Austin / Texas (Husker game)

[Blackshirt]

Article Published: Monday, November 03, 2003

big 12 football

Texas under Brown cloud

 

By Bill Briggs, Denver Post Sports Writer

 

AUSTIN, Texas - It's one thing to waltz into the heart of Texas draped in Nebraska red.

 

You get a few frosty stares.

 

It's quite another to invade the home of the 'Horns and publicly suggest their football coach be canned.

 

Then, you get handshakes, grins and offers of home-cooked meals.

 

Always looking to make new friends, I did both Saturday as the Huskers and their red horde caravanned to Austin. It also marked Week 8 of The Denver Post's visiting-fan tour of Big 12 houses. Over my Nebraska jersey, I wore an orange tee emblazoned with a surprisingly fashionable slogan: FireMackBrown.com

 

"That is a QUALITY shirt!" one Texas rooter hollered from a parking lot tailgate party, hoisting his beer in tribute.

 

"That needs to happen!" chirped a concession cashier as she handed me a tortilla-cradled sausage.

 

"We want him gone," grumbled Peter, a 28-year-old University of Texas alum and one of 10 fuming Longhorns fans behind the Fire- Mack website. They launched the virtual venting room after Arkansas stunned Texas 38-28 on Sept. 13. Brown, they charge, "has no gumption and freezes during critical games like a gutless coward."

 

Yeah, it's getting a tad personal in Texas, where life is big and football is bigger. A homegrown Mack Attack is buzzing through the bleachers like a verbal version of "the wave." It's a civil war set amid a gorgeous football still life: Bevo, a longhorn steer, snoozes on a grass slope above one end zone while a torrent of rowdies in burnt orange flash "hook 'em horns" finger signs and female cheerleaders prance in chaps.

 

"Don't get beat up wearing that shirt," Peter warned me before the game. Hardly. I could have run for governor - or the even loftier position of athletic director. One fan offered me a gulp of his smuggled rum-and-coke to toast the possibilities of a Mack-less team. Another guy promised the keys to his boat if I could "make Mack go away."

 

Brown's sinking popularity seems to defy the numbers - since arriving six seasons ago, his Longhorns squads have gone 56-17, played in five straight bowls and drifted occasionally into the top 5. He's considered a master recruiter. His worst year was 9-5. By comparison, Gary Barnett's Colorado team went 3-8 in 2000 and must win out this season to go 6-6.

 

Here's the problem: Brown's program is most certainly not OK. That is, blood rival Oklahoma has stormed past UT on the football charts - and whipped the Longhorns four straight times along the way. Texas lays 60 points on the New Mexico States and Tulanes of the world, but Brown's team is 4-9 against top-10 opponents.

 

And the 65-13 loss to OU three weeks ago in Dallas cranked the in-house hostility to new heights. The FireMackBrown website got about 1 million hits in the three days after the blowout.

 

"Historically speaking, you can't underestimate the power of the mob," Peter said. He asked that his last name not be printed because the website has received some threats from the pro-Mack Brown crowd. This is Texas, after all.

 

The site offers T-shirts, hats and beer koozies that spread the message. An online poll asks whether Brown should be shown the door: 21,422 have voted to fire him, 18,715 want to keep him - most of whom, Peter said, are sarcastic Oklahoma or Texas A&M fans. Celebrity head shots are topped with wise-cracking thought balloons - Don Zimmer: "At least I'm a fighter"; a Cubs logo: "Welcome to the club"; Al Gore: "What a loser"; Bill Clinton: "Mmmm, college girls."

 

The dump-Mack movement got even hotter after 29-year-old Texas fan and insurance agent Jed Schmidt was quoted in The New York Times last month complaining about the team's direction and urging Brown to fire his top assistants. To the shock of Longhorn Nation, Brown phoned Schmidt personally before the Oklahoma game to criticize his remarks.

 

"I kind of want Mack Brown to call me," Peter said. "I want to convince him to do the right thing. He just needs to be put out to pasture. He's earned a lifetime position to some fictitious job like assistant AD."

 

"I've been anti-Mack for a while," Ryan Dawson, a 29-year- old alum, told me while walking to buy a brat at the Nebraska game. "He doesn't have a lot of heart."

 

But as the threats to the website show, people are polarized in Austin. Brown seems to have the firm backing of the big-money boosters who hired him. When I wore the shirt past a pregame party of 50-something brie eaters in burnt orange, I evoked grimaces and groans.

 

And the bullhorn-voiced man who sat two rows behind me in section 16 - urging Texas to score a touchdown on every single play - saw my FireMack message and flashed a horrified look, as if the shirt read Save The Cows.

 

"You want to go back to John Mackovic (a former UT coach)? We were 4-7 under him! Thanks anyway, friend," the man said.

 

Everything changed once I slipped off the FireMack shirt and exposed just the Nebraska jersey. I suddenly was invisible to the cheering Longhorns fans inside Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. No taunts, no barbs, no "Husker go home." As Nebraska coach Frank Solich tried to crack the Texas defense, no one seemed to care about the fans of an overrated team getting walloped 31-7.

 

No one, except one woman adorned in red beads and red sweater who saw me clutching the FireMack shirt.

 

"Fire Mack Brown?" she said. "How about fire Frank Solich?"

 

Don't look now, lady, but according to Network Solutions, a website called FireSolich.com is now "under construction and coming soon."

 

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,3...1740859,00.html