Right up until the fall of 2013, Texas enjoyed the most stable athletics department in the country -- at least in the sports that matter. Since then, it's been anything but.
You simply don't replace 85 collective years of experience -- 16 for football coach Mack Brown, 17 for men's basketball coach Rick Barnes, 20 for baseball coach Augie Garrido and 32 for athletics director DeLoss Dodds -- without some turbulence.
Though it appears the 'Horns have nailed the basketball hire and everyone on the Forty Acres wants to believe they have the right man leading the football program, finding a new baseball coach has proven to be an impossible task. Garrido was "reassigned" on May 30. As we sit here, more than three weeks later, Texas still doesn't have a baseball coach -- and, worse, doesn't seem particularly close to hiring one.
It hasn't been for lack of trying. Interim AD Mike Perrin has reportedly shopped the job to Florida's Kevin O'Sullivan, LSU's Paul Mainieri, UCLA's John Savage and Oregon State's Pat Casey without a taker. A college baseball blue blood, with more College World Series trips and wins than any other program by a wide margin, can't give its job away.
Texas will eventually hire a new baseball coach. And when it does, it needs to begin looking for a new athletics director.
Dodds was the first to go among UT's statesmen, and replacement was the first hired in the form of Arizona State AD Steve Patterson. Patterson experienced some success in Austin. He hired Charlie Strong to run the football program and Shaka Smart as men's basketball coach, and installed beer and wine sales to make the Longhorns' continued mediocrity in those sports easier to swallow. But his short tenure was essentially a 22-month exercise in consuming a cactus. "He just put us through hell," a Texas source told ESPN after Patterson's firing. "I've had the worst year of my life. Some of the happiest people in town are the spouses of employees. He made a lot of good people miserable."
The Longhorns hired Patterson's exact opposite as his replacement in former Darrell Royal defender Mike Perrin, namely, someone who could calm, heal and unite the athletics department but with precisely zero experience running one. And it's showed. Months before the baseball search lingered into an lengthy depantsing, Perrin allowed Strong's offensive coordinator search to devolve to a point where the Longhorns had so little leverage it took he and university president joining an 11th-hour convoy to Tulsa to secure Sterlin Gilbert.
It's hard to criticize Perrin personally. A successful (read: rich) lawyer by trade, Perrin is essentially donating his time to the university. But that's kind of the problem, isn't it? Name another business that would hand oversight of its $173 million budget to an at-will volunteer. A well-meaning, well-liked volunteer, but a volunteer nonetheless.
I have long argued Arizona athletics director Greg Byrne* should be the Longhorns' top target, followed closely by Michigan State AD Mark Hollis and Oregon AD Rob Mullens. Ole Miss AD Ross Bjork and Mississippi State AD Scott Stricklin also fit the profile of someone the Texas should look for, but recent NCAA and legal-related controversies could muddle those waters a bit for the notoriously image-conscious Longhorns.
* Byrne's last name has been brought up as a detriment during past conversations among fans and media alike (his father Bill was formerly Texas A&M's AD and a veteran of many tussles with Texas), but I've always found this a particularly odd critique considering the two best coaches in Texas football history played or coached at Oklahoma.
The ideal Texas athletics director is a person in their early-to-mid 40's with experience in coaching searches, capital projects and major facility constructions, blessed with the time and emboldened by the appetite to shape the future of Texas athletics and become their generation's DeLoss Dodds. That's not Perrin.
Mishandling an offensive coordinator and baseball search exposed Perrin as being out of his depths. And while I believe Texas is a prime candidate to become one of this fall's surprise teams, it's ignorant to believe a football coaching search is out of the realm of possibility -- not with a team that's 11-14 in the past two seasons and 4-8 before Oct. 15, with Notre Dame, California, Oklahoma State and Oklahoma all calling in the first half of the season and the possibility of true freshmen at quarterback and center running a brand new offense.
This season is simply too important for Texas to enter without that possibility in mind, and if a search does come to pass, the past three weeks have shown Perrin can not be the man to lead it.