Texas Football: Charlie Strong tells players he’s not going anywhere
Texas Longhorns head coach Charlie Strong made it perfectly clear that he is not leaving the program for open jobs like the ones at Miami or South Carolina.
Rumors be damned. Charlie Strong has had to deal with the rumors and reports linking him to the vacant jobs at Miami and South Carolina for the last few weeks as questions about his future at Texas lingered.
Strong had a press conference last week with the Longhorns on their bye and dismissed the rumors and said he came to Texas to build a program and that’s what he’s going to do. Today, Strong left little grey area about his future at Texas when he told his players, “I’m not going anywhere, via Ryan Autullo of the Austin American-Statesman. “I have a commitment here.”
His two-year tenure hasn’t gone swimmingly on the field with Texas 10-13, but he does have a win over rival Oklahoma this year, and that’s something to hang his hat on and look to as a moment and a sign of progress. Truthfully, there hasn’t been many of those for Strong who may not have realized the rebuild at Texas would be this big of a project.
Strong’s recruiting class has some potential impact performers who will be counted on bringing Texas back to being Texas, but in the meantime, Texas is a middle of the pack team in the Big 12 and Baylor, TCU, Texas A&M and Houston in their own state, and maybe even Texas Tech.
Texas will get better and having Strong on the sideline next year will go a long way in getting back to competing for Big 12 titles, but it’s going to take another year or two for that to happen because Texas doesn’t have a difference maker at quarterback.
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Look at the teams Texas is competing with in the Big 12 and those teams have quarterbacks growing on trees but Texas can’t find one in the most fertile recruiting area in the nation. Once Strong finds his signal-caller of the future, this team can take off just as Louisville did when Strong got Teddy Bridgewater and that program took off.