Last Saturday, after Texas lost to miserable Kansas for the first time since 1938, Longhorns coach Charlie Strong became the center of chaos.
Charlie Strong can’t actually save his job with a win over TCU, can he?
Strong’s had 36 games in Austin. Why should the 37th matter, and why didn’t Texas just announce a decision?
Photo by Ed Zurga/Getty Images
A wave of local and national reports on Sunday said Texas decision-makers had made one to fire Strong, with an announcement coming as soon or as late as Monday. Strong’s devastated players tweeted through it, and it seemed a virtual certainty Texas would move on from the coach who’s 16-20 in three years, with Houston’s Tom Herman high on the list of potential replacements.
Except, that hasn’t happened yet.
Strong held a dignified press conference on Monday that ended with his players mobbing him in a show of support.
He went on the Texas-owned Longhorn Network that night and said he and his staff “deserve to come back.”
Strong proceeded through the week as Texas’ head coach, preparing with apparent normalcy to coach Friday’s game against TCU (3:30 p.m. ET, FS1). The Horns need to win to reach bowl eligibility.
The night before the game, the Austin American-Statesman reported:
The odds are slim, but it’s conceivable that Texas coach Charlie Strong could save his job with a blowout win over TCU in Friday’s regular-season finale, a university source told the American-Statesman.
What exactly constitutes a big win is subjective. A field goal at the final gun? Thirty points? Forty? Fifty? Does Strong need to be carried off the field in heroic fashion?
That was followed by Jimbo Fisher reportedly staying with Florida State, putting Herman even higher on LSU’s list, along with dueling reports on whether Strong was ever actually about to be fired in the first place.
What gives? Is Strong still going to be fired?
Short answer: Probably, but we don’t know for sure until it happens.
Long answer: Probably, but we don’t know for sure until it happens, because Texas is an unpredictable mess.
It won’t shock anybody that Strong’s dismissal (or the staying of that dismissal, at least) has not been handled in an orderly fashion. Texas doesn’t get rid of its football or basketball coaches without maximizing the drama. That was the case under former athletic director Steve Patterson, and it’s clearly still the case under new AD Mike Perrin. Here’s Perrin’s statement from last weekend:
Everything Perrin says there is, in a vacuum, good. It’s best not to fire a coach in the media, and Perrin likely isn’t lying about his stated intent. Texas’ plan, as best any of us know it, has always been to make the call after the season ends.
The hiccup here is obvious. Texas’ athletic department either has leaks or has people who are incorrectly telling reporters that Perrin’s already decided to fire Strong. Either is untenable, and it makes it extraordinarily awkward.
Strong’s a professional, and awkwardness isn’t the apocalypse. But it’s a horrible look for Texas that it had Strong spend an entire week in professional purgatory. It reflects poorly on the administration and won’t help Texas hire Strong’s successor, whether that search begins in two days or 10 years. (Though UT has enough money and resources to overcome just about anything else.)
Whether Strong is fired now or not, Texas has an issue.
Last year, LSU almost fired Les Miles at the end of the year. But Miles finished on a good run, and LSU AD Joe Alleva spared his job.
There are shades of that situation in this one, even though Strong’s been nowhere near as successful at Texas as Miles was at LSU, and the tough thing about that is that we all know how the last one ended.
It’s close to impossible to imagine Strong loses to TCU and doesn’t get fired ...
Missing a bowl two years in a row just isn’t cool with Texas influencers, and Strong would be accomplishing that by losing his last two games, one of which was against Kansas. To be clear, that’s Kansas’ football team. It’s a bad football team.
... but let’s say Strong wins on Saturday.
What happens then?
Is Texas going to wash away 36 games of evidence just because he won his 37th, against a TCU that’s drastically down from its heights of the last few years? (And if Herman was the only coach for whom Texas would’ve fired Strong, how badly did UT want to fire Strong to begin with?)
Or is Texas going to finally fire a coach a day or two after his players carry him off the field?
If Texas wins, then either Texas is about to fire a coach after putting him through public hell, or it’s about to keep that coach because of a win against a .500 team. Neither is good.
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