Texas Football Getting Its Swagger Back off the Field

Texas is still Texas. Baylor is still Baylor. What that implies, though, depends on who you ask. 

If you ask Longhorns wide receiver John Harris, it implies that Texas is unwilling to yield to Baylor as the top Big 12 team in Texas—or perhaps the best team in Texas regardless of conference. 

"They're still Baylor," Harris said Monday, via Mike Finger of the San Antonio Express-News. "Just because they started playing better in this era, that's good for them. We're still Texas."

The comments echo the ones issued by Horns linebacker Steve Edmond, who referred to Baylor as "trash" in April before later issuing an apology.*

(*Which was undoubtedly forced.) 

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Here's the obvious: Texas isn't better than Baylor right now. The Bears won the Big 12 championship last year and have been generally steamrolling opponents; Texas has underachieved since 2010. 

The Bears travel to Austin this Saturday as 17-point favorites, according to OddsShark.com. The series between the two has been mostly one-sided since 2010, with Baylor winning three of the last four. Two of those wins have come by 20 points or more. The lone loss, in 2012, was by six points on the road in a 56-50 shootout. 

Yet vocal Texas players still think they're better. Frankly, it's kind of refreshing. Humorous, but refreshing. 

It doesn't matter if it's Texas, Baylor or anyone else, players and coaches should think they're the best. Judging by how easily Bears coach Art Briles dismissed Harris' comments, via Shehan Jeyarajah of The Dallas Morning News, it doesn't sound like Baylor's threatened by them: "What am I supposed to say? We’re still Baylor, TCU is still TCU, Oklahoma is still Oklahoma. I don’t know what that means."

When asked whether the comments make a difference, Briles continued:

"

I honestly don’t know. I was unaware of any comments that were made. It helps with the four to five days prior to the game, but I don’t think it has any bearing on the football. Whether we’re getting under people’s skin, I don’t know. How people view us, that’s their right. We can’t define that. We can just think about ourselves.

"

That's likely because Baylor thinks it's pretty amazing, too, and it would be correct.  

As Finger tweets, coming across as confident (or, as some might say, arrogant) isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, Finger believes that head coach Charlie Strong likes the edge on display in some of those comments: 

Arrogance by itself didn't mark the downfall of Texas football. Complacency, poor assistant coaching hires and several key misses in recruiting did. 

The final years of the Mack Brown era were many things. Among them was the fact that the program was extremely buttoned up. That's not the case now. 

The attitude adjustment Texas is undergoing isn't translating into wins and may not for some time. There's far more to fix in Austin than just confidence. 

Whether the "new" Texas can get the program back to a championship level remains to be seen, but there's already an edge with the 2014 Longhorns that wasn't there over the past couple of years. 

That's fun to watch, even if the results don't always match. 

Ben Kercheval is a lead writer for college football. All quotes cited unless obtained firsthand.