Still on the Hook

You’d think Texas Coach Mack Brown had tried to buy votes in the polls to get the Longhorns into one of the four BCS bowl games, the way some people reacted to the things he said after beating Texas A&M; in November.

What Brown said -- some have called it pleading, some begging -- was this:

“If you’ve got a vote, vote for us.... I’m asking you to do that, and I’m asking everyone across the nation. This team deserves to be in the BCS. They deserve to go more than some teams that are being talked about.”

They were only words, and not really so different from the campaign speeches basketball coaches make every year, trying to bolster their chances to make the NCAA tournament.

Perhaps the scrutiny belongs more on the coaches and writers who eventually moved California down and/or moved Texas up in their rankings, even though Cal won its final game against Southern Mississippi. Or most of all, on a BCS system rife with arcane rules and contingencies that seem to do some team injustice every year.

Instead, what the hubbub proved once again is that there is something about Mack Brown and something about Texas football.

“We’re in the Rose Bowl and we’re one of the best teams in the country with a 10-1 record and we’ve got criticism?” Brown said.

“If I hadn’t said anything, I’d have been criticized for not getting to the BCS again.”

There you have it. He has a 69-19 record at Texas and his teams have won at least 10 games each of the last four seasons, but he is known more as the Coach Who Can’t Beat Oklahoma after losing five in a row to the Longhorns’ Big 12 rival.

His team is in the Rose Bowl for the first time, yet people can’t help mentioning the Holiday Bowl loss to Washington State last season, when the Longhorns never got over the idea that they were supposed to play in the Fiesta Bowl until they became a BCS-system victim and watched Kansas State go instead.

“It wasn’t just about us,” Brown said. “I’ve talked about the BCS every year.”

“What happened to Cal this year has happened to somebody every year. What happened to Auburn this year happened to somebody last year.

“It’s a system that in some ways is better than it was, but it’s flawed, regardless of whether we’re here or not, because Cal should be here too. They should be in the BCS. It’s a good thing people recognize it’s not a perfect system. It’s one that needs to be fixed, and I think they need to look at it every year. And next year, there will be another Cal and another Texas.”

For the record, Brown doesn’t believe his remarks put Texas in the Rose Bowl by causing Cal to lose enough of its lead in the Associated Press and USA Today/ESPN polls to allow the Longhorns to move ahead to No. 4 in the BCS standings, guaranteeing Texas a spot in a BCS game.

“If what I say mattered that much to the media, they’d sure be writing nicer things about me than they do,” Brown said.

He contends voters simply watched closely the final week and made their calls.

“Coaches [in particular] do not watch their votes as closely as other people till the end of the year. I’m guilty of the same thing,” said Brown, who votes in the USA Today/ESPN poll and had at least one voter in his pocket. His brother Watson, the coach at Alabama Birmingham, also votes in the coaches’ poll.

“I think there was the fact that [USC] had a tough day with UCLA on the day everybody watched,” Brown said. “I think people watched when Cal played Southern Miss, and it was a 17-16 game with five minutes left to go, with a 6-4 team.... We’d just beaten our rival. To me, that’s what put it over.”

It’s hard to explain exactly why there is so much criticism of Brown, another in a long line of coaches who supposedly “can’t win the big one.”

Perhaps it has something to do with the way Brown talks, or how much he talks, laying on the flattery a little thick in discussing such topics as Cal, the Cotton and Holiday bowls in a matter of minutes.

Some even find his good manners off-putting.

“Sometimes it comes off as sucking up or trying to be political,” Brown acknowledged.

Yet for all the criticism, Brown is on firm ground at Texas. He made more than $3.6 million this year -- $2 million in salary plus a one-time annuity worth more than $1.6 million -- and is poised to get a salary increase when details of a new contract are announced this week, Associated Press reported.

He has strong backers in Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds and Darrell Royal, the former coach who guided the Longhorns to three national championships.

“I haven’t run across [criticism] from the people who count -- the people who run the program, the people with influence over who goes and who stays,” Royal said.

“I was on the selection committee, and I know we all feel we could still be looking and not find a better choice than Mack.”

Brown says he has come to terms with the criticism, which he contends comes from a relatively small number of columnists, talk shows and Internet sites, but he talks about it a little too much to believe him.

“In Texas, every week that we play, everybody says this is the big game.... If we didn’t beat Arkansas, I wouldn’t have still been here. If we didn’t beat Texas Tech, I wouldn’t be here. ‘Are you going to make it past Oklahoma? Well gosh, they better beat Oklahoma State.’ Then at halftime against Oklahoma State, they were writing articles about whether I would be here or not.”

Brown has known tougher times. In his previous job as coach at North Carolina, he started at the bottom.

“We were 1-10, 1-10 the first two years. We were horrible,” he said.

This is a little different.

“You lose all the games, sometimes there is apathy,” he said. “If you win all the games, there’s elation. And if you win nearly all of them, they’re angry. Because you’re so close to getting it done. We lose to Colorado in 2001 in the [Big 12] championship game or we play Miami for the national championship. That had to be our biggest loss, because we were so close.

“I think the anger that any Texas fan has is that they can taste it.... With passion, with a Texan, you can get some loud noise.”

Some of the loudest came after debacles such as the Longhorns’ 65-13 loss to Oklahoma in 2003, or their 63-14 loss to the Sooners in 2000.

This year, there was another loss to Oklahoma, but the score was 12-0.

“If they beat Southern Cal and win the national championship and we can win Saturday, we’re 12 points away from winning the national championship, so that’s not bad,” Brown said.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another is the elaborate statistical analysis Texas has undertaken.

“We looked at every team that has won the national championship since ‘90,” Brown said. “We went back through to see how many yards they rushed for, how many yards they passed for, what the turnover ratio was, how their kicking game was.

“We’re trying to see if there’s something we’re missing, because we’re so close. We’re trying to take the next step. It’s not rocket science, you’re still going to have to have the players.

“And if we win the national championship, which we will, the next year they’ll expect us to win it again.”

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Sooner the better

Texas Coach Mack Brown vs. Oklahoma since Bob Stoops took over the Sooners’ program in 1999:

*--* Rec. before Texas Texas Texas Texas vs. Year Oklahoma Oklahoma Bowl Game Final Rec. Final Rank 1999 4-2 Texas, Cotton 9-5 No. 21 38-28 2000 3-1 Oklahom Holiday 9-3 No. 12 a, 63-14 2001 4-0 Oklahom Holiday 11-2 No. 5 a, 14-3 2002 5-0 Oklahom Cotton 11-2 No. 6 a, 35-24 2003 4-1 Oklahom Holiday 10-3 No. 12 a, 65-13 2004 3-0 Oklahom Rose 10-1* No. 6* a, 12-0 * entering Rose Bowl

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Los Angeles Times