anderson are as classy as successful coaches can be, and they’ve slowly built their respective programs for potential long-term success.

We’ll see how far Mizzou falls in football this year—clearly there will be a step backwards, but recruiting and facilities continue to seem to improve, so hopefully 2009 will just be a building process toward 2010 and 2011—and we’ll see if a) Mike Anderson is still on the sidelines at Norm Stewart Court next year (My bet: he most certainly will be), and b) if Mizzou takes a step backwards while transitioning in leadership from Carroll-Lyons-Lawrence to the current precocious class of freshmen (My bet: a step backwards in 2009-10, but still tourney-level success). If 2009-10 is a transition year for Mizzou athletics, with eyes on major success from 2010 to 2012, then this could be an extended “golden age” of sorts for Mizzou as well. But clearly only a few programs—and Texas is clearly at the top of the list—have the funds to succeed at the national-title level in both major sports and a majority of smaller sports, and the fact that Dodds seems to have found his rhythm in terms of talent evaluation of coaches, means that Texas’ success should continue for a while, at least until Brown and Barnes are gone.

Texas Monthly had a fascinating article on this in their November 2008 issue. Title IX had a massive impact on NCAA sports. As noted in the various posts above, Texas approach was to limit the number of sports that we play in…and be in serious contention to win it all, every year, in every sport we play. This means hiring the best coaches…coaches that know their x’s and o’s, recruit well, and be an ambassador of Texas and the sport. The first two are fairly obvious. Being an ambassador is about getting people to want to be associated with UT. In terms of recruiting, it’s particularly clear with the 2010 class the MB is building off of the 2009 class. This also includes the recruits that don’t make it to Texas because of scholarship limits or because another program fits their situation better…such as Devon Kennard, Dre Kirkpatrick, and Jarvis Jones…aside from the theatrics, they had nothing but good thoughts of Texas. It’s about keeping a clean program. It’s about recruiting parents. And it’s about recruiting companies that want to be associated with UT…which leads to money and the financial juggernaut that DD has built to build the best facilities and hire the best coaches that fit the criteria. The football program is the financial linchpin as it draws funds(directly from tickets, bowls games, tv revenue, etc, and indirectly by other corporate buy ins, merchandise, etc.) to all the other less profitable programs. Men’s basketball program under Barnes has been profitable lately, but not sure about the other men’s and women’s programs. Sustained bad pr can throw a wrench into the entire process. Think of a longer, protracted, sustained summer of 2007…parents wouldn’t want their kids coming to Texas and companies would be less inclined to be associated with Texas. I know we’re talking about UT sports, but it shouldn’t be discounted that Texas has amazing academic program, particularly at a public university, which makes it all the easier to recruit corporate sponsors. Now, I don’t foresee this happening with Muschamp as hciw. He fits the criteria with my only concern of how the offensive personnel (coaches and players) view him, but otherwise he’s a very high energy motivator, fluid x’s and o’s, and personable recruiter as noted by 2009 late recruit hit and misses. If Barnes was closer to retiring and/or leaving, we should probably find a hciw for him as well, but I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon. Other than the slip up this year, Augie has also been nothing short of great following Gustafson. Same could be said on the women’s side with Coach G following Conradt in basketball and Elliott following Haley in volleyball.

Hit enter a few times in there and I might read that. I bet it was profound and insightful.

PB, great job & thought provoking.

I’ve watched this sports program in earnest for the last 40 of my 49 years. My answer is that we are indeed in a Golden Age, of which I’ve enjoyed tremendously. But all our good work could be easily undone. We should never, ever take our success for granted and always hunger and thirst for more.

PB,
I hate to bug you. As an older dude I forget things now & then. I want to be front & center when the preseason magazine comes out. Any idea on timing?