Texas Aggie Football: Complete chaos: Comprehending a whacked-out week in Aggie Athletics

Dawn Lee Wakefield

Courtesy of Texas A&M University Arts Examiner

December 5, 2011 - Like this? Subscribe to get instant updates.

Commentary: During the past week, the entire Aggie Athletics program experienced aftershocks from the prior week’s heartbreaking loss to the University of Texas at Austin on the last football game, ever, supposedly, of this hotly contested series of jet-fuel driven exchanges that has endured some 117 years. One of the first hallowed traditions taught is how you are not to tolerate losing to ‘that other school’ under any circumstances.

Nothing worse than an armchair quarterback running down the plays and decisions of those in charge, but after seeing the repercussions from one game ripple like a shock wave across campus, maybe it’s time to simply ask a few questions.

Had Texas A&M won the turkey day shootout, would any of the chaos this past week have happened? Was it really the Longhorn Network that threw Texas A&M out of control and out of the Big 12 and into the arms of the SEC? Can the Aggies really compete in this new conference and have what it takes to win (in any sport) next season? Do all decisions just come down to who can pay more for the TV rights?

Yes, it’s true the school needs an income stream to support each and every one of the athletic programs at Texas A&M. And, the lion’s share of the income stems from football. So, each sport gets one vote and football gets, like, one million votes, whenever athletic decisions are to be made.Our school has been fortunate to have the Aggie Club, under the direction of beloved Aggie, Harry J. Green, Jr., at the helm. Back in the day, scholarships for student-athletes became something that Aggie fans were happy to fund, and everyone loved Harry. More times than not, donors would give a second endowment, as soon as they could, because they loved being a part of the exciting growth of A&M College into Texas A&M University.Changes came, and the university did its best to change with the times, but undergirding each change was the reminder that Texas A&M was once all male, all military, and all about lifting yourself up by the bootstraps when the going got tough. Aggies just never quit. If you were a quitter, you were no kind of Aggie.Texas A&M University has experienced more than its share of growing pains through the decades. From the simpler days of the 60s to the gentle days of the 70s, the proud men of Aggieland offered many campus leaders and recruited some gifted and talented researchers to strengthen the school’s reputation as a national beyond just the two strengths of agriculture and all things mechanical and engineering. The school’s move toward diversity also reflected positive changes, and as the enrollment numbers soared, the more TAMU looked like a ‘place to be’ for men and women to receive a well-rounded education in a somewhat safe haven. Emory Bellard as football coach in the 70s brought some grand days of glory to Kyle Field and sent many of his student athletes into the professional ranks, with degrees in hand. The 80s and the 90s were not as kind to Texas A&M. Too many fiascos and changes in leadership were necessary, and the school suffered multiple national spotlights and questions over leaders’ decisions..

Over the past thirty years, we’ve seen many football coaches come and go. For all of the outstanding growth and the excitement over winning and advancing in power and regard across the nation, at the start of Fall, 2011, really, one could not imagine Texas A&M in any better recruiting position than it was. But then the Longhorn Network started talking with ESPN. That began a chain reaction that has resounded for many months.

It’s hard to recall university officials making any national press statements about research accomplishments or student enrollment growth lately. Instead, it was everyone demanding to know what, why, when, who and how it was when the buzz went out about leaving the Big 12. It was all about football. And then they calmed everyone down, started waving and blowing kisses to the SEC, printed up all the new t-shirts, on and on.

‘Happy days are here again,’ they said. Okay, if you say so.

Opposing coaches’ comments provided humor, if nothing else, as the Baylor women’s basketball coach offered a colorful rejection of our suggestion to play them again sometime down the road. All the while Texas A&M movers and shakers behind the scenes had a master plan, but no one seemed to know what it was. Many times before, we’d seen some great coaches recruited to campus, and those ‘wins’ do go to Bill Byrne and the ever-widening wallets of Aggies who insisted on the best and winning. Mike Sherman looked like the choice of a lifetime in coaching.

Not all that long ago, the loud indifference for any other Aggie sport besides football was deafening. That disparity of respect shifted a little last year when the Aggie women’s basketball team won the national championship. When that magic happened, the National Championship started a chain reaction of people getting excited about ‘other sports’ on campus at A&M. It wasn’t just basketball; it was all women’s sports, too.

This week, Reed Arena also hosted the NCAA women’s volleyball tournament, and the Aggie women got knocked out of contention, being beaten by highly touted Kentucky. There was little to no crowd there to root for them.

Track and field has a phenomenal new state-of-the-art track and field facility. Yet, walk on campus and ask how many people have actually been inside? Many Aggie faithful have supported the student-athletes in track and field with their attendance, while also supporting other events, but their numbers are smaller. Case in point was the Aggie Men’s basketball game last night at home vs. Stephen F. Austin University.

At halftime, a huge group of winners walked onto the court of Reed Arena and received (for some) their third NCAA national championship ring, with “back to back to back” NCAA Track and Field championships, as basketball announcer Chace Murphy read their names aloud to receive recognition. There’s something wrong when they are both superstars in the classroom as well as on the field and we, the audience of Aggie faithful, can’t reel off their names from memory as fast as we can for the other sports teams.

A charming, unexpected, special touch was when the track and field student-athletes walked up into the stands, on both sides of Reed Arena, to share moments with the basketball audience, show their rings, and visit with nice folks they knew, and receive congratulations from others they’ll likely never see again. You have to wonder how it makes those national champions feel when there are no crowds to greet their buses when they travel away and return home. It has to be tough for those students.

And, to the point of all of this. What about the Texas A&M football team? The players? All week long, as the backroom negotiations were ongoing, phones were ringing and the texters were texting, buzz, buzz, buzz. Even before the first down of the last game of the season was playing, pundits were questioning how much it would cost to buy out Coach Mike Sherman’s contract if ‘they’ released him before it expired. Not really sure who ‘they’ are but there seems to be a group of ‘them.’

It wasn’t that long ago that the powers had extended Coach Sherman’s contract, promised a raise, and an even bigger buyout if terminating the contract. Now we hear/read that the new deal was never signed, and that the old deal is still in place. In what has to be the most embarrassing week for Aggie sports, ever, the public learned, before Coach Sherman or his family did, that he was being fired.

It’s wrong to be too fast to point a finger only at Athletic Director Bill Byrne. The unfortunate thing was that when this was going on, neither Director Byrne nor TAMU President Loftin was in town available for comment. The two most visible, powerful known presences in Aggie Athletic were nowhere to be seen, and they would have ordinarily been at Saturday night’s Aggie men’s basketball game.

Who told Byrne to make that call and get it done ‘now’? Even Byrne has a boss, or bosses, right? That someone or some persons who were really calling the shots may well have forgotten to think of the peace of mind and well-being of the young men who are the football student-athletes on campus. They have finals to take; some might even be graduating in two weeks. Surely no one thought about their peace of mind.

That’s quite a lesson for them to watch and learn: the rise to celebrity and being carried high and catered to is heady—almost addictive. But the minute you get hurt, or the minute you fail, you don’t count. People forget your name and move on.

In contrast, there's UT Coach Mack Brown’s record. He wasn’t doing all that great this season either, before showing up at Kyle Field. Yet, if media sources are right, he’s still the highest paid coach in all of college football. What group of ‘critical thinkers’ would cast aside the loyalty and personal friendships and, lo, even admiration of some student athletes for their head coach, and announce they no longer have a leader, but someone will get back to them on who the new leader is, but ‘as you were, men, as you were.’

Yesterday, the Aggie women’s basketball team experienced its first loss of the season and played an entirely uncharacteristic game of basketball that was equally a disaster on offense and defense. The day that defending national champions shoot 16.7% from the floor in the second half, and your pro-caliber draft favorite is 0 for 12 from the field, and where there are more turnovers than have happened in countless games, something is very wrong.

Maybe they all worried that if they lost a single ‘big’ game, the word would go out that the search for a new head coach would be on. Players form bonds, in trust, with the adults who are their coaches. They are a family, and they have feelings that need to be respected. The feelings of every student-athlete at Texas A&M were disregarded because someone probably didn’t think about what it would do to the students to learn of this news, this way. And, that’s a crying shame.

The Aggie tudent body is a family that is impacted, same as the student-athletes. All this chaos, confusion, and cone of silence is beneath what they deserve to have from the leadership of this university. Through every decision made in the athletic arena, you’re also stereotyping the quality and output of every degree major and the national reputation of every prestigious scholar and researcher others have recruited to be here and are trying to retain.

It’s surely not easy for many to be associated with a university with a new(er) reputation for knee-jerk reactions and blundered, blustered decision-making, complete radio silence and hunker-down-in-the-bunker mentality and no accountability for, and failure to consider the student body and team of student-athletes whose hearts were heavy and dreams were shattered when their leader couldn’t even be allowed to tell them the news personally.

And, yet, aren’t all Aggies everywhere supposed to now be waiting breathlessly for the next announcement of the man whose head will be next, one step away on the chopping block if he doesn’t perform? And yet, is everyone being asked to simply overlook the egregious actions of the past week and smooth it all over? Make it go away? They can launch all the spin doctors they have into high gear, but people won’t forget this easily.

You can run the high-energy music videos with catchy choruses, speak of the glory days all you want, but the characteristic of possessing class is silent, and makes no sound. You can speak of ‘this is home,’ ‘’our time is now,’ and ‘we are the Aggies, the Aggies are we,’ ‘mind, body, spirit,’ but what does that mean anymore?

Having integrity needs no trumpets, as it speaks for itself. And yes, many will be making that tsk-tsk sound and saying it’s a shame, but those sounds could be louder if people would write to the TAMU Board of Regents and say ‘Please correct this.’ It’s become an Aggie culture, sadly, these days, of hurry up, cover up, shut up, and put up.

And, from memories of the noble men of Kyle Field in days gone by, it was never meant to be this way. You all who built Texas A&M College, you started something great. May you be led in the future by those who remember how it used to be and who bring it back to that state again.

Coach Mike Sherman taught his student-athletes a lesson in class that should stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives: It’s not about winning or losing, it’s how you play the game. When you can stand in front of glaring lights and high definition cameras and wear a maroon tie and declare that you wish everyone associated with this school the best for their future, and say it has been an honor to be associated with it, is remarkable.

Aggies who sw that press conference witnessed something truly made of class. I have nothing but admiration for a man I never met. Sherman’s parting words to his team, though he was not allowed to deliver them in person,’ was for them to ‘Be men of character,’ to play the bowl game and win, and not let anyone tell them anything different other than that they were winners. Gig ‘em Coach Sherman, and thank you for the unforgettable example of class you showed this week.