I have talked to Texas fans ever since the Bucks played the home and home with them a few years ago. 2006-7? There is a lot of clamor for a change from Longhorn fans, but they sense that Mack Brown is going to Bobby Bowden them. Brown has support from the big booster class and the AD, so for right now, he can stay if he chooses. But they have been losing a lot of games, they lose to OU big, and they have had 4 de-commits since the end of the regular season. Texas is not a place where hardly anyone de-commits, so the pressure is building.
I look at Texas like I did FSU under Bowden - tons of talent, but stale. A new coach can come in and immediately turn it around. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes and how much pressure needs to build before Mack allows a renewal or the AD demands one.
I talked to a fairly well known CFB coach at, of all places, a marriage seminar a few years ago. Cooper was near the end of his era and I was referencing him in asking the coach how long a guy should stay at one school. He said there are exceptions, but he thought the time limit was 10 years. He said that that near the end of that time frame, the media and the fans are sick of looking at your face and hearing your voice giving the same answers to the same questions. All the newness is worn off, coaches tend to keep doing what they have done to get successful, and so they become predictable, which causes the program to get stale. Worse, some coaches get comfortable and careless, and make big mistakes (which later made me think of Tressel). He said that the media and social networking today makes it hard for a guy to stay in one place for longer than that because of the negativity that builds up. It all rings true with what I have seen since he told me that in a lot of different situations, and it particularly rings true for Mack Brown.
