Or, "Why My Irrational Hatred of Mack Brown Won't Go Away."





It's been nearly two years since Mack Brown's well deserved exit from the Texas head coaching job, but whenever his name comes up I fume.





The adrenaline surge that seizes me whenever anyone says anything nice about Mack - or anything bad about Charlie Strong - is, I imagine, akin to the surge a meth addict would experience jumping from an airplane, naked, into anti-aircraft machine gun fire . My hatred of Mack Brown has been labeled hilarious by my friends, over the top by my family, and ungrateful and immature by some members of the fan base on message boards such as this one.





In more lucid moments, even I admit that my complete revulsion for Mack is kind of insane. The invective, the curses, the physical disgust I feel when discussing him. The avalanche of words pouring from my lips indicting him and everything he ever did at Texas: his failures magnified a thousand fold, his successes credited to other factors (he was only a good recruiter because it's Texas, it recruits itself; every Texas player who succeeded in the NFL did it in spite of Mack, not because of him; etc., etc.) You really should hear it, it's crazy.





In more lucid moments, I assess Mack simply and rationally: he was the coach we needed in 1997, he famously "put the BB's back in the box," and we probably held on to him between 4 and 10 years too long. He did a lot of good things, but he's no Bobby Bowden. He's no Tom Osborne. He's no Nick Saban. Mack Brown is not a legendary coach, win totals be damned. Mack Brown was an average coach who took over Texas at the right time in a landscape that hid his faults and accentuated his virtues. He built it into the most desirable job in the country, then stayed a bit too long and made the program regress. None of that should spawn hatred from a Texas fan. And yet I loathe him. I detest him. I despise him with every fiber of my being.





Today I figured out why.





You see, today we fired Steve Patterson. We (meaning Greg Fenves) acted swiftly, demonstrating the decisiveness and business agility that was sorely lacking when Powers, DeLoss, and Mack were running things. It is this lack of decisiveness and business agility that caused Texas football and athletics in general to sink into the sweltering cesspool where they currently reside. Over 16 years as Texas head coach, Mack consistently personified these failures: never looking within himself and his program, never anticipating the changing landscape of college football, never recognizing the cracks, never acknowledging that the foundation he laid quite well was crumbling all around him. Mack is responsible for everything wrong with Texas football right now, and no semi-literate Texas fan with a casual fan's understanding of college football misses Mack or wants him back.





But they all think we do.





FOX, CBS, and ESPN all published stories today linking Mack Brown to the now vacant athletic director position at Texas. ESPN even felt it necessary to mention him as a candidate despite simultaneously citing a source that said he'll never be hired. Forbes took it a step further, daring to suggest that hiring Mack Brown would "appease the fan base in the short term."





Appease the fan base? We ran the incompetent clown out of town less than 2 years ago. We (meaning the big money donors) kicked his ass off the bandwagon, in spite of an 8 win season and a blowout win over Oklahoma, because we knew he wasn't the right man for the job. We recognized Mack for what he was: an average coach in a job too big for him. The Texas job isn't easy anymore, it's hard. And that goes double for the athletic director job. He's the wrong man for it, and I think a not-inconsiderable number of fans would renounce their Texas fandom if we hired him to do anything more than shake hands with donors, kiss babies, tell Charlie where he kept the scotch in the head coach's office, and wipe Fenves's behind. I count myself among them.





And yet presumably well educated people paid thousands of dollars annually to report the "news" in the sports world are telling the entire universe that Texas fans crave the return of Mack like the aforementioned meth addict craves, well, meth.





Why? It's one thing for fans of A&M, TCU, Baylor, OU, OSU, Arkansas (damn we have a lot of rivals) etc. to think we're all blithering idiots. We think the same of them, after all. But the national media?





And then it hit me. Somehow, someway, the college football universe decided that Texas football is synonymous with Mack Brown. That is the national perception of the third winningest program of all time. Want to be successful in a football relevant position at Texas? Do what Mack Brown did! Biggest question about whether Charlie Strong is the right man for the job: "Does he have the charisma necessary to handle the donors and the media, like MACK BROWN did?!" Now the Texas AD is fired because, in an amusing coincidence, he actually did lack the only meaningful quality Mack Brown brought to the job of Texas head coach: charisma and the ability to build relationships. The answer is obvious: hire Mack Brown!





Never mind that we fired him. Never mind that while he would be great with the donors, he has thoroughly demonstrated he would be garbage at the other important areas of the job: personnel management, administration, overseeing large capital projects. None of that matters though, because we have an opportunity to hire Mack Brown - and get our identity back!





In the immortal words of Scipio Tex: "It's not 'Mack Brown Texas Football.' It's Texas Football. He didn't build this. He [was] a caretaker."





And yet, unless this post or others like it go viral in a hurry, we will likely endure at least three months of speculation about who the next Texas athletic director will be, all of it littered with arguments in favor of hiring Mack Brown. We will probably hear at least seven times that Mack as AD is "almost a done deal," doubtless courtesy of McCombs and Jamail leaks to their media puppets or courtesy of the simple ignorance pervading the halls at the World Wide Leader and its ilk. None of it will be true, of course, because Fenves is no fool, but we'll have to hear it nonetheless.





And that's why I hate Mack. Because he has so skillfully pulled the wool over the eyes of the college football world and defined Texas football as synonymous with himself. Because the perception that he is Texas football, incredibly, endures over the reality that he was a lousy coach who stole $5 million a year and ran our program into the ground. Because he has fooled people so completely that credible members of the media are actually suggesting, with straight faces, that he should be placed in a position to supervise the man hired to clean up the wretched mess he left. It's intolerable, and it compels me to finish this post with messages to the media, to Mack, and to those tasked with hiring the next Texas athletic director.





To the national sports media: I need you to hear me. We, the embattled Texas fans sick of enduring humilation, derision, and mockery at the hands of the rest of the college football world, need you to hear us. Mack Brown is NOT our choice. Mack Brown would be the WORST possible hire as Texas AD. A Mack Brown hire would not appease us, it would enrage us. Stop suggesting otherwise. We are NOT Mack Brown. We're Texas.





To Mack Brown: I want to respect you. I want to be grateful for the good things you did. I want to give you credit where its due you. But I can't. I can't as long as the world thinks I and the University I love are defined by you. I can't as long as you have the nerve to state publicly that you "feel no responsibility" for the current plight of Texas football. I certainly can't as long as you actually feel no responsibility for that plight (and yes, I do give a lot of credit for your 1998 season to John Mackovic - he left you an incredible amount of talent). I loathe you, Mack. I will continue to loathe you until you publicly take responsibility for your failures, or (more likely) until people stop talking about you and stop associating us with you. I'd sooner see Matthew McConnaughey as our athletic director than you. And frankly, I'd sooner be defined by him too. Man won an Oscar.





And to Greg Fenves, the AD search committee, Korn/Ferry, and whoever else matters in making this critical decision for the future of Texas athletics:





ANYONE BUT MACK.







