The Hiatus

“Oh where have you been, my burnt orange one?”  - Bevo Dylan.

 It’s a question I get asked with shocking regularity for a gal with a little blog.  Obviously, they’re not asking it exactly like that, but the question comes up.  

If you’re a regular or semi-follower, you’ll note that I haven’t put anything up since October, just before the Texas-OU game. 

Before you start thinking that I stopped writing because of our performance last season, let me stop you.  We won the Texas-OU game (handily, I might add) and the three that followed…including a game against the team with the coach I love to hate, TCU.  Aaaaand let me just point out that I’ve written plenty of blogs through plenty of terrible seasons. 

I love my Longhorns to a fault, win or lose.  And Mack Brown.  Which leads me to the real point of the story:  Why I stopped writing.

The talk about Mack Brown retiring had begun to absolutely infuriate me.  To the point that I couldn’t even talk about it.

It’s not because I didn’t think Mack’s time to retire had come.   I did.

It’s not because I didn’t think it was time for a change. I did.

It’s because I believe Mack Brown earned the right to be treated with respect, and he earned the right to walk out the door with dignity on his own terms. 

I was ready for a change, but let’s be frank, here… (“Hi, Frank!”)…there’s not a single thing I can do about it.  Change was going to happen when it was going to happen, and nothing that a bunch of sportswriters, whiny fans or Monday morning quarterbacks could do was going to change that. 

So until the powers that be were ready to make that change, I made the decision to support my team and my coach the way I always had. 


By the time Coach Brown retired, it had been a two season long circus.  Each win brought speculation that Mack was being fired.  Each loss brought speculation that Mack was being fired.

My facebook post the day of the announcement.  I
deleted six rude Mack-hating comments from the
post that day.

The breaking point for me came when people began to insinuate that Texas fans would prefer to lose games in order to speed up the Mack ousting process.   As a Texas fan, I was not surveyed.  And had I been, my answer would have been an absolute “no”.   But the lack of polling wasn’t what got me the most.  What made me angriest was the idea that there were probably people out there who felt this way. 

To me, a FAN is someone who is enthusiastically devoted to their team.  Win, lose, bad staffing, good staffing.  You are a supporter of a greater thing.  To wish for losses is basically to wish to hinder the success of our players.  Which I personally think is a pretty crappy thing to do.

I needed to take a break from inviting people to spread their negative energy on me.  I still attended and watched the games, cheered for my players, coaches and school, and frankly, I did so with much more joy than I had over the previous season and a half.   

I stopped letting the haters in. 

I walked away from conversations about firing Mack Brown. 

I unfriended people on Facebook who took random comments I made (typically not football related) and turned them into rude remarks about how I refused to get on the Mack-Hating Bandwagon. 

I turned the TV and radio off when discussions about Mack Brown’s future started.

And it felt awesome to just enjoy the season, to enjoy the time with my friends & family, surrounded by burnt orange. To support Coach Brown in what I was confident would be his final season.

It felt pizza awesome.


I wish the rest of Longhorn Nation would have given Coach Brown the same respect, but I can’t control them.  I can’t control a desire to win that is greater than a desire to be a FAN.

And now that the dust has settled, I am ready to come back.  Now that we’ve all got our poopy-pants off, I hope the Longhorn Nation can come together with a new, positive attitude about our team.  Hopefully the complaining hasn’t gone on for so long that there’s no reversing it.  We would be doing a disservice to our players and new coaches if we didn’t look at the upcoming season with fresh eyes and hearts.


We are mere months away from a new era in Longhorn Football.  And let me tell you, I can’t wait!  I think Coach Strong is going to be good for The Program.

And I can’t wait to write about it.



Not this program.