Big Talent and Soft Schedule Have Him Hooked on ‘Horns

They haven’t cleared ground yet for the presidential helipad, but it’s starting to feel a bit like the days when coach Darrell K. Royal roamed the sidelines and Lyndon Baines Johnson literally dropped into Texas Memorial Stadium.

“We always knew when he was coming, because we could hear the helicopter,” Royal says of LBJ. “The Texas band would play ‘Hail to the Chief.’ He loved that.”

At 76, Royal can’t shoot his age anymore, but he still shoots a pretty good breeze.

He is standing next to his cart at the Barton Creek Golf Club, regaling visitors with tall Texas tales.

“When we were really jelly-rolling it, it was an exciting time,” Royal says.

Then, like time, Texas football slipped away.

It has been 24 years since Royal retired and 30 years since he coached the last of three national championship teams in 1970.

Royal didn’t figure to last long enough to see the revival, let alone be a part of it.

But after a quarter-century of being a football plain state, Texas has gone retro.

Royal has been summoned back from the pasture he had been put out to, Texan George W. Bush is 272 electoral votes short of reclaiming the White House, and Longhorn football may be on the cusp of another dynasty.

Pay no mind to the Associated Press’ preseason poll or the coaches’ annual weather-vane tally.

Texas is No. 1.

Yeah, we know--Texas Coach Mack Brown can’t believe it either.

“We’re in the top 10 in most polls and we lost our last three games?” Brown says.

Don’t bother us with details, Mack, it’s time to toot your Longhorns.

We say this knowing Texas may actually be a year away. There are holes to fill at wide receiver and a quarterback controversy brewing between Major Applewhite and Chris Simms.

But, cosmically, this is the year Bush and Texas can go over the top together.

The Longhorns have 18 starters returning from last year’s 9-5 team and are still sock-sorting through three of the best recruiting loads in history.

In two years, Brown has shaken Texas football to its core, not to mention just about every hand in the state.

The schedule is softer than those box springs over in Sealy. In a controversial move, Texas backed out of a season-opening game at much-improved Hawaii and instead will play host to Louisiana Lafayette.

Texas also misses Kansas State and Nebraska in Big 12 Conference play, faces upstart Oklahoma in Dallas on Oct. 7 and gets archrival Texas A&M; on Nov. 24 in Austin.

If the Longhorns can sidestep a couple of potholes--at Stanford on Sept. 16, at Colorado on Oct. 14--they could be 11-0 headed into a potential Dec. 2 Big 12 title game showdown against powerhouse Nebraska.

Brown faced a similar scenario three years ago at North Carolina, when his Tar Heels needed only a home victory against Florida State to reach the title game.

“We had everything there except we weren’t ready to win the game,” Brown says.

Florida State scorched the Tar Heels at Chapel Hill and North Carolina finished 11-1, No. 4 in the final coaches’ poll.

The difference this time is that Texas may be the one team not intimidated by Nebraska. The Longhorns handed the Cornhuskers their only loss last year and thumped Nebraska two years ago in Lincoln.

In the 1996 Big 12 title game, of course, John Mackovic’s Texas team stunned No. 3 Nebraska, 37-27, in one of the decade’s greatest games.

“Our kids like that game,” Brown says. “They respect them, but are not intimidated. They want to be in that game.”

Lonely Star State

So what happened, Bevo?

There is no good excuse for Texas football ever going sour.

It’s like Napa Valley not being able to produce grapes.

Texas has been a football hotbed for 100 years. It is the state’s collegiate football program, with unparalleled interest, talent and funding.

Fred Akers, who succeeded Royal, had his moments but never seemed to get the right bounce. A heart-wrenching, 10-9 Cotton Bowl loss to Georgia in the 1983 season-ender cost Texas the national title.

Then came the Texas flu-step.

Texas went 36-34-1 from 1984 through 1989 under Akers and David McWilliams, and 41-28-2 in six years under Mackovic in the 1990s.

Texas hasn’t been ranked No. 1 in the AP since Oct. 9, 1984.

Bill Little, an athletic department publicity man since 1965, has witnessed first-hand the fall from grace.

“‘Anger is one thing,” Little says, “but when it was apathy, that’s when I thought we’d never get it back.”

Some blame the decline on rampant cheating that pervaded the Southwest Conference in the 1980s (Texas emerged relatively unscathed).

“We were in a world then when people played by a different set of rules,” DeLoss Dodds, the school’s athletic director since 1981, says. “We just weren’t getting the players. And we let our facilities slip.”

Though he turned out to be the wrong coach, Mackovic at least deserves credit for spearheading a five-year, $90-million makeover that has left Texas with jaw-dropping facilities.

Something else was missing all those years, though.

Someone, actually.

Darrell Royal.

For reasons that remain clouded, Texas pushed Royal aside in 1976--he was not even allowed on the search committee that led to Akers’ hiring.

What did Royal contribute? In 20 years, his Texas teams won 11 SWC titles and national championships in 1963, 1969 and 1970.

In 1968, he and his staff developed the “Wishbone” offense, a quadruple-threat run offense that propelled Texas to 30 wins in a row and consecutive national titles.

It was Royal who, one summer, taught the Wishbone to Alabama’s Bear Bryant.

But an old cowboy was allowed to fade into the sunset.

“I really don’t like to talk about what happened in between,” Royal says of the dark years. “I’d rather stay current. It might not come out right.”

Mack Attack

It didn’t take Brown long to turn over tables.

One of his first acts after replacing Mackovic in 1997 was restoring Royal to the royal court.

During an early Texas practice in the Brown regime, Royal asked the new coach if it was OK to talk to one of his players.

“I said, ‘Yeah, you can talk to him,’ ” Brown says. “ ‘The stadium’s named after you, you can do whatever you want.’ ”

Brown, in turn, extracted from Royal the nuances and politics of Texas football.

When Brown asked, “Will you help me with the Texas tradition?” the old coach’s face turned a Royal flush.

“I knew we had something special then,” Royal says. “He knew where his priorities were.”

Royal told Brown to keep his nose out of state politics.

He instructed Brown about dealing with Texas fans: “Whether you like it or not, they need to think you like it.”

He told Brown that Texas was like no other football creature.

“The good news is people really care at Texas,” Royal told Brown. “The bad news is that people really care about Texas.”

Royal won’t forget Brown’s entrance on the Texas stage.

Before addressing the media at his introductory news conference, Brown stopped in the hallway and called Eddie Joseph, executive vice president of the state’s High School Coaches’ Assn.

“In a sense, that was more the nuts and bolts of the football program rather than the press conference,” Royal says.

Brown has since thrown up a recruiting wall around Texas. He has either visited or written all 1,200 of Texas’ prep coaches.

“He’s absolutely the best P.R. guy I’ve ever run across,” Royal says.

This year, Brown turned down 700 speaking engagements and transformed the school’s football athletic complex into a monument to Texas football.

Instead of Muzak, athletic department elevators chime “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You,” the school’s fabled fight song.

Former Texas Heisman trophy winner Earl Campbell watches home games seated in one of six real saddles perched in the players’ private lounge in Texas Memorial Stadium.

Mack’s idea.

Texas has sold 50,000 season tickets this year, despite not playing Oklahoma, Kansas State or Nebraska at home.

“It’s coming, it’s around the corner,” DeLoss says of Texas’ return to glory. “And it’s the real thing.”

Or Is It?

There’s nothing like a quarterback controversy to screw up a potential dynasty.

In Austin, it’s the talk of Sixth Street’s rooftop eateries.

Applewhite or Simms? Simms or Applewhite?

“I was in a gas station,” Simms said, “And I go to pay the guy and he says, ‘You’re that Simms kid, right? You going to beat out Applewhite?’ ”

Hey, what better place than a gas station to pump for information?

Simms, the sophomore son of former New York Giant quarterback Phil Simms, is Texas’ most heralded recruit since Heisman Trophy winner Ricky Williams.

The 1998 USA Today high school player of the year, Simms reneged on a commitment to Tennessee and instead chose Texas.

Simms says Tennessee wanted to redshirt him; he wanted to play right away.

But as a true freshman last year, Simms could not displace the sophomore Applewhite, who set 10 single-season school records while throwing for 3,357 yards and 21 touchdowns.

Simms threw 36 passes in seven games.

Now what?

Applewhite tore the ligaments in his left knee during the Cotton Bowl, an injury he guessed could be used for an excuse to usher in the Simms era.

“The college game is a business,” Applewhite says.

But Applewhite made it his business to get his left knee back to 100%, which he say it is.

How does Brown have the race handicapped?

“Both parents like their son better than they like the other parents’ son,” he says.

Brown says both quarterbacks will play. He faced a similar quandary at North Carolina, when he successfully platooned Chris Keldorf and Oscar Davenport.

But Simms, a 6-foot-5 sophomore, is already antsy, knowing he probably would have been starting this year had he gone to Tennessee.

“Yep,” Simms says. “That’s the choice I made, and I live with it. But I’m happy here, beyond belief.”

Simms knows quarterback controversies; he’s still bitter about Scott Brunner beating his dad out for the Giants’ starting job in 1980.

“[Bill] Parcells chickened out,” Chris says of the Giants’ former coach.

Simms is guessing one man is going to end up with the job.

“I can’t see it going through the season,” he says of the platoon system. “I don’t think it could work. It creates too much turmoil for the team.”

Simms and Applewhite appear to be good friends and both insist they will not let this become a wedge issue on a team.

“There is not going to be any ‘Chris’ camps, because I won’t let that happen,” Simms says.

Applewhite says the quarterbacks can’t do it alone.

“It’ll take a lot more than Chris Simms and I to handle it right,” he says. “There are a lot of friends involved, loyalties.”

Brown says this story will be played out peacefully.

“I’m not going to let a pouting quarterback ruin our season,” he says.

Applewhite notes that no Texas quarterback since 1990 has started and finished the same season.

Darrell Royal hasn’t taken sides on the quarterback issue, but has offered Brown a bit of general advice.

Brown: “Darrell says that if you got it you make it. If you don’t got it, you won’t make it. And if you don’t know what ‘it’ is, you haven’t got a chance.

“Our theme for this year is ‘it.’ ”

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TIMES’ RANKINGS

1. Texas

2. Nebraska

3. Florida State

4. Alabama

5. Michigan

6. Wisconsin

7. Georgia

8. Florida

9. Miami

10. Virginia Tech

14. USC

24. UCLA