(Editor’s note: This story ran in the American-Statesman on April 1)
In October, Sports Illustrated surveyed the college sports scene and asked, “Who’s No. 1?”
The cover photo featured athletes from Texas and Stanford, two schools noted for their excellence in a variety of sports. SI gave the nod to Texas.
“That’s mainly because the Longhorns performed slightly better than the Cardinal in the big-ticket sports like football and because their fans approach sports with just a touch more fervor,” SI’s panel of writers concluded.
Texas fans, the truly knowledgeable ones, shuddered. They knew about the dreaded Sports Illustrated cover jinx, which started with the magazine’s first issue, in 1954. Baseball player Eddie Mathews graced that cover, and then promptly was injured. Through the years, some of the stars who’ve appeared on the SI cover have lost playing time, big games, their careers and even their lives.
Sure enough, within a week of being on the cover, quarterback Chris Simms and the Longhorns lost to rival Oklahoma.
But the Texas football team rallied and finished in the Top 10 for the second straight year, after failing to do that a single time in 18 seasons.
T.J. Ford, the Texas basketball team’s point guard, also was on that SI cover. He not only went on to be named player of the year by most pickers, he also has Texas in its first men’s Final Four in 56 years.
The Texas women’s team, after falling from the elite level, has a shot tonight to get back to the Final Four for the first time since 1987.
The UT men’s baseball team is a reigning NCAA champion, the first time it can say that in almost two decades. The men’s swimming team finished second in the NCAAs last week after winning three straight titles. Other Longhorn sports are doing almost as well.
Even an SI cover can’t jinx this golden era in athletics. It’s made possible by top-notch coaches and administrators, the move to the Big 12, Texas high school athletics — and, yes, money.
“It’s an exciting time,” said Chris Plonsky, senior associate athletic director at Texas. “I’m sure Stanford has had these kinds of years in some sports. Right now I’m in Palo Alto standing in a hallway and I’m looking at all their Sears Cup trophies (for all sports) they have piled on a table. But not many schools have had this kind of success in revenue-generating sports.”
Oklahoma had one last year when the men’s and women’s basketball teams reached the Final Four and the football team was 11-2. So far, only three schools have had their men’s and women’s basketball teams make the Final Four in the same year. And it’s been rare to find schools that are powerhouses in both basketball and football.
For decades, men’s basketball prospered at schools where football wasn’t king: Kentucky, Indiana, Duke, Kansas, Marquette, Georgetown.
Some of them don’t play football, others just barely. Even UCLA, once the gold standard in basketball, was often second-best in football in its own city.
Women’s basketball has roots in places such as Old Dominion, Louisiana Tech, Tennessee and Texas, where men’s programs were often overlooked.
Only lately have some of the bigger schools been trying to win at everything.
“Being in a different conference really challenged us on the basketball side,” said Texas Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds. “We had to step up or be a doormat. You could finish second in the Southwest Conference and still not make the NCAA tournament. Now, in any sport, if you can win a Big 12 championship you can win a national championship.”
In the 1980s, when the old Southwest Conference was dying and scandal-ridden, recruits saw how things were going and left the state, Dodds noted.
Texas is known as a high school football hotbed, but what many don’t realize is that Texas has — by far — more high school basketball players than any state in the country. According to figures provided by the National Federation of State High School Associations in 2001-02, Texas had 70,661 high school basketball players. California was second with 42,267. Indiana had 10,924 and Kentucky, 7,350. Texas also had 69,975 girls playing high school basketball, more than doubling second-place California.
When football coach Mack Brown arrived in 1997 and basketball coach Rick Barnes followed in 1998, Texas began keeping more of that high school talent at home. That led to victories, and that led to money.
Under Brown, the football team has become a revenue stream that can generate more than $15 million in profits. Athletic fund-raising pulled in an additional $16 million last year. Such money helps pay the salaries of Brown, Barnes, women’s basketball coach Jody Conradt and baseball coach Augie Garrido, and buildings and renovations, such as the $53-million project at the Erwin Center complex, which is getting a new basketball practice facility as well as a $40-million face lift.
“Rick changed our mindset about the facilities,” Plonsky said. “He’s been in some situations where maybe he didn’t have enough bullets in the barrel to compete with the elite. He said, you (Texas) should be the elite.”
Right now the Longhorns are just that.
As for the SI cover jinx, talk to Stanford. Their men’s and women’s basketball teams were seeded to meet Texas in the tournament, but neither Stanford team got that far.
