The Blank Page II
The Longhorns have now set a standard in which they must define themselves by, every single week.
The Longhorn Football program is great again. I attempted to write that sentence in such a way that didn’t make it seem like a play on a slogan that belongs on a red hat with white letters, but I didn’t want to injure myself on the first line of an article. Asking if Texas Football is really back is a silly question. If you’re still asking that question, or if you’ve asked it at all since Tom Herman was fired, it means you haven’t been paying attention to what Steve Sarkisian has been building in Austin over the last four years.
I once bought into the theory that there would be a moment or a game where the dead skin of the lost decade would be shed like a snake and the Longhorns would be reborn. I’ve said before that I envisioned it as biblical—or so I hoped. But that was a foolish line of thinking, born from the romanticized longings of a writer. If a program is "back" or "not back," it implies there’s a light switch you can flip on and off. If it were that easy, it would have happened by now and if so then the Aggies have clearly been stumbling around in the dark in a house without electricity since 1939. There isn’t one "aha" moment that signifies a team’s arrival, it’s not all made better in Tyrone Swoopes diving across the goal line against Notre Dame or Sam Ehlinger and Bevo barreling over Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. That’s not how sports work, and it’s not how great things are built. If something is great, it’s the result of an upward climb, a slog toward the mountaintop. And once you’re there, it’s a fight to stay on top or near the top. National championship or not, Texas is clearly on the mountaintop now, alongside the other great programs in college football.
If you slept through the blessing of the Manning family, the double-digit win in Tuscaloosa, the Big 12 Championship, or the 11 players drafted, may I present to you the evidence of what Texas did to the defending national champs? Regardless of what you think of Michigan’s prospects in the 2024 football season, the Longhorns’ beatdown of Michigan in Ann Arbor last Saturday should have silenced any remaining skeptics. Texas’s success in 2023 wasn’t a one-off or the result of a weak Big 12. Michigan has a roster full of future NFL draft picks and was on a 23-game home win streak for a reason. To dismantle them the way the Longhorns and Quinn Ewers did means something.
Sark has been building a big, physical, and fast football team since he arrived in Austin, and it’s here to stay, whether or not there are any remaining doubts. The Longhorns are on top of the mountain, or as close to the summit as you can be without a ring (if you’re a Kobe Bryant disciple and think only championship banners matter). The Sooners, the Aggies, the mighty SEC, and the collective hate of the scorned Big 12 teams can’t derail the Longhorns at this point. Sark has elevated the program beyond the reach of its detractors.
The season can still ebb and flow, and the Longhorns might lose games, but a high standard has been set. With opponents like UTSA, ULM, and Mississippi State coming up in the next three weeks, Texas isn’t really facing those teams as much as they’re facing their toughest opponent yet, themselves.
I’m not a high-level athlete. I’ve never so much as sniffed being one. I can’t imagine the pressure and stress that these coaches and players or student athletes or kids or young men (all of the above) face in a single day with everything on their plate. The only comparison I can make is to the bar I’ve set for myself, the standard I’ve created in my expectation to put one word in front of the other.
Last season, amidst Quinn Ewers' injury and the Longhorns’ red-zone struggles, I wrote about how Sarkisian’s struggles reminded me of the terror that is a writer’s blank page. For a long time, I wanted to believe I was a good or talented writer. More than that, I wanted to believe I was a writer at all. Most of my conversations about writing weren’t about the craft or the good things I was reading, they were about how I wasn’t writing, even though I wanted to be, and how I hated myself for not doing it. It hurt when my son Jack asked me at 32 what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I responded, “a writer.”
Like Texas fans who banged their heads against the wall wondering why the Longhorns hadn’t solved their struggles by now, I wondered why I hadn’t simply made myself a writer with the snap of my fingers and a tug on my bootstraps. My version of the Tyrone Swoopes touchdown would come in the form of dreaming up a story that I convinced myself was "the one" or writing a one-off good article in a football season. I was looking for the light switch. But one idea won’t change your complex notions of identity, and if you quit halfway through a football season, it doesn’t matter how good one of your pieces turned out to be. The blank page remained, defining me.
Last season, I set a standard for myself: I would write every single week, regardless of whether or not Texas won, lost, if my kids had gotten me sick or if I didn’t feel like it. This season, it’s twice a week with The Reheats on Sunday and the longer article midweek. Then I work through my checklist: Be a writer (X), be a good writer (X), be a great writer ( ), be a published author (stay tuned for news about The Longhorn Alphabet), be a great published author ( ).
The struggle with my identity will always remain. When people ask me what I do, what do I say? “I sell wood...” Meh. “I sell windows and doors...” Woof. I sell. Speaking of Bevo’s Bucket. I know what I want my answer to be, but to say it, to proclaim "I am a writer," means I need to fill up the blank page with so many words that I can’t help but call myself one. If I’m spending all this time writing, how can I not declare that I am? Whether people like my work or not, that’s up to them. I will write what I love, the only way I know how to do so.
As if they were writers placing one word in front of the last one: Sark, his staff and these players have built this program back to where it belongs. Texas has set a high bar for itself, again. Because of that, it doesn’t matter if UTSA, ULM, or Mississippi State gameplan well or get hyped up for the game against the burnt orange and white under the lights of DKR. It’s not about them anymore, it’s about “us,” as Sark would say. The win against Alabama, the toughness at the goal line against Kansas State, the Big 12 Championship, the Michigan beatdown—it has all set the standard for the Longhorns and Steve Sarkisian. Now, they must meet that standard, every single week.
As for me, I have to grab the bar I’ve set for myself and not back down from the blank canvas staring at me—realizing it’s not really the page that’s looking back, it’s me.
wonderful! And write you shall. I love the goals and approach.