A thought about what is going on this year with Mack Brown

is the defense isn’t good enough to carry the offense like Mack expected. The 2nd DT didn’t show up like it did the past two seasons and every team UT lost to tears up the middle of the defense.

Greg Davis doesn’t have a VY, Colt, or Shipley to cover up his predictable offense.

Has Mack had a good year? You have to ask?

But has he lost it? No. Strong NO. Does he care? Hell yes. He’d be the first to admit he’s made mistakes, that he made some decisions that haven’t worked (and maybe he suspected they wouldn’t work).

There’s no easy answer on the ineffectual play. One thing that’s clear: This is not a strong team mentally. They haven’t dealt well with adversity, and some players have lost focus, lost discipline, failed to step up at crunch time. Maybe that fold at crunch time is the biggest surprise to me. This is a program whose teams came from far behind, from almost no chance of winning, to pull out game after game from 2004-09.

That’s missing. Mack’s got to get it back. I’m guessing he will.

I agree that the two “near misses” the last 2 years had a negative effect on Mack. One result was his attempt to develop a power running game, even though he clearly did not have the personnel for it. Added to that are the effects of 2 beliefs Mack has stated this year. One is that he thought the defense might be the best ever at Texas and the other is “In college, football games are lost, not won.” Thus Mack apparently felt that so long as the offense did not make alot of mistakes the defense should be able to win the game for us. Having an inexperience QB made Mack take his “playing not to lose” philosophy to the extreme. Thus I think alot of the conservative play-calling and horizontal passing game were a misplaced and ineffective attempt to minimize turn-overs and give Gilbert confidence by having him complete short passes. However, completing a pass for a 2-yard loss gives no QB confidence. The defense wasn’t near what Mack thought it would be. The team started losing and people started clamouring for them to “take the reigns off Gilbert” and “allow” him to thrown the ball downfield. Finally this was done with disasterous results. Yet Mack did not want to take Gilbert out even for a quarter out of a fear of a “QB controversy” or of damaging Gilbert’s confidence, ignoring the fact that leaving him in to throw 5 interceptions would be even more damaging to his confidence. Mack preached accountability but didn’t practice it. Players, I believe, lost confidence in both Gilbert and Mack. Some of them then tried to do too much, making mistakes. Others just “mailed it in.” I don’t think Mack has a clue what the problem is. One weeks he accepts all the responsibility himself, the next week he calls out his coaches in public. One week he describes the players as arrogant with a sense of entitlement and says he doesn’t trust them, the next week he is praising his effort. These mixed message further confuse and frustrate the players. We are seeing the painful results.

he’d better clear it up real quick. The University would forgive two maybe even three off seasons, an off season being 6-6. but no worse However, a season that ends up 4-8 and last in the Big-12 South, well that may be a bovine of a different color. The University of Texas historically does not tolerate losing seasons regardless of the coaches previous record! One that could be this bad….well there will have to be a lot of good will from the University leadership for Mac to even hang around and it will only be good for one year. So whatever you folks think might be running through Mac’s head, I’d bet he’s fearing a pink slip, not some lost opportunity from years gone by. At Texas more than any other University in the country, its not what did you do for me last year, its what did you do for now!!!!!!!!!!!