Charlie Strong needed a huge win over Oklahoma. This time, he didn’t get it

You guys will never believe this, but Texas’ defense failed in a big spot.

The team’s performance is on Charlie Strong, despite him having a team so young: It’s starting a freshman at QB and counting 13 underclassmen among its top 19 tacklers. The roster heading into the season was 71 percent underclassmen.

Demoting defensive coordinator Vance Bedford, as Strong did days prior, now looks simply like a move to placate a fan base that wanted a scalp more than any kind of long-term solution.

With talk swirling that Strong’s job was on the line, Texas entered another Red River game in which the atmosphere of uncertainty reigned supreme. Unlike almost any other rivalry, Red River defies expectations year after year.

It did not this season. Oklahoma won, 45-40. If you thought Texas was going to come out and put the hammer down defensively, your expectations were as asinine as those in power in Austin, and the environment created by those expectations makes it nearly impossible for Strong to succeed. They couldn’t pull off the miraculous, but that shouldn’t be what’s required in Year 3.

Changing a coordinator, even to one as experienced as Strong, was never going to produce the instant change folks demanded. That’s not how this works. It definitely doesn’t work that way in the span of six days.

With Strong calling the defense, Oklahoma turned the ball over four times in the first half, including this questionable pass coverage which ended up being an INT.

Things went to the intermission with a 14-13 Oklahoma lead, but the Sooners had outgained the Longhorns, 281-130. This wasn’t a defensive struggle so much as it was the Sooners not being able to fire on all cylinders. OU was close to competent on O, with 6.7 yards per play, but the self-inflicted wounds made you think Texas was keeping things together.

In the second half, the Sooners opened up a can on offense, with 391 total yards and 8.9 yards-per-play in the second stanza alone.

But that’s Texas’ (and the entire Big 12 for that matter) current brand. To expect any different in six days is lunacy, no matter who is calling the defensive plays. Samaje Perine went wild to the tune of 214 yards on 35 carries. DeDe Westbrook finished with a school-record 232 yards receiving, and he did it in three quarters.

Texas’ defense was 86th nationally in total defense coming into the OU game. The unit has given up less that 444 yards once this season in five games. The defense under an experienced coach like Strong, with that side of the ball as his calling card, should expect to be better. But if this is what you are, to expect it to shift in an instant isn’t fair.

Strong’s defense should’ve never gotten this bad to begin with, but he has to have time to fix it before heads roll.

So where do things stand with Strong?

Look, things are not good for our man Charlie, no matter which way you slice it. The offense got it figured out, and that was the initial demand from the folks in Austin. The problem isn’t simply that the expectations are outsized; this is Texas, and the upper echelon of the sport is where the Longhorns should traffic. The problem is the immediacy with which the ship was expected to be righted.

Kirk Herbstreit put it perfectly this morning on College GameDay with his disdain for the situation Strong was put in from Day 1. When you put a coach in an impossible situation from the outset, it becomes a pressure cooker in which he has to deliver multiple Herculean feats in a small amount of time. Even if he does at first, when he doesn’t people wonder what’s going on.

That expectation helps put Strong in a no-win situation. Strong did not have his moment on this Saturday. There is only the same old Longhorns defense, which everyone can smell dooming Strong’s tenure, whether we like it or not.

The Longhorns brass has claimed it will give him until the end of the season, but will they? If you follow closely, Texas doesn’t seem to do a lot of things according to conventional means. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that ends up with a capable coach getting the boot because he never really got a fair shake.

If you’re going to demand the world from Strong and then clutch your pearls when he doesn’t deliver it, why didn’t you just fire him last Sunday and not demand a demotion of a defensive coordinator to make it look like you’re giving him a fair shake?