Wonder when Brown will leave Texas? You might be pondering for a while
Mack Brown doesn't seem like a coach ready to retire.
BCS computer geeks have been invited to Austin in the offseason to speak to the Texas staff about how to deliver the program from a repeat of last season's tiebreaker nightmare. The 57-year-old coach raised hell in January at the American Football Coaches Association board of directors meeting. The subject: the insanity of automatically awarding that No. 1 spot in the coaches poll to the winner of the BCS title game. Texas believes it had as much of a stake to the spot as Florida, USC or Utah.
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| Will Muschamp recevied a nice raise to be Brown's head-coach-in-waiting. (Getty Images) |
What can Brown do for you? At last check, there were 19 commitments for the class of 2010. Barely a month after wrapping up the class of 2009, Brown is almost done with next year's recruiting class. It's still fair to call him Coach February -- Coach February 2011.
What could be construed as Brown tidying up for the next guy sooner than we think is actually business as usual. His program annually is one of the first in the country to start spring practice. The Longhorns took the field Feb. 27 and finish April 5. With that out of the way, there are things to do and places to see. Brown is jetting off in late May to visit the troops in the Middle East on a coaches junket.
When he returns, after a bittersweet 2008 season, the Longhorns probably will start the season ranked as high as No. 2 in most of the preseason polls that matter.
Texas has mattered a lot since Brown turned around the program 11 years ago. There have been five consecutive bowl wins, a national championship and at least 10 wins for eight consecutive seasons.
Don't expect things to change any time soon.
Spring recruiting
It became fashionable years ago for coaches to offer scholarships to high school juniors 1½ years before they step on campus. Brown has turned fashionable into ruthless.
No one is better at rounding up a quality recruiting class early. The reviews of this year's class, though, sound more like those of the new U2 record -- "unchartered territory," "unprecedented," screamed a couple of recruiting gurus. Aside from filling in around the edges, Texas is essentially done with that 2010 class.
Brown does it because he can. With 375-400 Division I-A athletes in the state each year, it doesn't make sense to piddle around. All but one of the 19 recruits is from the Lone Star State.
"When we got here 11 years ago, we started offering scholarships in the summer of their junior year," the coach said. "Everybody thought that was so early because in the East that's what was happening. What has occurred is the other schools try to get the jump on us. They're offering them during their junior year. We still wait until after their junior year is over, until after signing day."
It has become the Southwest version of USC, where Pete Carroll is so close to the talent, that he doesn't so much recruit as select. Brown says if he offers four defensive backs, he'll tell them the first two to commit are going to be taken. There is no time to wait around.
Texas is so selective that even if still-unsigned 2009 No. 1 recruit Bryce Brown called tomorrow, he would have a hard time getting a scholarship. The door is all but closed on this year's recruiting.
"We're not the bunch that runs in late and makes a big push. If a young man has 10 offers and he comes in for a junior day and we do not offer him, he's upset with us and walks out mad. Our hand is pressed," Brown added. "We need to make early decisions."
The amazing thing is Texas under Brown has rarely whiffed in recruiting. It helps when the top 50 players in the state "are going to be able to play," as Brown puts it. If Texas nabs 20 of those 50, it has a class full of four- and five-star studs.
Texas being Texas, its future players are devoted to the university, having been to games and spring games since they were children. For the first time since 2000, Brown did not lose an assistant this offseason. That qualifies as stability on a staff that routinely rebuilds even when it does lose a coach. It's also the reason Muschamp is getting $900K a year to learn on the job.
Early commits come with that one big warning label. It's one thing to get commitments from 16-year-olds. It's another to be able to project how that talent will mature with the NFL, grades and injuries factored in.
"We're having to predict what our numbers will be like a year and a half from now. It's really difficult," Brown said. "You try to see who might have a medical (problem), who might be in grade trouble, what juniors that might go out early (to the NFL), which kids might not play a lot and which might want to graduate in four years."
Texas actually ran thin at quarterback a few years ago. It had a commitment from No. 1 quarterback prospect Ryan Perrilloux and came in relatively late on Southlake, Texas' Chase Daniel. Perrilloux committed, waffled and ended up signing with LSU. Daniel was smitten with Missouri early and never wavered.
Luckily, Brown had offered Colt McCoy (who committed) about this time of year in 2005 during the quarterback's junior year at Jim Ned High School in Tuscola, Texas.
"We ended up with one quarterback (in the class)," the coach said.
A pretty good one. When you're in on the best players in Texas, it's hard to miss.
Running it up
Brown obsesses over being beaten out by Oklahoma in that Big 12 South tiebreaker. You remember the situation: The three-way tie in the division between Texas, OU and Texas Tech was broken by an obscure 11-year-old tiebreaker the Big 12 had adopted: Highest-ranked team in the BCS goes.
Oklahoma won the tie because it was the highest-ranked BCS team despite losing to Texas in October. Brown worries that he might have to change strategy if the situation ever rolls around again. Sportsmanship be damned, run up the score as much as possible trying to impress the pollsters and computers.
"It looks like right now the polls responded to people who scored a lot of points," Brown said. "All indications last were the BCS formula was about who scored the most points. That becomes the hot team."
In the end, it was the computers that pushed OU over the top.
So this offseason Brown invited Jeff Anderson of the Anderson-Hester computer index to speak to the staff. Anderson's is one of the six computers used in the BCS standings. There will be more computer gurus invited to Austin this spring.
Brown wants to find out if he left money (actually, points) on the table. Texas led Kansas 35-7 in the third quarter last November and could have added a couple of more scores. It was clear that day that Brown played it down the middle -- winning by an impressive margin but concerned with not embarrassing the Jayhawks.
That was also the case in the regular-season-ending 49-9 rout of Texas A&M. Meanwhile, minds inside Texas' Moncrief-Neuhaus Athletic Center want to know why Oklahoma caught the fancy of the computers after scoring at least 60 points in its last five games before the final BCS ratings.
"That's why we're searching to figure out if we did what we think was right," Brown said, "if we did what was best for our program, if what we did what was best for our kids. Did us not scoring there at the end against A&M keep us out of the Big 12 championship game and therefore the national championship game and cost Colt the Heisman? That's a real dilemma for us right now."
Dilemma might be a delicate way to put it. All this is bad news for Texas' 2009 foes. Check the schedule. A case could be made for half the teams being candidates for a Longhorn nuking.
The tiebreaker controversy is only going to grow this spring. In May, the Big 12 must decide what to do with its controversy. A lot of people think the league will choose the SEC and ACC models. Both those leagues break three-team divisional teams by eliminating the lowest-ranked BCS team and breaking the two-team tie with their head-to-head meeting.
The Big Ten is considering changing its tiebreaker from its current rule that has its roots back in the mid-1970s. After head-to-head, a tie goes to a team playing the fewest I-AA opponents. If that doesn't break the tie, the team most recently in a BCS bowl is out.
In May, Big Ten ADs will consider changing the rule so that the BCS bid goes to the highest-ranked team if the tie cannot be broken with head-to-head competition. (The Big Ten does not play a true round-robin schedule.) This is not quite the Big 12 tiebreaker, which only comes into play if there are three or more teams tied in a division. Plus, the Big 12 had to go to about its fifth option to separate Texas, Oklahoma and Texas Tech. This would be the second Big Ten tiebreaker.
Another big difference: The Big 12 tiebreaker only breaks a tie to get into the conference title game. The Big Ten tiebreaker would decide the conference's automatic qualifier in a BCS bowl.
