Hornography

This year's theme is going to be patience.

Texas fans are reeling from an embarrassing home loss against Brigham Young. Satur­day's 41-7 train wreck marks two in a row dropped to the Cougars. A certifiable has-been has turned what should be a cushy rivalry wrong-sided.

People who've paid any longstanding attention to this Longhorns program should have seen this coming. The writing was on the wall well before Charlie Strong even started with his suspensions; the team he inherited from Mack Brown is just not that talented.

Contrary to popular opinion, the University of Texas is not entitled to sport a perennially dominant college football team anymore. Expectations should have better better calibrated when Strong arrived last winter. Fresh from a lackluster conference championship bid and an embarrassing Alamo Bowl defeat to Oregon, it should have been evident that the Longhorns were a long way from competing for BCS honors.

Yet there we were last autumn, penciling in more wins than losses on 2014's schedule. Victory over North Texas was inevitable; a week 2 home game against BYU would have been a win to mark in pen. Satur­day's trip to Dallas to play Jim Mora's talented UCLA Bruins should have been just as obviously a loss. (Same goes for Baylor and Oklahoma, upcoming.)

But as the summer passed, the optimistic tendencies of burnt orange nation bloomed. David Ash was back, and so were Malcolm Brown and Johnathan Gray. Chuck Strong had suspended everybody else, but so what? Expectations still grew – and the conversation around the program turned brighter.

"Dang, Charlie Strong ain't playin' around!" supporters said. "We're gonna whoop those Hollywood boys from UCLA. They call this a neutral site, but Dallas ain't exactly Switzer­land." Then more: "Players can't live off campus until their senior years? That's what we've been missin'. Feels like a 9-4 year to me."

"Charlie's making the boys sit in the front row in class? I might not live this down, but Oklahoma ain't that tough, either."

More and more of those losses originally penciled in on the calendar got prematurely erased and changed into wins. Texas fans spent a summer masturbating to the thought of Captain Strong not letting his players get their ears pierced. Now they're 1-1, staring at 2-5 after a tough month ahead, and wondering where all their talented players went.

Truth is Strong never had them. Despite saying "We will not be in the national championship game" as early as April, Strong's public approach to building toughness and discipline somehow brought on unjust expectations. In doing so, he's deflected attention away from small talent at too many positions – and made himself a target of his own fans' unrealistic expectations.