Tired Horn

Uh... no. Standing amid the dreary ashes of the men's basketball program at Texas, no one is asking for a coach who can overnight make us top 10, Big XII champions, or a Final Four team. We'd accept someone who can simply, IN YEAR FUCKING FIVE, field a team that doesn't look freakishly unfamiliar with the basics of successful basketball. I don't think that's asking too much. I think any number of coaches not named Shaka could accomplish that.

They do need to learn how to play in the Big XII. They just need to learn it from someone else.

It really is kind of amazing. How can Shaka be this bad? Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.

Why stop there? 12 was in easy reach today.

Man, we are so far past that point. It's year 5 and our product looks like finger paint from a bunch of blind-folded kindergarden kids who were force fed Quaaludes. God almighty. How does a program survive being like this?

Yep. We're a WTF offense. It's not built to succeed, so no matter who's playing we inevitably have these games where it's just indescribably excruciating to watch us. It's so random yet relentlessly ineffective.

I wasn't even excited about winning it last year.

Maybe that's Shaka's plan---play such a dreary, unwatchable brand of basketball that, after a while, the powers-that-be can't even bring themselves to think about our men's basketball team. The extensions will just roll out on auto pilot.

I like that. All it really needs is a "fucking" in front of it.

Congratulations to Captain Crash. He was always one of my favorite Cowboys.

You're just not taking the long view. If Jason had been allowed to complete his twenty-year process, we'd have been a process-oriented juggernaut.* * Not that we'd actually have won a title, but we could explain why we hadn't better than anyone.

Yep. That's pretty hard to defend.

Yep. The more accurate appropriate comparison would be Shaka and Charlie Strong

Give him some credit. He might just stumble into a sack instead.

Kind of amusing that Derrick Henry wound up with the highest quarterback rating in the game.

Because the passing game hasn't had to do that much. They can run and Baltimore has gagged the game away something fierce--3 turnovers and 3 failed 4th down attempts on the Titans side of the field.

It's kind of shocking how bad LJ looks.

Remember that famous line about nuclear war? "The living would envy the dead." That's kind of how I feel when watching Shaka's teams in those all too frequent moments where they're misfiring on all cylinders. Its so fucked up yet never even remotely interesting.

It's worse than that, because it didn't just happen to us. We paid serious money to have that thermonuclear device dropped on us. Good times.

I disagree. The Hindenburg was far too violent and memorable. For Shaka you need something that's both awful and completely boring in a really grating way.

Put me down for almost anyone or bust.

we're not going to do that competing for the Final Four in basketball isn't even a nice-to-have around here. it's certainly not a priority or a must-have. I think a lot of you have bought into a real myth about Texas athletics, because of the "we're the Joneses" bullshit of the decade of the 2000s. Keeping up with the Joneses is just an idiomatic way of saying keeping up appearances. The Joneses in this idiom aren't the smartest or happiest family on the block (at least not intrinsically so). They're not winners. They just have the nicest looking stuff. The myth is that "we're the Joneses" has anything at all to do with winning. It doesn't. It (maybe) has some (casual) correlation, because winning makes more money than losing, but ultimately Being Texas is about appearances. We look like an athletic program that should win a lot, and we make a lot of money doing what we do, which is being the college sports equivalent of the stereotypical Obtuse White Guy in a TV commercial, or maybe a Billy Zabka character from an 80s movie. The only way-- and I mean this in literal terms, I mean there is never going to be a hypothetical BMD who decides he wants to see us win a basketball national title and money-whips Tony Bennett to come here, and Chris Beard is not going to tearfully declare he's Coming Home To Restore Texas Basketball, and none of the other fanciful What Ifs are going to happen -- the only way Texas will ever have a coach on the level of Billy Donovan is if we hire him as an up-and-comer from some Dollar Store program and then, like Rick Barnes, he decides to be a lifer here because you can coast for fucking years here once you're embedded. I agree about the whole "Joneses" thing. But is it really too much to ask that a school with the resources of Texas have a basketball team that's simply watchable? That's where my bar is these days. Forget NCAA titles, Big 12 titles, any higher aspirations, really. I'd just like to watch a basketball team that doesn't have me pondering whether I'm more bored or more nauseous. Boredom and nausea are not a good combination, unless, apparently, you're Shaka. He seems to thrive on it.

The NCAA tournament isn't really Shaka's thing. He wants the computer's predicted chances for the NIT.

Just a thought---could Shaka actually be trying to get fired? I mean, think about it. Right now he has to sit there watching every one of our shitty games. That's got to suck. It would be a lot better to just have all the money without having to endure watching his team play.

Well, given that it's Jerryville, McCarthy is probably about as good as we could expect. I'm not holding my breath for a Super Bowl with Jerry's Boys, so I'll wait at least a few games before calling McCarthy a fat fucking retard.