Thermos H. Christ

Yeah but we were at least in the game and looked like we could win it if we’d just get our shit together. Tom Herman absolutely lost games and very nearly lost games to teams who never should’ve been competitive with us. He just didn’t get blown the fuck out by anybody. He never trotted out a team that didn’t look like they belonged on the field with the opponent. The team we trotted out last night had absolutely no chance of even making it a contest with a basement dwelling Arky team that has won 3 conference games in 3 years, led by a position coach.

I mean yeah it’s game two, and much remains to be seen about how the Sark era will play out. But it took Sark two weeks to fail harder than Mensa ever did in four years, so for someone who never liked or understood the hire to begin with this sure doesn’t make me see it any different. If we’d let Herman have another season to try and get over the hump we’d be in a better position than we are today. Better because we wouldn’t have just been utterly crushed for 60 minutes by a team that sucks, and because we’d still be in a position to fire a middling coach and get a good one if that opportunity came up. We’re stuck with Sark for 3-4 years at least. Maybe Sark will put it all together here, anything’s possible. I just can’t see any reason to think it will happen.

Tom never got dominated bell to bell like this. By anyone. This was straight Charlie shit.

No break.

You were saying…

Not much of an improvement? Did Tom Herman’s teams ever get crushed like this, against anybody? Granted he let inferior teams hang around and too often let them win but we were always in the game. We were never in this one.

I'm so bewildered that the dumb choo choo song somehow became the line in the sand, for either side. You can't throw a rock on our campus without hitting something that has a history steeped in racism, but the battle rages over the choo choo song of all things.

That about sums it up. Casey looks like starter material, he just had the misfortune to be behind Sam and ahead of Card. I hope he sticks around at least through this season, because I think he'll get playing time and if anything goes wrong he could get a lot of playing time. But ultimately you have to expect people to do what is right for them, and if he can go get a starter job elsewhere I don't see what will stop him from doing that.

The alternate is camouflaged as a normal uniform

If an actual burnt orange helmet longhorn was good enough for Earl Campbell, it's good enough now.

I hate it so much. Chocolate brown is not burnt orange, it is not any orange, and it is ugly. After like 20 years we finally get the turf the right color and we have to screw up the helmets again? If the "burnt orange" on the jersey and the helmet are different colors, at least one of them is the wrong color by definition. And the right one can't be the one that is not a shade of orange at all, and doesn't match one other thing in that stadium. It's much closer to aggy maroon than it is to burnt orange. It sucks.

I mean with like one or two exceptions we've been mediocre or worse every season for over a decade, and we're about to head into this season with a totally inexperienced freshman QB, with yet another new coaching staff, led by a Saban assistant who has never done shit as a head coach. He quickly took Washington from being really awful to being OK and never improved from there at all, only to have them become best team in their conference the moment he left while USC... did not. If the results had been there on the field USC wouldn't have cared if he was shotgunning a beer on every play. It totally might work out. It could. But there's plenty of reason to temper one's optimism here.

I hate the darker helmet logo so much. God dammit. Just make it the right color. Make it all the same color, the right color. If you have two colors going on, at least one of them is wrong.

Spindletap is aggy? Or are you just saying that because Houston? Either way Heavy Hands, Houston Haze, Diamonds In My Mouth, all S-tier NEIPAs.

By the way, as far as Texas goes, nobody holds a candle to Spindletap Brewery in Houston for NE IPAs. Heavy Hands is the shit.

No love for Taaka? When I was a kid old man next door bought that shit by the case..stacked the boxes by his trash bin out back Taaka is ass even by the standards of rotgut vodka. Nikolai is 10x better. And of course for only a moderate bump in price you can get Smirnoff which is equal or superior to most “premium” brands.

I love NE style hazy IPAs, so I'm in heaven right now in terms of the craft beer trends. The previous big trend, when sours were all the rage, was not my thing at all.

Yeah Micheladas with tomato juice suck. Lime juice, dash of hot sauce, chili salt on the rim, that's good shit.

Oh give it a rest, you're just being contrarian. IPAs of various styles are great, but that's not the beer you want when you're in the scorching sun throwing them back like water. I enjoy a nice glass of scotch too, but I'm not going to reach for it during an outdoor activity in 100 degree heat just so nobody can question my machismo.

Helles people, Helles is the ticket for "good" summer beer. An ice cold Spaten or Weihenstephaner or Hofbrauhaus fucking slams in the heat. St. Arnold Summer Pils is real good too. Or sure, just your favorite watery macro-style beer. You won't go wrong with a frosty Red Stripe or something.

Oh snap, looks like we just launched some program that specifically allows players to license their name/image/likeness and use the University's trademarks along with it. Being able to sell your name and image with the most recognizable logo in sports attached seems like it could be a big deal? https://www.burntorangenation.com/2021/8/20/22634908/texas-longhorns-group-licensing-name-image-likeness-official-logos

Is this true? If so, no wonder Quinn Ewers is going to Ohio State if he's expecting to make six, maybe seven figures there and we're just feeling it out. Saban wasted no time talking about his seven figure QB who hasn't taken a snap. I've been wondering about why we seem to be missing on so many top targets, but this would explain a lot.

Excited for more high-profile, high-upside games in big rowdy venues. Hopeful about the prospect of improving recruiting even beyond where it has been by having a bigger presence through the whole deep south and Florida, losing fewer in-state targets to Tech/TCU/Baylor, and taking away Aggy's best sales pitch. Will miss the round robin and the wild, funslingin' Big 12 full of plucky underdog teams that have a history of punching above their weight. Sad to see the landscape of college football shifting away from a place where there are a zillion teams and an upstart school like KSU or Okie Lite or Tech or TCU can catch lightning in a bottle and go on a run and get into the top 5. Where we could see something like Baylor and TCU both being ranked in the top 10 and having a completely bonkers shootout for the ages where Baylor wins 61-58 after being down 21 points with 10 minutes left. It feels like things are rapidly shifting towards an NFL-style model where all the money and talent and opportunity will flow to a much smaller set of teams concentrated into a couple of megaconferences. I'm glad to be one of the teams on that's "in," but the chaos and the diversity and the sheer scope of CFB has always been a lot of what I love about it.

What makes me ill at ease is that Sark's bona fides are as a guy who coaches players. I've come to believe that, especially at a place like Texas, a head coach has to excel at the CEO stuff - having the overall vision for the direction of the organization, attracting and retaining the best staff, mentoring and managing his people and getting them what they need to succeed, handling the politics of it all. However good he is as an X's and O's coach, it's a big question mark as to whether he can do that successfully. And I worry that an X's and O's coach is at a disadvantage here if that means they're trying to micromanage things down at the player level. Working with Saban should be a master class in keeping an organization humming, and hopefully Sark learned a lot there, but a lot of Saban assistants have gone on to less-than-illustrious careers. I also wouldn't be surprised if a guy as pathologically competitive as Saban sees all his assistants as potential future competition and doesn't go out of his way to teach them how to do his job.

I'm pretty sure it's not going to be a bad thing for Texas if we can start openly backing dumptrucks of money up to players' houses. Dumptrucks full of money is one area where we're always competitive.