Mack Brown: Horns down disrespectful, should be evaluated by league

The Texas Longhorns were once again the butt of jokes throughout the Twittersphere early Monday afternoon due to a comment made by head coach Mack Brown when asked about the taunting penalty called on junior wide receiver Mike Davis Saturday:

"The horns down is disrespectful," Mack Brown said. "We ought to talk about that as a league." #ut

— kbohls (@kbohls) November 5, 2012

Most of the responses characterized Brown as whining once again after he expressed his reservations about the Longhorn Network several weeks ago. CBS blogger Tom Fornelli even went as far as to create a facetious list of things that Brown finds disrespectful.

The comment from Brown was in response to a discussion about the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty that Davis received for holstering his guns following his first touchdown:

Mike Davis was asked if, considering others do horns-down, he could get away with guns-down vs. Tech: "That's what I was thinking," he said.

— Mike Finger (@mikefinger) November 5, 2012

Apparently not.

While the actual hypocrisy of the call was lost on those who basically took Brown's comment out of context, one respected Oklahoma blogger was able to put the situation into perspective:

i can't believe i'm going to do this, but i'm going to defend mack brown here. his guy got penalized for something opponents do on the reg

— Allen Kenney (@BlatantHomerism) November 5, 2012

Exactly.

The point here isn't really that the league should ban the "horns down" handsign (as much as Brown's comment made it seem that way), which would be difficult to enforce given the prevalence of it, but rather that the conference is not treating opponents mocking the Longhorns as they are treating the Longhorns mocking opponents.

If Mike Davis can't do essentially the same thing that every other team does to Texas, doesn't that represent a double standard?