Saturday’s home matchup against the Texas Tech Red Raiders will mark Senior Day for Texas Longhorns like defensive end Malcolm Roach, wide receivers Devin Duvernay and Collin Johnson, offensive linemen Zach Shackelford and Parker Braun, and a host of other Texas football players. Win or lose, it’ll also be a disappointing note for the players to end their Longhorns career on, after the team fell to a befuddling 6-5 record with their loss to Baylor over the weekend.
All’s well that end’s well, though. Unless you’re Tom Herman, who’s currently being chased down by an angry social media mob that’s armed with burnt orange torches and pitchforks.
Given that, what does the future hold for fall-guy coordinators like Todd Orlando and Tim Beck?
Longhorn coaches are going to need to check their lease agreements after this game. Tom Herman signed an extension after last season, which means he's safe. However, nobody else is safe after this season.
— Anwar Richardson (@AnwarRichardson) November 23, 2019
Saturday, it seems, will tell.
WHAT THE WISE MEN ARE SAYING ABOUT LONGHORNS FOOTBALL
ESPN’s Paul Finebaum on Birmingham’s WJOX: “There’s no sugarcoating it. Tom Herman has been an abject failure at Texas. That surprises me and many other people because I believed in this guy. I knew him when he was [Urban Meyer’s] offensive coordinator [at Ohio State]. I thought he was one of the smartest coaches around. Either he has failed doing the things you have to do or Texas is beyond salvage.”
Hookem.com: Bolhs: Tom Herman, Chris Del Conte are firm on head coach’s ability to fix Texas
NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE IN LONGHORN LAND
Herman, to some extent, isn’t the only head coach honcho currently sitting on the hot-seat. Texas men’s basketball coach Shaka Smart is catching flak for the Longhorns’ (5-1) first loss to No. 22 Georgetown over the weekend. “Offensively, [Georgetown] really took the fight to us from a physicality standpoint. ... I don’t think we drove with the aggressiveness we need to drive with, with the physicality we need to play with. I don’t think we cut hard enough. There was just a tentative nature to us that really worked against us in the second half. That ended up being a big difference.”
Texas women’s basketball coach Karen Aston understands her team has the momentum in the lead up to the Rainbow Wahine Showdown in Honolulu next week, where the Longhorns (3-2) will face off against North Carolina State, North Texas and Hawaii in a three-day showdown.
As noted in yesterday’s roundup, Texas bested Southern by 54 points on Sunday – Texas women’s basketball’s largest winning deficit since they whooped McNeese by 56 points in November last year.
“Pleased with the game [on Sunday],” Aston said during Monday’s press conference. “I thought there was some improvement with our defense, our sense of urgency. I thought also that the beginning of the game was much more purposeful than probably any that we’ve played so far this year, just in a sense of executing early, making early passes, not being too anxious, and making what I consider to be the hard play instead of the easy one. We did the easy things [on Sunday] that made us look more cohesive.”
A video tour of the Longhorns’ new J. Dan Brown Player Development Center was released Monday. Included in the fully donor-funded athletics facility is a performance center for weight training, a nutrition center, a multi-use turf equipped with batting cages, the Roger Clemens pitching lab, as well as an alumni locker room for former Longhorns to use during their professional offseason. Take a digital tour of the facility and see for yourself.
Honoring the past. Building the future.
— Texas Baseball (@TexasBaseball) November 22, 2019
This is the J. Dan Brown Family Player Development Center. This is Texas. #HookEm pic.twitter.com/AX9Z1srQhm