FanPost

Can we just chill out for a bit

It's the same thing every year.

Every season we go in thinking we can win a championship. Don't lie to yourself, it's always in the back of our minds. It's hard to not think that way when you support the University of Texas. With the name, history, and money, yes, we should be winning championships.

However, this simply will not happen anytime soon. We aren't going to hire a new coach and in year 1 magically improve to win a conference championship. That is what I think we all hoped would happen (would've been nice huh), but it's simply so unrealistic it's almost laughable. At any other program (give or take a few other bluebloods like us), this mindset would not fly because people are reasonable enough to know that most of the time you will be bad before you will be good. So, frankly, I'm tired of seeing the same "we suck the coaches suck our players suck" comments.

This is my take on our season thus far:

1. Sark

I am holding out judgement on him and his coaching for at least another year. I would like to see how he recruits, especially how he utilizes the transfer portal. I keep seeing fans claiming that he sucks and is just Herman 2.0. Maybe this is true. Maybe he is another young, overhyped offensive mind that is not cut out to be a head coach or is just too under-experienced. Or maybe is he a good coach. After all, our offense has looked better this season (ignoring 4th quarters) than most seasons in the recent past, and we saw the offense Sark is capable of creating when he was at Alabama. But we are not Alabama. At least not yet. And this will not happen in one year.

This is where our mindset needs to change. Take Baylor, for instance, who was 2-7 last year. If that happened at Texas, our HC would be out before you could say hook'em. But Baylor is not Texas, so they stuck with their HC and are now sitting at 7-1. We know why this happened at Baylor, it's not that complicated. It's consistent coaching (ie. not switching out coordinators every year), solid players at skill positions, and strong lines. Which brings me to my next point...

2. Lines

Another reason why I do not think we should be making any judgements on the coaches and our team yet is because our lines suck. D-line is eh. Pass rush is relatively non-existent and our run defense is just bad. But our d-line is great compared to our o-line.

This is what I think is most important. Our o-line sucks and no matter how many skilled players we have, and we do have some very skilled players such as Bijan (who I think will win the heisman with a better o-line) and Worthy, it will not matter if we do not have a good o-line. How do we expect a star running back to do well without good blockers. How do we expect CT to hit his targets or even see open targets when he has 2 seconds in the pocket before being pressured. Our team could be really really good, but this will never happen until we get the o-line we need. It does not need to be the best o-line in the country. We have skilled enough players to do very well with only an average o-line. But we do not have a good line now, so we will not play well.

People want to blame our playing on bad coaching or CT or whatever else it may be, but we simply will not know if those are the reasons for our struggles until we get a quality line. A good o-line can make bad coaching look good. A bad o-line will make any coaching look bad.

3. Patience

It has taken me a while to realize this, but we need to get used to the idea of rebuilding. We throw the word around casually but don't take it to heart. A rebuilding season is not going to be a pretty season, but we just have to get through it. Give Sark 2 recruiting classes, see if he fixes the o-line by recruiting it heavily and finding veteran linemen through the transfer portal. If he does this, we will be 10x better.

It takes patience. Patience sucks. But we absolutely have to have it if we ever want to return to being a consistently good football team.

All in all...

Let's stop making judgements on Sark and our players, especially negative judgements. I know, it's hard not to, and maybe we will find that they are warranted. But there is simply no way for us to know this until we give it a couple more years. The lofty expectations we have for our team only cause things to be rushed. This leads to skipping steps like recruiting skill players instead of foundational linemen or firing a coordinator because their group performed poorly after playing in a brand new scheme for only a season. Results cannot come without consistency, and consistency cannot come without patience.

So come on y'all, let's just chill out for a bit.

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