NCAA Football texas Longhorns

It's hard to argue with much when a team goes 12-1 and comes within a lucky last-second play of going undefeated during the regular season as well as having a chance to play for the national title.

That is unless you play in the backfield at the University of Texas, where high production at running back is an expectation. The Longhorns, relying heavily on a group of inexperienced running backs, didn't put up the kind of running numbers that have become commonplace in Austin, where immortals like Earl Campbell and Ricky Williams once did their work.

Junior running back Vondrell McGee knows that this season the running back corps will have to make considerable strides to quiet detractors who insist the Longhorns ground attack has fallen off.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

If He Can Get On The Field, Play Ball -- It's come to this: the 13-year-old brother of Tennessee safety Eric Berry has pledged to play football for the Vols. Nevermind that he's not even in high school, but the kid's set on Orange and who is Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin to say no? The saving grace in all of this is that verbals are non-binding and four years is a lot of time to fill where both parties could easily part ways.

While some athletic departments in the Big 12 and across the country are having to scale back in the wake of the recession, the University of Texas athletic department continues to rake in the big bucks.

According to a report in the Birmingham Business Journal on Monday, the Longhorns rank No.1 in football revenue and overall revenue based on 2007-08 numbers. Texas generated $72.95 million in football revenue and $120.28 million overall.

Ohio State came in second in overall revenue with $117.95 million, followed by Florida with $106.03 million.

Texas coach Mack Brown understandably fumed last season after Big 12 tiebreaker guidelines eliminated his team from the BCS championship mix.

He even threatened to vote his team No.1 in the final USA Today Coaches' poll, which counts for one-third of the voting to determine the BCS national championship. That's a AFCA no-no, as coaches are obligated to vote for the BCS championship game winner , so Brown backed off his threats and voted Florida No. 1.

For a while it looked like Brown was prepared to get real ugly with his peers.

But now the veteran UT coach is all smiles after word leaked out Wednesday that the AFCA has decided to no longer make the coaches' final poll votes public beginning in 2010. So the era of transparency the coaches had been so proud of and confined by is over.

Just maybe the Big 12 football coaches thought they had seen the South Division at its most competitive in 2008 when they voted this spring not to change the league's three-way tie-breaker guidelines.

They might want to re-think that one.

The ultra-competitive Big 12 South could again have as many as three teams in a logjam for first place if the best teams take turns beating up on each other as they did last season. Oklahoma, Texas and Texas Tech all swapped wins and finished tied for first in the South with 7-1 league records at the end of 2008. They Big 12 had to sift through four tie-breaker stipulations before coming up on the fifth that named the Sooners the South champs by virtue of their BCS poll standing.
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The cries near the end of the Big 12 football season were for change.

The system for deciding the divisional champion in the event of a multiple-team tie seemed unjust when Oklahoma received the South Division's spot in the Big 12 title game over Texas and Texas Tech, after all three finished with identical 7-1 league records last season. During the season, UT had beaten OU, but lost to Texas Tech. The Red Raiders claimed a dramatic win over the Longhorns, but got crushed by the Sooners.

Don't get U.S. Rep. Joe Barton wrong: He doesn't think Tim Tebow is a Communist. He just thinks the process by which Tebow and the Florida Gators became national champions is reminiscent of Communism.

College Football Spring Storylines 2009 looks at the key developments and big news from spring ball.

The Big 12 stood up and challenged the SEC for the title of One Conference to Rule Them All in 2008. They didn't exactly succeed, but the conference gave us a lot of great football last season.

However, that was then and this is now. The postseason was not entirely successful for the conference, with a 4-3 overall record in bowl games. How will that carry over into this fall? Who's on the rise? Who's hitting the skids? We'll talk about the big stories after the jump.

College football is a wonderful game but sometimes its math is a royal pain. Texas has a dazzling athlete at second string quarterback named John Chiles. Chiles' problem is he's a true junior with very little pocket experience behind entrenched senior Colt McCoy and with much-hyped freshman Garrett Gilbert waiting in the wings.

Thus, the inevitable: Chiles asked Texas this week to move him to receiver. He was the Longhorns' third string quarterback as a true freshman and the second stringer last year. He probably could have developed into a decent pocket passer, but would have only had one year to make it happen before being turned over to the NFL which wouldn't have liked his limited experience and modest height at six foot two.

What will Bevo eat while he does nothing on the sidelines now? Pelletized rubber? Texas' football team has been among the righteous, playing football on grass from 1996 until this week, as the program has decided to switch to FieldTurf in time for the 2009 season. Bummer.

Artificial fields have come a long way over the years and FieldTurf appears to be the best of the bunch, but color us a little sad. They're not exactly the cheapest investment around, but the savings is made up over time with less maintenance and replacement costs than grass and allows a venue to host multiple events without tearing up the turf and ruining it for the football team.