Scattered Start for Longhorns

A flight chartered by the University of Texas football team left Austin, Texas, on Wednesday morning and touched down about noon at Los Angeles International Airport without a single player aboard.

For Coach Mack Brown’s team, it was business as usual.

Brown, his second-ranked Longhorns set to play top-ranked USC for the national championship in the Jan. 4 Rose Bowl game, had once again given his players the option of finding their own way to Southern California.

And all 124 on the roster took him up on the offer, making travel arrangements independent of the team and in the process pocketing a little extra cash.

“We’ve done it this way for 14 years [at North Carolina and Texas] and -- knock on wood -- we’ve never had one player arrive late, so it’s worked,” Brown said Wednesday, greeting arrivals in the lobby of the Century City hotel serving as the Longhorns’ Rose Bowl headquarters. “Also, these young people pretty soon are going to be going out on their own into the real world and we try to let them have as many real-world experiences as they can.”

NCAA rules allow bowl participants to be given a travel allowance roughly equal in value to the cost of an unrestricted round-trip ticket to the bowl site from an airport nearest to the player’s hometown or campus.

If they can find a better fare, they pocket the difference.

“You stand a chance to make some money if you’re aggressive and you plan ahead and get a good flight,” said George Wynn, assistant athletic director for football operations at Texas. “That’s why a majority of them do it.”

Some would rather travel with their families, Wynn added, and some like to stretch their Christmas break by avoiding a return to Austin before flying out.

But cash motivates most.

“Most guys will end up netting 700 bucks or so,” Wynn said.

And so it was that Wynn, after arriving Wednesday via the charter flight that carried the coaching staff and other support personnel, was trying to keep track of 124 separate player itineraries. Or was it 121? Four players, among them punter Richmond McGee and long snapper Nick Schroeder, drove out together from Austin, arriving early in the afternoon after 22 hours on the road.

Some players had to be picked up at LAX, others in Burbank or Orange County. Some were running late because of flight delays.

All were due by 6 p.m.

“You always are a little edgy on travel day,” said Ed Goble, associate athletic director for business. “It’s kind of a no-news-is-good-news situation.”

(USC has allowed players to make their own way to bowl games too, but last year Coach Pete Carroll required them to take the team charter to the Orange Bowl.)

For all the administrative hand-wringing, Goble said, “We haven’t had any incidents, we haven’t had any problems. Occasionally, you’ll have a player that misses a flight or misses a connection or runs into a typical travel problem that can happen this time of year, but generally speaking those incidences are limited to maybe one or two kids just delayed a little bit getting in.”

He said it’s “very rare” that players fail to arrive on time.