True story - my uncle was awesome, funny , smart and at one time really rich Exxon exec... died in a cheap hotel a few years ago penniless - killed me... I digress. In high school he was a really good aka all district RB, DKR was eating at his aunts house who was a nieghbor if my then 16 year old uncle... so he knocks on the door and meets DKR who was eating. DKR stopped what he was doing and focused on this teenaged kid and DKR said “we’ve had our eye on you”, my uncle told me it made his life. As an adult he knew DKR was being nice and had no idea who my uncle was... who ended up walking on and making Techs team. I always goaded my uncle into telling that story as a kid over and over and I could repeat it verbatim.
And the sordid world recruiting had become. In part thanks to that culprit in Norman, followed by some like coaches in the SWC.
i can't help but feel sad reading this.^^ No coach have I ever respected more than DKR. I never played for him. I did see and hear him speak, and shook his hand after he spoke at my HS football banquet in 1965. And I would have run through a brick wall, or died trying, had he asked. The Dazed and Confused seventies were just that for a lot of kids. I'm glad I dodged that bullet. I wouldn't want to think that a good man and a great coach like DKR would not have been able to relate to me.
At least Barry admitted it and invited investigation flaunting it at the NCAA. I could tolerate that, although I blew up a few times when they "kidnapped" kids, and we couldn't find them. Sanctimonious ******** like Osborne are the ones had trouble with. Also lots of problems when SMU bought that mother a house
Cary, If it makes you feel any better, he used the term "these inner city kids" when talking about not being able to relate. As poor as he grew up, I have always thought he was tired of the changes in kids and the other coaches.
First rule of business...You don’t worry about the snakes because you know they’re snakes (and you probably could do without the kids who are attracted to snakes). Instead you worry about the ones who say one thing, but act another. Those are the ones who will screw you.
100% right. Kids only care about getting to the NFL, etc....They don't care about the fans or the school. of the 100+ players there might be a dozen who could contest that.
Generally I agree, but let’s not lump everybody into the same category. Look at Sam. Cade, Danny Young, And that’s just conjecture on my part but I’m sure there’s a lot more that we don’t know about
I was having lunch at a Black owned bar-b-q restaurant in East Texas during the ‘70’s, It was mid-afternoon and the owner sat down to talk. He told me that OU brought a lot of recruits in and how much they could eat. I ask him why so many of the good ones went to OU and not the Texas schools. He said the recruiter played up the fact that the SWC was late to the dance on Black players and the Mom and Dad’s were being reminded of that. Nobody ever did more for a football player than what Coach did for Earl, and probably nobody did more for turning that image around for Texas than Earl. But it took time for these players to believe. 1969 was an all white NC. The last. And some coaches were quick to tell that to recruits.
I don't like him either. How different do you think he is on arrogance vs Stoops? Difference was Stoops won.
Good question. Herman thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and in fact, his football IQ is quite low if one bases the assessment on the decisions he has made. I’m not sure the same could be said of Stoops. So while Stoops was a bit of a jerk, his track record and his in-game decision making was in a different league based on what we have seen so far from Herman. And I don’t think Stoops would be so disingenuous as to make an extraordinarily inappropriate and race baiting comment like, “but would we let them date our daughters?” If someone is looking for the epitome of a sellout comment, made to appease perhaps 10-20 players — many of whom could give a crap about our university, look no further.
Look, too much is made of arrogance by people in the spotlight. To succeed in such fields, you have to have about an in-exhaustible amount of self-confidence, as you have a very difficult job, with doubter, and backstabbers everywhere as you move up the coaching ranks. If you doubt yourself, you'll never make it. Herman's problem is that so far he doesn't have **** to show for it. Opposing fans are never going to like a successful head coach at another team. Fans of a team won't mind a confident / arrogant attitude if there are championships and big wins against hated rivals. With no championships, and 1 win each against OU / OSU / TCU (3-7, 30%, F for Fail), it's very grating, and quickly becoming a joke.
Having had the benefit of dealing with Bob Stoops a few times, I never found him arrogant at all. I first met him after he thoroughly kicked our *** on his way to a NC. Bobby Jack was kind enough to introduce me after that game and tell him I predicted the blowout a year before. I congratulated him on an outstanding game plan and execution, and that as a Texas EX, it killed me, but as a student of the game I had to admire the surgical precision with which he carved up my Horns. Bobby Jack added, "Coach, i can tell you that there is no human on earth that it hurts more to say that". Over the years, our paths crossed many times including doing him a favor, and I found him more introverted than arrogant.
I think Herman has personality flaws as many do. He’s a narcissist to a degree. But he’s a players coach and a very good recruiter. He empathizes with those he works with which is not us fans. I’m thinking 9-1 this season and a B12 championship. Hope it happens.
While it is true that most coaches and politicians are indeed arrogant, arrogance is not a necessary prerequisite to success. In others words, one does not have to be an arrogant a** to be confident. In fact, the few individuals that actually have their egos under control — indeed a very small subset — stand out and are often admired. One such individual that comes to mind is Dabo Swinmey. In the political arena Reagan never struck me as being arrogant.
Yeah, I've told this story, but in 2005, prior to the season, I flew him and the wife and another couple from Chicago Midway to Tulsa. He was very polite and anything but arrogant. Didn't treat me like hired help or anything like that. I always said I should have taken one for the team. Oh well haha.
There is a lot of truth in what you say^^. I remember I was in college at North Texas in 1969 and it was the week of UT v Arkansas. Texas was #1 and Ark #2. Everybody (or so I thought) in Texas and Arkansas was pumped for the game, even kids like me who loved DKR and UT, but weren't students at either school at that time. So I was on campus talking to some guys I shared classes with and excitedly asked them what they thought about the game, who would win, etc. One of the guys, shook his head and grimaced, and said, "I don't give a **** about that game, why would I care about those teams." I was shocked. I'm sure my face showed it, too. The fellow I was talking to was black. And that fact, that UT and UA did not allow black players at that time was why the young man was bitterly voicing his feelings of being disinterested--and disconnected--and disallowed fundamentally from forming an attachment to UT football. Until that moment I was too stupid, too ill informed, and too much in my mostly white bubble to know how painful it must have been to be a born and raised Texan and having to leave the state to play big time college football at the highest level because of the color of one's skin. At that time North Texas had been integrated athletically for years. In fact, my older brother played at NT with Abner Haynes in the 1950's. The SWC schools, sadly, came late to integrated athletics.
Cary, Ask your friends this - if black athletes are so upset about when and how certain schools were integrated, why is it that they will martyr a person like George Floyd but not immortalize the man who did more for young black players in Texas than anyone including Dr King? How and whom they choose as their "heroes" really bothers me, and ruins any credibility they might have had, not that they care.
George Floyd was chosen as a martyr by a white cop that murdered him in broad daylight as citizens looked on and recorded it. If not for that none of us would know who the hell George Floyd is. I've seen nobody holding Floyd up as a role model for their children. Only that they don't want their children to die in such a manner. The black community did not choose Floyd. He was chosen for them.
All I know is that this crowd never stops to think about or aknowledge the good this country has provided their people, past and present. They have a warped view of history that has been hammered into them so hard that it affects their views of the present and their future. (Fortunately this isnt true for all..but the ones who get the attention and are loudest) I'd like to ask, with a good solid historical understanding, where would your people be if not for the advantages, adjustments, intervention, and opportunities provided by this country and it's people and their beliefs?? Doesnt mean we cannot continue to make improvements ....but this^^^^ will affect the power of your voice, your level of credibility, and how you and your efforts are perceived. Right now that group sees life in this country through a pin hole. The fact that racism is presumed any time a black man is killed says it all and, though the fact that they have this concern raises a legitimate issue facing our country, the lack of discernment, limited scope of view, and prejudice of their own is both detrimental and dangerous. That is their choice and theirs alone.
Sabre and Rain, I didn't mean to start a back and forth. And I won't participate in that. I was responding to a post by Chinstrap that I agreed with. And because of an ancient memory it jarred loose of a black student and a white student (me) talking in a time and place where that wasn't common; A black student who answered my excitement and anticipation with a pain, more a heartbreak, that was encased in anger, about being excluded from being able to get or have what I, my father, my white friends took for granted. All this was orbiting around a brief discussion about UT and Arkansas playing the "game of the century." I didn't get defensive when he shared his honest feelings based on his very real experience. I tried to understand where he was coming from. It was not a place I was familiar with. I thought it was important to try hard to understand what could cause two young men to have such a starkly different response to two schools playing a big time football game. That's really all I meant to say. But I will add that I think my efforts have been rewarded in ways I could never have imagined. -------------------------------------------------- So back to Texas football, 2020. Go Horns, beat UTEP, and I hope LJ Johnson commits to the HORNS this week! And as much trouble as I have liking the weird personality that I think Tom Herman is, I wish him nothing but success while at the 40 acres.
I didn't really get it until I had a black officemate. We had 2 to an actual office back then. We were discussing race relations and he asked me if I carried my IBM badge when I ran in my neighborhood. Course I said no, why would I. He said he did because if the didn't cops would question a black man running in the upper middle class neighborhood he lived in. This really drove home to me the way we perceive race and how as a white man I could be completely blind to the prejudice around me.
Texas was not alone in coming late to the party of fully integrating athletics, nor was the SWC. There was a sprinkling of integration throughout the US but not at an in depth level like we see today. Colleges came around after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I mention Texas to point out the facts AND the use of race against Texas by OU recruiters, and that is what happened under Barry’s watch. Texas has an incredibly strong record of supporting minority participation In all areas and fought for the cause, and won, all of the way to the Supreme Court.
I started K in 1973. I think I was the first or second integrated K class in the county. I read later that the school board decided on desegregation in 1970 but it took 2-3 years to build new schools, etc to integrate the schools. I don’t see anything wrong in taking time to get it right. Did that apply UT athletics? I don’t know. But holding grudge against the university for taking longer is not automatically valid since all universities are not the same. It’s lazy thinking.
