Craven: What a difference three weeks has made for the Longhorns

[caption id="attachment_19773" align="alignright" width="300"]Photo by Diana Porter Photo by Diana Porter[/caption] The process is working for Texas. We live in an instant-gratification world, but sports don’t work that way. It takes three to four years of recruiting and instilling an imprint on a program to truly judge a coach’s worth. The Longhorn faithful is already starting to see the benefits of that patience with Charlie Strong and the current state of the football team. It was an abysmal start of the season for the Longhorns. It started with a blowout loss to Notre Dame and continued with a blowout loss to TCU and two heartbreaking losses at home to Oklahoma State and Cal. Both of those losses came, in large part, due to special teams errors late in the game. Then, the Twitter beefs started. Players were barking at other players. Coaching changes happened a few weeks previously. And it looked like the Strong era at Texas had a short shelf life. Not because Strong didn’t have his team contending for Big 12 or national championships, but because the team didn’t seem to be competing. The patience at Texas runs thinner than at most programs, so it made sense to start talking about how this would end. Something crazy happened, though. Texas went to Dallas and knocked off Oklahoma in impressive fashion. The following week, Texas looked as sloppy as the weather outside on offense, but managed to beat Kansas State at home. Texas found an identity. Texas is going to run the ball with Johnathan Gray, D’Onta Foreman and Jerrod Heard. The team is going to play defense, led by a staggering amount of freshmen and sophomores. The team is going to compete, something no onlooker could accuse Texas of doing in games like Notre Dame and TCU. Those teams quit, this team won’t. Strong will forever be on the hot seat at Texas. Remember, this is a program that fired Mack Brown after a few bad seasons, even though most boosters liked Brown as a person and Brown won Texas’ first national championship since 1970 and won 10 games with ease most years. The Longhorns aren’t the program that accepts long-term mediocrity, but it is nice seeing the fan base support the rebuilding process of Strong in an age where guys get fired in the middle of seasons. Strong had a similar record early in his tenure at Louisville. A place he had so much success that Texas came calling in the first place. Texas won’t win a championship this year, but this program looks much closer to making the leap than it did three weeks ago.