Paul Rhoads celebrated Iowa State's stunning upset at Texas Saturday in vintage Rhoadsian fashion, a well-deserved bit of exuberance for the biggest win of his young head-coaching career – especially in the wake of two of the worst losses, debacles against Utah and Oklahoma that buried the Cyclones by a combined score of 120-27. It was ISU's first road win over a ranked team since 1990, and 28-21 final notwithstanding, it wasn't close
Of course, one coach's triumph always comes at the expense of another coach's trash, which even Mack Brown doesn't think is too strong a word at this point to describe the broken state of affairs as the single worst month of his 13-year tenure draws to a close with his single worst loss:
"I don't think it's (a lack of) talent," Brown said. "It's attitude. We played well against Nebraska, and I'm mystified. We stunk and played bad today, and I get mystified. ... You can't trust your team. You can't trust your coaches when they’re not getting things ready to go."
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"You're asking me to wave a wand and fix it," he said. "I'm fighting my guts out, trying to turn this around. If you need to tell (fans) we're going to run a boot camp, go ahead. Tell 'em I'm going to scrimmage here in the stadium in a minute."
It doesn't take staggering insight to suggest a Longhorn loss to Iowa State goes slightly deeper than "talent." But the line about being unable to trust his assistants may be the first sign ever that the perennial fan discontent with longtime offensive coordinator Greg Davis is beginning to penetrate the facade of the consummate "CEO coach." Davis followed Brown from North Carolina in 1998, and his worst offense at Texas in the meantime averaged just shy of 33 points per game in 1999; no Longhorn attack since 2005 has averaged less than thirty-six.
The current group is putting up a little below 24 per game, hasn't hit 30 since early-September scrimmages against Rice and Wyoming and may not have found the end zone at all in the losses to UCLA and Iowa State if both defenses hadn't loosened with the game well in hand in the fourth quarter. The leading rusher continues to average below 40 yards per game, which didn't matter when Colt McCoy was lighting up defenses as one of the most accurate, efficient passers in the country two years running. Now that Garrett Gilbert is a whisker away from being the lowest-rated passer in the Big 12, suddenly it's boot camp time.
The next five games – four of them against likely bowl teams that appear quite a bit better to date than UCLA or Iowa State – may be the first real crisis for a head coach whose most persistent shortcoming over the last decade is that he doesn't win enough national championships. If the Longhorns find a way to right the ship and run the table to another 10-win finish, it will be one of the great damage control campaigns in recent memory. If they lose one more – just one, when the opportunity exists for several more – it will probably go down as UT's worst season ever under Brown, and he'll be faced with a critical decision: Is this just 2006-07 all over again, a young yet talented team with a young yet talented quarterback enduring some inevitable growing pains on the way to reasserting itself on the national stage in a year or two? Or has the operation veered down a path it has to actively try to reverse?
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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